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Easily cracked: scientific instruments in states of disrepair
Simon Schaffer
“Receivers fit for our turn are more easily crack’d than procur’d, and therefore ought
not to be unnecessarily thrown away as unserviceable.” (Robert Boyle, 1660)1
ABSTRACT
There has been much scholarly attention to definitions of the term
“scientific instrument”. Rather more mundane work by makers, curators
and users is devoted to instruments’ maintenance and repair. A familiar
argument holds that when a tool breaks, its character and recalcitrance
become evident. Much can be gained from an historical study of
instruments’ breakages, defects and recuperation. Maintenance and
repair technologies have been a vital aspect of relations between makers
and other users. Their history illuminates systems of instruction,
support and abuse. These systems were, for example, evident in the
development of astronomical instruments around 1800 within and
beyond the European sphere. Episodes from that milieu are used to
explore how instrument users sought autonomy; how instruments’
mutable character was defined; and how judgments of instruments’
failure or success were ever secured.
TWO MONTHS AFTER ITS LAUNCH in April 1990 it emerged that the Hubble
Space Telescope’s 94-inch mirror, completed a decade earlier, suffered from spherical
aberration. A committee found that a misplaced fleck of non-reflective paint had led
to a distortion of the lens dimensions for the mirror’s optical template; and that this
had been missed in cross-checks because, frustrated when the lens wouldn’t fit into its
housing, technicians had fixed the problem with some domestic washers. Senator Al
Gore held that “a very dark veil fell on the world of astronomy and astrophysics
research.” Yet after an already planned service mission, by late 1993 the Corrective
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Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR), a set of small mirrors
engineered to compensate for the main mirror’s flaw, had been installed and judged
successful. COSTAR is now displayed at the National Air and Space Museum. As
Robert Smith pointed out in a timely afterword to his splendid history of the Space
Telescope project, this tale of fall and redemption cannot be reduced to individual
ineptitude and jobbery, but rather typifies the socio-technical life of sciences and their
hardware. Not every ingenious fix ends up in a national museum, but every
instrument is liable to failure and repair. According to one of the Space Telescope
Science Institute’s senior astronomers, “it’s a safe prediction that everything’s not
going to work. The big question is, how much of it will work?”2
Faults are defaults, yet instruments perform. A principle of science studies is that
dissensus is instructive, not pathological, and agreement is not inevitable, but to be
explained. Instruments’ adequate function needs comparable analysis. Then “the big
question” is how it’s judged that instruments are working and, indeed, what they are.
Many have a stake in such judgments, not just technicians and other users but also, for
example, conservators, who offer valuable reflexions on the materials and techniques
involved in recovering instruments’ common functions.3 Aesthetics as well as
conservation are involved, attitudes to authenticity or anachronism of restoration and
of ruins.4 It’s plausible that the very category of scientific instrument depends on such
curatorial interests. Despite remarks about the museum as a site where such objects
are somehow removed from the economic circuit, inventory maintenance has been
vital for scientific devices and their social life. States of disrepair are not often
deemed worthy of display even though, perhaps because, they show signs of use.
What follows can be read as a plea for shows of shards and fragments alongside
glamorous devices.5
There have been many ways to manage instruments in states of disrepair, from preemptive design to artful tinkering or forensic diagnosis. Major modern industries
emerged from the work of repair shops, while these same industries backed the new
discipline of retrospective failure analysis.6 The Hubble aberration shows failure
analysis is never just diagnosis of prior knavery or foolishness: rather, the qualities of
persons and things need simultaneously to be evaluated. In another Baltimore
example, the eminent optical physicist John Strong recalls Henry Rowland’s
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cautionary dictum about ruling diffraction gratings: “no mechanism operates perfectly
– its design must make up for imperfections.” Such designs are necessary but rarely
sufficient. “The apparatus constantly needs repairs,” Rowland told his university
president in 1888, so his machinist Theodore Schneider was “an absolute necessity”:
the ruling engine “cannot be run without a person near it all the time to oil it & keep it
in repair…to see that no accident happens.”7
The claim here is that states of disrepair refer simultaneously to tools and to the
humans that interact with them and each other. As usual, sociology offers better
resources than does epistemology to make sense of this essential if obscure repair
work. Fixing requires artisan tinkering in contrast with more formal rule systems.
Such infrastructure is of great economic and technical importance. Perversely, it is a
matter of widespread concern almost solely in catastrophes, when infrastructure is
deficient. “The materiality of instruments only surfaces in their making and
breaking,” writes Davis Baird in his account of scientific hardware. Nor is repair
simply conservative, but a site of innovative transformation.8 It’s hard to distinguish
repaired from customized hardware. Labour politics of class and gender matter to the
status of such repair work: it was long reckoned that infrastructural maintenance was
unproductive, barely registered in economic accounts. But in a brilliant 1926 essay on
the idealization of broken devices in the improvisations of Neapolitan technology the
Marxist sociologist Alfred Sohn-Rethel observed that there “technology’s essence lies
in getting what is broken to work. And in the handling of defective machines,”
artisans’ “capacities go well beyond the merely technical.” Naples became a city-state
of disrepair. Sohn-Rethel saw how breakage accompanied definition: “that which is
intact, that which just works, arouses misgivings and doubts, because the fact that it
just works means that it can never be known how and for what it will work.”9
Mending has been so seductive for sociological study that phenomenologists first
stressed the ubiquitous repair needed in mundane conversation. Sociologists noted
how participants in conversation repair the flow of dialogue, how observers’
discrepant accounts need repair to sustain a shared world, or how machine users
repair devices’ outputs to help fit them into society. In each case, it’s argued, repair
passes unnoticed.10 Rather more literal repair work, in laboratories and elsewhere,
was then subjected to sociological analysis. Car mechanics, computer technicians and
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photocopier repairers have all been studied: fixing all the relations between
customers, technicians and machines is crucial.11 Historians have paid welcome and
compelling attention to the problems of instrument error and disturbance. Jutta
Schickore’s studies of microscopes’ imperfection show how from the earlier
nineteenth century “it was now the user of an instrument who had to ensure that a
particular device was in proper working order. The instrument’s reliability was no
longer certified by an instrument maker’s well-reputed skills. Rather, the individual
differences between instruments produced by the very same maker came into the
fore.” Yet, as David Edgerton indicates in his study of the political economy of
maintenance, “we are not in a position to give an overview of the main trends in the
history of maintenance and repair.”12 It’s worth examining past repair work in the
case of scientific instrumentation, partly because it traces the social interests invested
in its function. Some histories of broken instruments and their fixes might help.
Managing states of disrepair is salient in epochs of scientific practices’ dislocation
and reorganization, such as the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
period of scientific, industrial and political revolutions. British dominance in
mathematical and optical instrument-making then built on major technical innovation
in making lenses, mirrors and divided scales, investment in new instrumental
institutions, followed by comparative loss of London’s wider market leadership.
Established instrument typologies were displaced by new styles of hardware and new
classes of makers and users, not least in the global deployment of these devices during
world war and imperial aggression. The numbers and kinds of those with a stake in
instruments’ behaviour significantly increased. Breakage and repair were evident,
since pervasive, ill defined and revelatory of the challenges of the social order of
scientific work.13
Hagiographies of the age of industry and empire told of heroic recuperation of
disorderly hardware. Son of a Clydeside ship-owner, James Watt was sent to London
in summer 1755 where the eminent telescope-maker James Short helped him get a
place in a mathematical instrument shop. Watt learnt how to fix Hadley’s quadrant, a
newfangled navigational device touted by elite mathematicians but, unlike the more
common backstaff, often liable to disrepair. Watt was soon employed by Glasgow
University first to repair the shipboard damage of a West Indian bequest of high-class
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astronomical instruments by Jonathan Sisson and others, then from 1758 to maintain
lecturers’ apparatus, including a John Bird quadrant. Watt reckoned quadrants were
peculiarly profitable because maintenance could more easily be divided between less
skilled operatives. Decisive was Watt’s commission in 1763 to put into working order
a demonstration steam engine recovered from Sisson. Watt judged there were
“considerable difficulties in the execution owing to the very bad construction of its
parts.” The move from artful restoration to innovative experiment is celebrated in the
historiography of steam engineering: his pre-eminent modern biographer remarks
“this request changed not only Watt’s career but also the history of world
civilization.”14
Six years later, the repair of one of Bird’s astronomical quadrants also became
celebrated in “the history of western civilization.” Equipped with a telescopic sight
and leveled with a plumb bob, the device was indispensable to check the going rate of
the astronomical regulator used to time the transit of Venus across the Sun. In 1769 a
well-guarded quadrant was taken from James Cook’s astronomical base in Tahiti,
whence the transit was to be observed. The gentleman-naturalist Joseph Banks at first
guessed it had been taken by British seamen for trade. Then the senior chief Te Pau
made “with three straws in his hand the figure of a triangle,” the shape of the lost
instrument. It had been taken by another Tahitian leader, later identified as
Monaamia. In company with the ship’s astronomer Charles Green, Banks hunted the
instrument and Monaamia as if chasing poachers on his Lincolnshire estate. “Mr
Green began to overlook the instrument to see if any part or parts were wanting.” It
seemed to the Royal Observatory veteran that while the stand was lost, “nothing else
was wanting but what could easily be repair’d.” Back at Fort Venus, Banks’ servant
Hermann Spöring, a Swedish émigré who traded as a London watchmaker, fixed the
Bird device and “makes all easy again.”15 Yet the repair did not make all easy. On
Tahiti, it was associated with penal reprisals against Polynesian hosts. In London, the
Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne stated the transit observations were inconsistent,
especially when judged against “quadrants of the same size and made by the same
artist.” The unfortunate Green, dead on the voyage, was condemned for “want of care
and address.” Cook responded privately that Maskelyne “was not unacquainted with
the quadrant having been in the Hands of the Natives, pulled to pieces and many of
the parts broke, which we had to mend in the best possible manner we could.” States
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of disrepair helped distribute responsibility across cultures and spaces, resources to
defend some reputations and damn others.16
As survey systems spread worldwide, maintenance and repair became more debatable
and dependent on relations between makers, users and travellers. The career of the
Board of Longitude from the 1760s illuminates the long-range problem. The
mechanization of instruments’ scale division by Jesse Ramsden, Edward Troughton
and others from the mid-1770s answered the Board’s demands for reliable devices
with which to observe lunar distances at sea. To sustain this normal function new
systems of repair and maintenance must be developed.17 In late 1786, keen to arrange
remote observations of a predicted (though mistaken) cometary return, Maskelyne got
the Board to sponsor marine officer William Dawes to take to the new Australian
penal colony a set of the Board’s instruments used on Cook’s voyages. Amongst them
was an “old sextant” made by Ramsden. Former astronomer with Cook, Dawes’
colleague William Bayly knew the troubles of Ramsden’s sextants. Within a few
weeks, Dawes and Bayly tried the sextant at Portsmouth on lunar distance measures.
They decided there was a fault in the sextant’s index glass, sending London both a
drawing of the bad image and a demand for replacement. “I will answer for it, Mr
Ramsden will allow a defect in this instrument, whatever his opinion may be now.”18
Dawes asked that Ramsden add a mercury mirror to let fixed stars be visible by
reflexion. The young marine gave three good reasons why the device needed this fix.
“In the case of accidents to the other instruments” in New South Wales, such as his
Bird quadrant, he could still trace the comet’s path. If Dawes died, anyone who could
use a sextant could maintain his programme. And “with respect to the sextant as it is
impossible to foresee what imperfections may be discovered in the present
construction or what improvements may be made in the course of several years, I
think it better to defer having [a new one] made till my return.” Dawes was never
convinced the master instrument maker had met his demands. He reported to
Greenwich about the unsteadiness of instrument design, of environmental conditions
and of officers’ habits. The capacity to act at a distance, and pre-emptive guarantees
of reliability in what seemed remote thus vulnerable sites, raised major crises within
the instrument trade.19
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While European precision instruments were exhibited as marks of technical, so
political, capacity to act globally, they depended on vulnerable maintenance systems
whose agents were not always members of elite institutions. Despatched in 1791 as
astronomer for the Vancouver expedition’s north Pacific surveys, the young
Cambridge mathematician William Gooch was issued with two sextants, one by
Troughton, the other “by Dollond, new divided by Troughton.” But in the Atlantic he
soon found the Troughton device had its micrometer screw jammed and the other
“was eaten through with rust and the horizon glass loose.” At Rio, he found in
harbour the Pitt bound for New South Wales with convicts government judged useful
for the penal colony, including one of Ramsden’s former employees, who fixed both
sextants in Gooch’s presence. The convict artisan reckoned the screw stuck because
wax hadn’t been promptly applied to its shaft and the other instrument’s horizon glass
must have been shattered for some time. Gooch was supposed to train other crewmen
in using these instruments to determine longitude by lunar distance. His status as
astronomer depended on their adequate performance. Even his killing on Oahu in
1792, and the loss of his instruments, was somehow treated as avoidable damage.20
Transportation networks’ integrity both depended on, and sustained, this kind of
maintenance. It was forbidden to land Dawes’ instruments at the Cape en route to
Botany Bay in 1788 lest they be damaged. When the Board of Longitude decided to
set up its own observatory at Cape Town three decades later, “almost all the
instruments received some damage” on landing. “Sailors would make no difference
between a cask of herrings and the cases containing the circle and clock.” In several
communities local instrument trades won market advantage so survived because of
their ability to fix devices from prestigious but remote centres. It was easier to
cannibalize old devices than get new ones. This repair trade flourished within
provincial Britain as well as overseas.21
Social status profoundly affected makers’ and users’ relations. A telling example is
provided by the output of Watt’s erstwhile patron James Short, who unusually
specialized in reflecting telescopes, unlike sextants and quadrants then rather a
prerogative of genteel patrons. Short offered guides “to keep the telescope in order,”
to exert long-range control within the rival proprieties of deference and secrecy.
Mirrors must neither be touched nor wiped: “it is the dust that does the mischief.”
22
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In the late 1760s, with Benjamin Franklin as intermediary, the ailing telescope-maker
began producing a reflector for Harvard College. In 1768 Franklin reported that just
before his death Short had “at length finished the material parts that required his own
hand, and waited only for something about the mounting that was to have been done
by another workman.” Short’s brother Thomas completed the job by 1769, and it was
used to observe the Venus transit of that year. Almost twenty years later, however,
Thomas Short contacted Franklin again from Edinburgh, concerned the reflector must
have been damaged during the American war through its removal, offering to “repair
it sufficiently and make it more compleat.” Short proposed adding a Cassegrain
mounting to the original Gregorian, to introduce his novel method for enabling two
observers to use the instrument simultaneously, and replace the eyepiece with a
reflector. All Short needed shipped was the tube, the main mirror and the pair of
eyepieces and smaller mirrors. This would be done for free, provided Franklin could
locate members of Short’s family in the former colonies. The reflector’s repair career
didn’t end there: when fixed by the London maker William Jones in 1817, the college
protested at exorbitant costs of changes to the telescope stand. Jones retorted that in
Short’s original version the stand was hopeless: “we are confident in declaring the
value of the Telescope at present is 150 pounds, whereas in the state sent to us for
practical & steady use, an Astronomer would not have given 50 shillings.”23
Principal instrument makers such as Bird, Ramsden or Jones scarcely understood
themselves as servants but rather as partners and, not infrequently, judges. Users such
as Green, Dawes or Gooch all had their competence as practitioners in question: since
competence was connected with repair, these tensions affected the social history of
instrument maintenance. The new century witnessed fresh investment in scientific
infrastructure, magnetic and stellar observatories, physical and medical laboratories,
engineering and natural history museums. Novel systems of laboratory training also
demanded instrument assay and maintenance. In the wake of these changes, as
Schickore points out in the case of microscopy manuals, it was recognized that all
instruments are flawed and that hardware’s materiality was salient in every inquiry.
As workplace sociology reminds us, normal sites needed no fixing, but
institutionalized repair lay at their heart. This was equally clear in meridian
astronomy, which was supposed to demonstrate norms both of social and celestial
conduct. According to a Cambridge astronomy textbook, “the results now exacted are
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of such nicety that we cannot rely on observations except we are assured that at the
times of making them the instruments were properly adjusted. The instrument then
requires a daily and continuous examination.”24
In anticipation of Rowland’s dictum about disrepair and design, the leading
astronomer John Herschel set out the proper relation at such sites between users,
instruments and makers. “Though we are entitled to look for wonders at the hands of
scientific artists, we are not to expect miracles. The demands of the astronomer will
always surpass the powers of the artist; and it must, therefore, be constantly the aim of
the former to make himself, as far as possible, independent of the imperfections
incident to every work the latter can place in his hands.” Autonomy was key. At the
new Astronomical Society of London, Herschel’s colleague Benjamin Gompertz
distinguished between instruments’ “direct construction”, involving makers’
“accuracy and attention,” and “inverse construction,” failure diagnosis that offered
“the means of obtaining from well-invented, but what may be termed ill-constructed,
instruments very accurate results.” The period’s leading scientists sought to free their
work from the idiosyncrasies of the instrument makers while they increasingly
depended on their output. “The expense of good instruments is often far beyond the
means of those who could use them to the best advantage for science and this fact
renders the inquiry of the best use to be made of a bad instrument an interesting
subject.” It therefore became a “truism”, as the historian of astronomy Agnes Clerke
put it, that bad observers might make good instruments worthless and that
practitioners’ skill could extract valuable results from bad instruments by studying
“the idiosyncrasy of each one of the mechanical contrivances at his disposal.”25
States of disrepair might become the norm, yet adequate performance was hard to
define. In the 1820s, major new observatories were set up or overhauled worldwide.
In several spectacular cases, committees of users and makers conducted forensic
analyses of equipment failure. Repair became a matter of legal and fiscal urgency. In
1828, for example, Gompertz was involved in an East India Company inquiry that had
eminent London astronomers and instrument makers judge the adequacy of
instruments shipped to Bombay, then returned by the irate astronomer there: while
“the instruments arrived in the most perfect manner” in India, and “there was not so
much as a scratch on the cases that contained them,” it was claimed the principal
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instrument supplied was “the worst instrument and the most common that has ever
been made in London for a public observatory.” The committee found otherwise and
instead sacked the Bombay astronomer. What counted was that observatory managers
should be able to improvise repairs on site, not demand perfection. According to
another committee member, the grand amateur James South, in judgments of a
competent instrument and reasonable reparations “any astronomer is left to his own
fancy.”26 From 1832, South himself was involved in another, even more violent, fight
about repairs, competence and social status. The idiosyncratic equatorial telescope
South commissioned from Troughton for his Kensington observatory was reckoned “a
useless pile” by the astronomer and eventually destroyed and its remnants sold. There
was no prior stipulation of the standard the instrument should meet: “we are not aware
of our having at any time engaged that your polar axis should possess a specified
degree of perfection,” Troughton’s firm told him.27 South was peculiarly and publicly
alert to the insufficiencies even of reliable instruments. Commenting in the press in
late 1828 on a new Edinburgh observatory for which Troughton provided a thirty-inch
focal length transit instrument, South declared that it “very probably was imagined by
the Government” that “nothing more was necessary than the mere placing the
instruments on their respective piers.” Hardware could not guarantee quality. “As well
might they have supposed that desks, pens, ink and paper would make Cabinet
Ministers as that astronomical instruments would per se produce astronomical
observations.”28
The notorious difficulties of new southern observatories launched in 1821 at the Cape
of Good Hope, promoted by the Board of Longitude, and at Parramatta by the New
South Wales governor Thomas Brisbane, showed how hard it was to secure
autonomy, manage instrument failures and negotiate long-range relations between
administrators, astronomers and the trade.29 The favoured British model demanded
separate measures of right ascensions using a transit instrument and of zenith
distances with a mural device. In 1812-16 Troughton set a standard with a pair of new
commissions for the Astronomer Royal, a ten-foot transit instrument and a six-foot
diameter mural circle.30 He held the best repair discipline was to treat design as
prospective failure analysis. A combined transit circle would always be subject to
error: “no scientific gentleman could have foreseen this, it is a thing that belongs to
experience alone.” In 1825 he told the first head of the Cape Observatory that “the
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mural can be constructed with more certainty of success by a mere workman” and that
“an instrument that did not require frequent adjustments would be of vast importance
in an observatory where much business is required to be done”.31
Other makers, such as Thomas Jones, mimicked Troughton’s enterprise. He copied
the Troughton mural circle for shipment to the Cape, though it was never reliable
enough for precision altitude measures: visiting the Cape in 1834, Herschel saw no
visible damage and suggested an improvised way of compensating for the apparent
errors in its mount. It was not until it was sent back to Greenwich at the end of the
1830s that a design fault with its pivot collar was at last diagnosed. “The Cape
Astronomical Establishment has cost the country upwards of £20,000 sterling. Cui
bono?” South asked in the newspapers.32 At exactly the same period, the Parramatta
observatory also descended into ribald controversy with an official inquiry by the
Colonial Office in which Herschel and South again played polemical roles as
guarantors of repair discipline. The fight was partly over the unreliable performance
of its Troughton transit instrument: “I find it difficult to imagine the nature of a defect
which, escaping all the usual modes of verification employed by astronomers on their
transits, should yet produce errors of the amount in question,” Herschel remarked.
When Jones’ newfangled meridian circle reached Parramatta, its spirit level burst in
the antipodean heat: “the level is broken, and index circle was very badly graduated”,
the astronomer judging it “quite useless.” Ultimately the Australian observatory
ceased work after its manager’s health failed, the building was destroyed by termites,
and the hardware “requires to be put into the hands of a skillful instrument maker to
render it serviceable.”33
Concerns about trials of devices to be used overseas in very different environments
proved justified. Mary Louise Pratt uses the term “anti-conquest” for Europeans’
accounts of seemingly innocent, if not victimized, survey work, projects nevertheless
entirely incorporated into colonial power relations. Survey instruments’ sufferings
became part of these anti-conquest narratives. Like several other imperial projects,
British geodetic surveys in India had their own hagiographic repair story. In 1808 the
Rajarajeshwara temple in Tanjore and a three-foot circular theodolite built by one of
Ramsden’s former apprentices were both severely damaged when they came into
violent contact. George Everest, later the Indian Survey’s superintendent, turned the
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theodolite’s painstaking mending and recalibration into a foundation myth. The
contrast between heroic repair and ghastly hardware was telling. John Hodgson,
Surveyor-General in India in 1826, complained that “the instruments sent are so bad,
but while the spirit of contract and job prevails so strongly at home, this will be the
case.” Officers were expected to supply their own, yet found none were available.34
Everest paid many visits to the London shop of Troughton and his new partner
William Simms, tried to command expensive modifications to their designs, then
recruited testimonials from Herschel and South to justify his demands. Everest
notoriously judged the theodolites that the Company had at first proposed to supply
mere “rattletraps”.35
Everest understood the truism that no instrument could survive unscathed after it left
the maker’s workshop “in countries where instrument makers are not to be procured,”
so reckoned he had to make his system independent both of the vagaries of the
London officials and of the Indian field. “A professional mathematical instrument
maker” was needed to counteract the effects of “a puff of wind or a careless native.”
Herschel’s principle that astronomers should not expect “miracles” became a
polemical claim about the geography of indigenous skills. Everest’s initial choice was
Henry Barrow, an independent supplier for many of the London instrument makers,
supported by Troughton, Simms and Dollond. Significantly, Barrow soon broke with
Everest on the question of local experts’ skills in fixing the survey’s hardware: “if
natives can do these kind of things, what’s the use of my being sent out Mathematical
Instrument Maker?” They could. Barrow was succeeded by Sayed Mir Mohsin
Hussain, first as warden of the Calcutta observatory in 1824 to repair the instruments
there, then at the Survey as its principal artisan on the Troughton and Simms
altazimuth circles.36 Even then, Everest found the spirit levels on these instruments
were not proof against tropical heat, so summoned the maker to correct the design and
recommended “some place erected for the express purpose of making experiments
with the instruments destined for the Honourable East India Company’s
establishments” before they were shipped. Instrument makers were thus compelled
persistently to experiment with their big instruments while their users had to make do
and mend in unpredictable ways.37
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In the instructive fights that erupted around instrument repair, improvised mending
mixed with tests supposed to calibrate instruments against expected behaviour. When
these failed - as in cases such as South’s equatorial or the Indian equipment – a
sociologically familiar regress arose. Was the difference due to some unnoticed
change in conduct, or, rather, because the instrument was faulty? Only some
agreement on what counted as competent performance could begin to resolve such
conflicts, but that required prior agreement on the phenomena the devices were used
to determine, such as local longitude or time.38 This, in turn, depended on a tacit sense
that the same instrument survived its mutations under repair work. One of the more
familiar examples was the career of the great reflectors that dominated much British
extra-meridional astronomy in the earlier nineteenth century. Large metal mirrors
needed permanent maintenance with skills almost impossible to codify and rarely
public. From the 1780s, the tradition’s founder William Herschel accumulated vast
experience at polishing, employed as many as twenty-two labourers, then sought
optimistically to mechanize: “I had only to invent the method of giving that motion to
a mirror which I already knew it ought to have, and when I failed it was because the
machine did not do what I intended it should do.” When William’s son took his
family’s twenty-feet reflector to South Africa in 1834, John Herschel spent hours
every month polishing its mirror. Sometimes it worked well: “as the polisher at first
starting had no figure and did not touch in the middle, I expected to find the figure
destroyed…to my great surprise and satisfaction I found on trying it at night that I
have thus luckily blundered out one of the finest figured mirrors I ever beheld.”
Sometimes it didn’t: after a session of 2700 strokes, “a successful process and very
little trouble,” Herschel sadly found “it is a bad figure.” 39
Unpredictable mirror mending mattered partly because these reflectors were used to
decide whether nebulae were nearby gas clouds or distant star clusters, a distinction to
be made either by resolving nebulae into stars or by mapping their changing shapes.
Protagonists needed a way of calibrating mirrors’ virtue without tautologically
appealing to the images they made. As the fourth earl of Rosse explained in his
summary of such observations conducted in western Ireland at Birr Castle from 1848
with the giant reflectors his father had built there, every time their mirrors were
polished “the telescope, though in mechanism the same, is optically speaking a new
one.” The earl conceded there’d been “no arrangement for testing it in the workshop,”
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that mirror performance varied in unpredictable ways, so that “after waiting for a test
night it was found manifestly inferior to that which had been in use.” Above all,
“unlike the case of a refracting telescope, of the performance of which a competent
judge may be able to give an opinion of permanent value, the reflector of this year
may be as to defining power practically a totally different instrument from what it
may be in the next.” The great reflector was therefore the name of a series of subtly
changing devices. Indispensable repair produced rather than normalized these
changes. As its historian Jim Bennett notes, the establishment of normal work would
demand “new systems of manufacture and protocols of research in a reformed
telescope culture.” 40
The challenges of such new systems were at once made clear when Rosse’s colleague
the Dublin engineer Thomas Grubb was commissioned to build the world’s largest
equatorial reflector for Melbourne in the 1850s, so as any changes in the shape of
nebulae in the southern skies could be better traced. Scholars are still divided about
the reasons for the instrument’s failure, even whether it failed. Every feature of
maintenance and repair work raised in this essay bore on the Melbourne telescope’s
fate: the importance of normal repair work, its tacit and improvised quality, the
difficulty of reliance on and autonomy from the instrument-maker, and the mutability
of maintained devices. Since repair recipes were lacking, Rosse, Herschel and their
colleagues debated how and whether to train on-site technicians in fixing the
instrument. It was alleged the choice of speculum metal made the device peculiarly
hard to maintain, that Melbourne observers lacked the skill to keep it in order, or that
because of its high focal ratio its design could not easily be overhauled for the new
technologies of photography and spectroscopy. When it reached Melbourne in 1868 it
was soon found that the mirror was pinched in its cell, that mirror varnish had not
been properly removed, and that mirror definition was awry or at least unpredictably
variable. In a manner akin to the Hubble Telescope’s traumas, news quickly reached
the press, where the state of disrepair was labeled “a gigantic philosophical blunder,”
while the Dublin manufacturer published a long defence of his firm’s work and
instructions on how better to run the machine. The astronomer who best managed the
instrument, the Melbourne photographer Joseph Turner, initially guessed nebulae
were becoming fainter, when in fact it was the mirror that was tarnishing. Turner also
found a way of manipulating one of the screws behind the great mirror to correct bad
15
definition: modern astronomers cannot quite see how Turner’s repair could have
worked. In any case, financial crisis deprived the observatory of the maintenance
resources needed to keep its prized instrument at work.41
This essay joins much work in science studies that takes error seriously in the states of
disrepair of instruments and users. In particular, it aims to provide some material for
understanding how and why it was ever decided that a device and its milieu were in
such a state and how they were managed when major issues of status, labour and
public interest were typically in play. The introduction to an admirable recent
collection of studies of past error, including investigation of the performance of extant
instrumentation, classifies the “malfunctions” of scientific tools: “epistemologically,
the case is not too troubling, since the standard against which the instrument can be
calibrated is (at least in principle) known.” Sociologically, however, the case is grave,
because social and material disorders are so interdependent.42
A final example shows how disrepair implicates both social and material orders. In
August 1793 a group of European artisans and diplomats arranged for the display of a
large planetarium in the hall of Upright Governance and Pervasive Clarity at the
Summer Palace in Peking as part of an East India Company delegation to the Qing
emperor. The machine was completed in southern Germany in 1790, bought by the
Company, then fixed at vast expense by a London clockmaker for what was imagined
as Chinese consumption. Glass domes were designed to cover models of the different
world systems. Prudently, several spare bent glasses were packed up. The embassy’s
leader Lord Macartney told the Qing officials it would take one month to erect the
world machine. Capacity to fix the model became a sign of rival skill and culture.
Orreries and clocks were stock-in-trade for the tribute systems that dominated
relations between Europe and Qing China. Their maintenance and repair was a nice
political and commercial matter. The Company men learnt there had once been a
Peking glass factory established by Jesuit missionaries, but now no glass was made in
the Empire. Macartney’s planetarium description carefully stated that “Persons of
Science conversant with this machine took it asunder, and the same persons are come
with the Ambassador for the purpose of putting it together again with equal care and
art, before it can be exhibited to His Imperial Majesty; which to do without risk of
damage will require a considerable length of time.”43
16
But as the delegation’s astronomer, watchmaker and mathematical instrument maker
worked together to set up the machine, their staging went awry. One of the glass
panes on the dome covering the Ptolemaic model had cracked. At first, the Company
men were relaxed: court officials “seemed to be much struck with the attention
manifested by our bringing several spare glasses for the dome of the planetarium, one
of the panes of which happened to be cracked and which, without such a precaution,
could not be prepared in China”. Then the watchmaker and the instrument maker
vainly tried to cut a replacement glass pane with a diamond, smashing three pieces in
the process. In contrast, a Chinese workman quickly managed the business with a hot
iron. “The edge was not straight, but sufficiently so to answer the purpose.” The
delegation drew a nervous if condescending conclusion: Chinese workmen could not
make glass, but “their imitative powers have always been acknowledged to be very
great.”44 Worse followed. The Company men were annoyed the machine had to be
erected in front of imperial witnesses, since “ignorant people should always be taken
by surprise.” Although fixing needed artful improvisation, yet the imperial officials
“impute every mistake or hesitation in the workman …to a want of knowledge in the
machine and want of ability in the profession.” But there was a good political reason
why there was an audience. They’d been told it would take weeks to erect and was
impossible easily to disassemble. An imperial decree asked the obvious question
about the tribute: “if after the gifts are assembled, they cannot be dismantled, how
could we accept them?” 45
Macartney countered that imperial officials wrongly imagined “that labour, not skill,
was the only thing necessary, and that putting together so complicated a machine as
the whole universe was an operation almost as easy and simple as winding up a jack.”
But the expert witnesses, including Jesuit mathematicians dispatched from the Bureau
of Astronomy to scrutinize machine and artisans, had a different reason to doubt
western ocean pretensions. The imperial court declared that since Macartney “has
seen that there are people in the Celestial Empire who are versed in astronomy…and
clock-repairing and are now helping alongside those who are setting up the articles,
he can no longer boast that he alone has got the secret.”46 Furthermore, it was simply
incredible that this “astronomical and geographical clock” could not be fixed. The
imperial decree pointed out that the clock must already have been painstakingly tested
17
in Europe “to see if it moved properly and could be offered in tribute.” So it was
necessary to study both the clock and its artisans. “If we do not profit from this
occasion,” decreed the Emperor, “attentively to study the way of setting it up and
dismantling it and thence to grasp the essential points, once the artisans have returned
to their country if the vital elements of its internal mechanism undergo the slightest
damage, who will there be to fix it? Won’t it end up becoming fit to be thrown
away?”47 In identifying instruments’ disrepair with a state of disorder, the Son of
Heaven was absolutely right.
1
Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall touching the Spring of the Air
(Oxford: H. Hall, 1660), p.72.
2
Robert W. Smith, The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Technology and Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 402, 411-414. Compare Diane
Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and
Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
3
W. J. Read, “Renovation and Repair of Scientific Instruments,” in The History and
Preservation of Chemical Instrumentation, ed. J. T. Stock and M. V. Orna
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), pp. 157-162.
4
Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine (Princeton:
Markus Weiner, 1995); Christopher Woodward, In Ruins: a Journey through History,
Art and Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001); Robert Ginsberg, The
Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).
5
Deborah Jean Warner, “What Is a Scientific Instrument, When Did It Become One,
and Why?” British Journal for the History of Science, 1990, 23: 83-93. David
Edgerton reports that in the 1960s the UK government proposed the term
terotechnology for maintenance engineering: The Shock of the Old: Technology and
Global History since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2008), p. 77. For artefacts’
removal from context see Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and
Venice, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 30-34; Charles Saumarez
Smith, “Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings,” in The New Museology, ed. Peter Vergo
18
(London: Reaktion Books, 1989), pp. 6-21. For the case of scientific instruments see
Bernard Schiele, “Les Silences de la Muséologie,” in La Révolution de la Muséologie
des Sciences, ed. Bernard Schiele and Emlyn Koster (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1998), pp. 39-77; J. A. Bennett, “Beyond Understanding: Curatorship and
Access in Science Museums,” in Museums of Modern Science, ed. Svante Lindqvist
(Canton, MA.: Science History Publications, 2000), pp. 55-60.
6
For the case of electronics: Yuzo Takahashi, “A Network of Tinkerers: the Advent
of the Radio and Television Receiver Industry in Japan,” Technology and Culture,
2000, 41: 460-484; Henry Petroski, Success through Failure: the Paradox of Design
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 41, 51.
7
John Strong, “Rowland’s Diffraction-Grating Art,” Vistas in Astronomy, 1986, 29:
137-141, on p. 137; George Sweetnam, “Precision Implemented: Henry Rowland, the
Concave Diffraction Grating, and the Analysis of Light,” in The Values of Precision,
ed. M. Norton Wise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 283-310, on p.
293. Compare Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge: a Philosophy of Scientific Instruments
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 150, 152.
8
Baird, Thing Knowledge (cit. n. 7), p. 146. See Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift,
“Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture and Society
(2007), 24.3: 1-25; Edgerton, Shock of the Old (cit. n. 5), pp. 77-81.
9
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Das Ideal des Kaputten, ed. Carl Freytag (Bremen: Bettina
Wassmann, 1990), pp. 33-38.
10
Phenomenology of repair is discussed in H. M. Collins, Artificial Experts: Social
Knowledge and Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 60, 6271; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 30-34.
11
Julian Orr, Talking about Work: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996), p. 79; Frank Nutch, “Gadgets, Gizmos and Instruments:
Science for the Tinkering,” Science, Technology and Human Values, 1996, 21: 21428, on p. 215; Christopher Henke, “The Mechanics of Workplace Order: Toward a
Sociology of Repair,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 2000, 44: 55–81, on p.61.
12
Jutta Schickore, “Ever-present Impediments: Exploring Instruments and Methods
of Microscopy,” Perspectives on Science, 2001, 9: 126-146, p. 136; Edgerton, Shock
of the Old (cit. n. 5), p. 81.
19
13
J.A. Bennett, “Instrument Makers and the “Decline of Science in England”: the
Effect of Institutional Change on the Elite Makers of the Early Nineteenth Century,”
in Nineteenth-century Scientific Instruments and their Makers, ed. P.R. de Clercq
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985), pp. 13-28, on pp. 13-15; A.D. Morrison-Low, Making
Scientific Instruments in the Scientific Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 3646.
14
Richard L. Hills, James Watt: His Time in Scotland, 1736-1774 (Ashbourne:
Landmark, 2002), pp. 56-57, 72-73, 84, 312; Ben Marsden, Watt’s Perfect Engine:
Steam and the Age of Invention (Thriplow: Icon Books, 2004), pp. 45-47. For the
hagiography see David Philip Miller, “True Myths: James Watt’s Kettle, His
Condenser, and His Chemistry,” History of Science, 2004, 42: 333-360, on p. 348;
Christine Macleod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity
1750-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 125-152. For the seaquadrant’s commercial career see Jim Bennett, “Catadioptrics and Commerce in
Eighteenth-century London,” History of Science, 2006, 44: 247-278, on p. 264.
15
The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768-1771, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Sydney:
Angus and Robertson, 1963), ed. J. C. Beaglehole, Vol. 1, pp. 268-71, 309; James
Cook, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768-1771 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1955), ed. J.C.Beaglehole, pp. 86-89. For “theft” in these contacts, compare
W.H.Pearson, “The Reception of European Voyagers on Polynesian Islands, 15681797,” Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 1970, 27: 121-153, on p.140 and
I.C.Campbell, “European-Polynesian Encounters,” Journal of Pacific History, 1994,
29: 222-231.
16
G.M.Badger, “Cook the Scientist,” in Captain Cook: Navigator and Scientist
(London: C.Hurst, 1970), ed. G.M.Badger, pp. 30-49, on pp. 38-39; David Turnbull,
“Cook and Tupaia, a Tale of Cartographic Méconnaissance,” in Science and
Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the 18th
Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), ed. Margarette Lincoln, pp. 117-131, on
p.125.
17
A.N. Stimson, “Some Board of Longitude Instruments in the Nineteenth Century,”
in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Instruments (cit. n. 13), pp. 93-115, on p. 98.
18
Dawes to Maskelyne, 25 January 1787, Cambridge University Library, Royal
Greenwich Observatory MSS 14/48, fol. 249v; Philip S. Laurie, “William Dawes and
20
Australia’s First Observatory,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society,
1988, 29: 469-482, on pp. 470-471. For Bayly versus Ramsden, see Anita McConnell,
Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800): London’s Leading Scientific Instrument Maker
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 105-106.
19
Dawes to Maskelyne, 8 February 1787 and 26 July 1790, Cambridge University
Library, Royal Greenwich Observatory MSS 14/48, fols. 251-252, 302-303; Laurie,
“William Dawes,” (cit. n. 17), pp. 475-479; Doug Morrison and Ivan Barko, “Dagelet
and Dawes: Their Meeting, Their Instruments and the First Scientific Experiments on
Australian Soil,” Historical Records of Australian Science, 2009, 20: 1-40, on p. 38.
20
Gooch to Maskelyne, 17 November 1791 (copy in Joseph Banks’ hand), University
Library Cambridge, MSS Mm.6.48, fol. 196r; Greg Dening, The Death of William
Gooch: a History’s Anthropology (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995),
pp. 119, 128; McConnell, Ramsden (cit. n. 17), p. 147. For Gooch’s instructions see
University Library Cambridge, Royal Greenwich Observatory MSS 14/9, fols. 61-64;
for his instruments see Andrew David, “Vancouver’s Instruments, Charts and
Drawings,” in From Maps to Metaphors: the Pacific World of George Vancouver
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993), ed. Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston, pp. 291-297, on
p. 292.
21
Laurie, “William Dawes” (cit. n. 17), p. 474; Brian Warner, Astronomers at the
Royal Observatory Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town: Balkema, 1979), pp. 7-8;
Morrison-Low, Making Scientific Instruments (cit. n. 13), p. 267.
22
G. L’E. Turner, “James Short and His Contribution to the Construction of
Reflecting telescopes,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 1968, 23: 91-108;
Short to Franklin, 28 July 1762, Benjamin Franklin Papers: Volume 10 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1966), p. 137. For the contrast between the market for
reflectors and for quadrants, see Bennett, “Catadioptrics,” (cit. n. 14), 254-255 and
Bennett, “The Era of Newton, Herschel and Lord Rosse,” Experimental Astronomy
(2009), 25: 33-43, on pp. 35-36.
23
David P. Wheatland, The Apparatus of Science at Harvard, 1765-1800 (Cambridge,
MA.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 17-19; Short to Franklin, 28 May 1787,
Benjamin Franklin Papers (New Haven: Yale University Press, unpublished), 045u035.
21
24
Schickore, “Ever-present Impediments” (cit. n. 12), p. 140; Henke, “Mechanics of
Workplace Order” (cit. n. 11), p. 57. For meridian astronomy see David Dewhirst,
“Meridian astronomy in the private and university observatories of the United
Kingdom: rise and fall”, Vistas in astronomy, 1985, 28: 147-158. The textbook is
Robert Woodhouse, A Treatise on Astronomy, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1822), p. 84.
25
John Herschel, A Treatise on Astronomy (London: Longman, 1833), p. 66;
Benjamin Gompertz, “On the Theory of Astronomical Instruments, Part 1,” Memoirs
of the Astronomical Society, 1824, 1: 349-54, on pp. 349-350; Agnes Clerke, A
Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century (London: Black, 1908),
p. 122 (italics in originals).
26
Curnin to Bombay Council, 21 April 1827 and South to Wilkins, British Library
MSS IOR F/4/940/26363, pp. 81-82, 154.
27
Michael Hoskin, “Astronomers at War: South v. Sheepshanks,” Journal of the
History of Astronomy, 1989, 20: 175-210, on pp. 184-186.
28
James South, “Astronomy versus the Government,” 9 December 1828, in The
Morning Chronicle (11 December 1828) (italics in original).
29
Warner, Astronomers at the Cape (cit. n. 21), p. 2; Shirley D. Saunders, “Sir
Thomas Brisbane’s Legacy to Colonial Science: Colonial Astronomy at the
Parramatta Observatory, 1822-1848,” Historical Records of Australian Science, 2004,
15: 177-209.
30
Derek Howse, Greenwich Observatory: volume 3: the Buildings and Instruments
(London: Taylor and Francis, 1975), pp. 26-29, 38-40; J.A.Bennett, The Divided
Circle (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987), pp. 169-172.
31
Troughton to Fallows, 20 December 1825, in Brian Warner, Royal Observatory
Cape of Good Hope 1820-1831: the Founding of a Colonial Observatory (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1995), p. 138.
32
Warner, Astronomers at the Cape (cit. n. 21), pp. 25, 45-46, 56; Warner, Royal
Observatory (cit. n. 31), pp. 134-140, 174-175; James South to the editor, The
Morning Chronicle (27 November 1828) (italics in original).
33
Herschel to Gipps, 26 December 1837, Royal Society MSS HS 19.72; John Service,
Thir Notandums (Edinburgh: Pentland, 1890), p. 198; Saunders, “Sir Thomas
Brisbane’s Legacy,” (cit. n. 29), pp. 194-196.
22
34
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:
Routledge, 1992), pp. 38-39; R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of
India, 4 vols. (Dehra Dun: Survey of India, 1954-58), Vol. 2, pp. 241-244 and Vol. 3,
pp. 212-13.
35
Matthew Edney, Mapping an Enpire: the Geographical Construction of British
India 1765-1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 241-250; J. E.
Insley, “Instruments of a Very Beautiful Class: George Everest in Europe, 18251830,” Colonel Sir George Everest (London: Royal Geographical Society, 1990), pp.
23-30, on p. 26; Anita McConnell, Instrument Makers to the World: a History of
Cooke, Troughton and Simms (London: William Sessions, 1992), p. 27. For
“rattletraps” see Phillimore, Historical Records (cit. n. 34), Vol. 4, p. 144.
36
Jane Insley, “Making Mountains out of Molehills? George Everest and Henry
Barrow, 1830-39”, Indian Journal of History of Science. 1995, 30: 47-55, on p. 51.
For Mohsin Hussain see Phillimore, Historical Records (cit. n. 34, Vol. 3, p. 188 and
Vol. 4, p. 458. For Everest on the lack of “instrument makers” see “Memoir regarding
the Survey Establishment in India and Particularly the Great Trigonometrical
Survey,” British Library MSS IOR L/MIL/5/402, fol. 369, and on “a puff of wind”
see Everest, “Memoir Containing an Account of some Leading Features of the Irish
Survey and a Comparison of the Same with the System Pursued in India”, British
Library MSS IOR L/MIL/5/302, fols. 315-16. For indigenous surveyors see Kapil
Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Scientific
Knowledge in South Asia and Europe (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), pp. 211-16.
37
Everest to Court of Directors, 21 May 1829, British Library MSS IOR
L/MIL/5/402, fol. 455.
38
H. M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice
(London: Sage, 1985), pp. 84, 105; Donald MacKenzie, “How Do We Know the
Properties of Artefacts? Applying the Sociology of Knowledge to Technology,” in
Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology, ed. Robert
Fox (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996), pp. 247-263, on pp. 260-261.
39
J.A.Bennett, “ ‘On the Power of Penetrating into Space’: the Telescopes of William
Herschel,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 1976, 7: 75-108, on pp. 89, 91 and
Bennett, “Era of Newton, Herschel and Lord Rosse” (cit. n. 22), pp. 39-41; David S.
Evans, Terence J. Deeming, Betty Hall Evans and Stephen Goldfarb, Herschel at the
23
Cape: Diaries and Correspondence of Sir John Herschel, 1834-1838 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 91, 329.
40
Earl of Rosse, “Observations of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars made with the Six-
foot and Three-foot Reflectors at Birr Castle,” Scientific Transactions of the Royal
Dublin Society, 1879-1880, 2: 1-178, on pp. 4-5; Bennett, “Era of Newton, Herschel
and Rosse,” (cit. n. 22), p. 41.
41
I.S.Glass, Victorian Telescope Makers: the Lives and Letters of Thomas and
Howard Grubb Bristol: Institute of Physics, 1997), pp. 39-61; S. C. B. Gascoigne,
“The Great Melbourne Telescope and Other 19th Century Reflectors,” Historical
Records of Australian Science, 1995, 10: 223-245; W. Lewis Hyde, “The Calamity of
the Great Melbourne Telescope,” Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of
Australia, 1987, 7: 227-230, p. 229 (for the “blunder’).
42
Giora Hon, Jutta Schickore and Friedrich Steinle, “Introduction: Mapping ‘Going
Amiss’ “, in Going Amiss in Experimental Research, ed. Giora Hon, Jutta Schickore
and Friedrich Steinle (Dordrecht:Springer, 2009), pp. 1-7, on p. 5.
43
“Account of Sundry Articles Purchased by Francis Baring and John Smith,” 8
September 1792, British Library MSS IOR G/12/20, fols. 596-597; Catharine Pagani,
Eastern Magnificence and Western Ingenuity: Clocks of Late Imperial China (Ann
Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2001), pp. 99-124; J. L. Crannmer-Byng, An
Embassy to China (London: Longmans, 1962), p. 299; J.L. Cranmer-Byng and T.H.
Levere, “A Case Study in Cultural Collision: Scientific Apparatus in the Macartney
Embassy to China, 1793,” Annals of Science, 1981, 38: 503-525, p.524.
44
Cranmer-Byng, Embassy to China (cit. n. 43), p. 99; William Proudfoot,
Biographical Memoir of James Dinwiddie (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1868), p. 49;
John Barrow, Travels in China (London: Cadell, 1804), p. 306.
45
Proudfoot, Biographical Memoir (cit. n. 44), p. 48; James L. Hevia, Cherishing
Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embass of 1793 (Durham:
Duke, 1995), p. 154.
46
Cranmer-Byng, Embassy to China (cit. n. 43), p. 146; J. L. Cranmer-Byng, “Lord
Macartney’s Embassy to Peking in 1793 from Official Chinese Documents,” Journal
of Oriental Studies, 1957-1958, 4: 118-187, on p. 152.
24
47
Harriet T. Zurndorfer, “Comment la Science et la Technologie se Vendaient à la
Chine au XVIIIe Siècle: Essai d’Analyse Interne,” Études Chinoises, 1988, 7.2: 5990, p.p. 76-77.