Abstract
The Kew Observatory has been a neglected child of Victorian science; neither in its day (1840–1910), nor since, has it attracted much attention from its contemporaries or historians. Lee T. Macdonald’s excellent historical analysis of Kew changes all this, not only as it concerns Kew itself but as it concerns the larger institutional landscape of Victorian science and the political economic issues that drove Victorian science.
Kew began life when King George III had it built in 1768–1769 as his personal observatory for observing the 1769 transit of Venus. For the next three-quarters of a century, it stood unused, serving as little more than a storage site for instruments and equipment. Then in 1842, as Macdonald shows, under the leadership of several key Victorian scientists and philanthropists as well as the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), Kew was resurrected into a multipurpose observatory – serving variously to discover, locate, and measure an array of geomagnetic, meteorological, and (solar) astronomical phenomena and to conduct metrological work (including instrument making). That cumulative work turned it into an important part of the British institutional science scene while also putting its acquired scientific and technological expertise at the service of the worldwide British Empire. If the only weakness of Macdonald’s account is his tendency to give a blow-by-blow narrative of Kew’s history between 1842 and 1910, that narration nonetheless serves him well as he proceeds to ask and answer three general historiographical questions about Kew as an observatory.
First, he asks what Kew has to tell us about the organization of the physical sciences in Victorian Britain; how were they funded, managed, and who were their practitioners? He answers this set of questions by showing in detail how Kew was both a public and a private institution. He presents the strong, early role (to 1871) played by Edward Sabine in gaining private funds after 1840 from both the BAAS and the Royal Society to re-establish Kew as a scientific institution, in particular one for making geomagnetic and meteorological observations. Sabine’s efforts, we learn, were actively opposed by George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, at Greenwich. Moreover, Sabine worked closely with both John Peter Gassiot and Warren De La Rue, both of whom helped endow Kew with private funds. (Macdonald also discusses the influential role of John Herschel in urging private, as opposed to public, support for research science.) Along the way, Kew became Britain’s foremost standards (testing) institute and thereby brought in a good deal of income that helped in its efforts to become financially independent, although it remained partly dependent on public funds. Macdonald thus argues that by about 1890 Kew constituted the origins of its successor institution, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL, founded in 1900). Hence, he sees the NPL’s origins as not simply a response to Germany’s founding of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (1887), but as the natural outgrowth of Kew. This set of developments, Macdonald argues, embodied and reflected the gradual replacement of the general scientist by the university physicist.
Second, Macdonald asks about Kew’s actual development as a centre for the observational sciences. It was, he shows, much more than an astronomical observatory. This is not to say that astronomy is here neglected: there is a fine chapter entitled “’Solar Spot Mania ‘Cosmical Physics,’ and Meteorology, 1852-1870,” wherein Balfour Stewart’s work at Kew is nicely presented. Yet in astronomy Kew lacked the dedicated funds and research mission to keep pace with either Greenwich or the university observatories. Beyond astronomy, Kew was, however, a multidimensional institution, one that was deeply concerned with geomagnetic, meteorological, and standards (instrument testing) issues. Indeed, the latter became Kew’s most-important activity which helps explain why in 1900 Kew was taken over by the new NPL. In short, Macdonald shows how Kew went from being a multipurpose observational science institute to becoming a highly specialized standards (testing) institute.
Third, Macdonald asks how Kew, within the setting of Victorian Britain’s culture of physical science, ultimately became (so) devoted to standards (testing). Here, he sees Kew’s development as paralleling the electrical standards work at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory after 1871; as contributing to the testing needs of meteorological and magnetic instruments of the British government, of the medical profession (especially for clinical thermometers), of the chronometer and watch industries, and of other branches of commerce and industry. In general, Kew aided the British Empire’s worldwide maritime needs, be they commercial, industrial, or political.
In addressing these three historiographical issues, Macdonald has much to report about infighting and power struggles among various British men of science and various British scientific institutions, not least the BAAS, the Royal Society, and the government itself. Above all, he shows that Kew’s history “challenge[s] the idea that laissez-faire – and the physical sciences’ consequent reliance on private sources of patronage – went out of fashion before the end of the nineteenth century” (p. 12). He shows, in short, that Kew Observatory was a much more important and interesting institution than many scholars have previously realized.