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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 439-440



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Latitude: How American Astronomers Solved the Mystery of Variation. By Bill Carter and Merri Sue Carter. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002. Pp. viii+252. $24.95.

Histories of scientific discovery, such as this popular (no footnotes) account of the solution of a relatively obscure though important problem in geodetic astronomy, are generally of interest to readers of Technology and Culture for one of two reasons—either because improvements in instrumentation (the technology of science) were essential for the scientific discovery or because there was some technological payoff from the discovery. Using those criteria, this book might be of double interest. The discovery, in 1891, of the variation of latitude by Seth Carlo Chandler Jr. depended in part upon Chandler's invention of the almucantar, an astronomical instrument that introduced a simple and inexpensive system of automatic leveling that was essential to the discovery. And, while the discovery had no immediate practical implications, knowledge of the variation of latitude has, a century later, proven to be essential for Global Positioning System (GPS) technology.

Named after the term in astronomy for a line of constant altitude, the almucantar was designed to replace the transit instrument. The essential element was a mercury flotation bearing at one end of the altitude axis that automatically leveled the instrument. Chandler announced his invention in 1880. Four years later he had a 10-centimeter aperture almuncantar installed at Harvard College Observatory, and the observations he made with it were essential to his later discovery, although they were by no means the only observations he used.

Interwoven in the account of this scientific discovery is the most extensive biography to date of Chandler. An actuary for most of his life, he was nonetheless a significant figure in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American astronomy. A protégé of Benjamin Apthorp Gould, he published extensively, served as the editor of the Astronomical Journal for over a decade at the turn of the twentieth century, received the recognition of his peers through election to the National Academy of Sciences, and defended the importance of traditional positional astronomy at a time [End Page 439] when American astronomers were turning more and more toward astrophysics.

Bill Carter and Merri Sue Carter are geodetic astronomers and, to a large extent, intellectual heirs of Chandler. Perhaps because of this connection, they make somewhat grandiose claims on behalf of Chandler and his work. They maintain that his detection of the variation of latitude and Simon Newcomb's reconciliation of Chandler's observations to theory "heralded the emergence of American science from the shadow of European dominance" (p. 37). They mourn the later loss of Chandler's almucantar by DePauw University, declaring it "the most historically important American instrument built in the nineteenth century" (p. 108). And they complain that the European astronomical community willfully ignores Chandler's contributions.

The reader might be more willing to entertain such claims if the authors had not undercut some of their own credibility by failing to demonstrate a very good understanding of the context of Chandler and his work. Like many practitioners turned historians, Carter and Carter have read deeply in the primary sources but not widely in the secondary literature. It is difficult to accept their judgments about the historical significance of Chandler's work when their writing is not informed by some of the most important publications on the history of American science. For example, there is no evidence that they consulted William Goetzmann or A. Hunter Dupree regarding federal funding of science, or Hugh Slotten concerning astronomical research by the United States Coast Survey. The authors seem unaware of John Lankford's characterization of Chandler as a "curmudgeon" disliked by almost every other major American astronomer; if they had read Lankford, they might not have found Newcomb's treatment of Chandler in his Autobiography so mysterious. The book also suffers from a number of factual errors, especially in regard to dates.

I opened Latitude with the hope that it would fill a gap in the...

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