Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy (review)

Michael S. Reidy begins his important new book with an overview of the centrality of the sea to Britain’s commercial, imperial, and social evolution. Understanding the movement of tides became ever more important as trade continued to expand and empire became increasingly important. The rise and fall of tides were fundamental to the movement of vessels in and out of Britain’s major ports, and ports around the world. A lack of such knowledge had wrecked countless numbers of expensive ships, thus causing loss of valuable commerce and state revenues. Reidy argues that this vital quest for tidal information was central in forging the nature of nineteenth- century British science.

The subject of tides was resurrected in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, with the Admiralty becoming an important part in its subsequent development. A crucial figure in the attempt to improve tide tables was John William Lubbock, a Cambridge graduate and London banker, who worked with the Hydrographic Office calculator, Joseph Foss Dessiou, to produce accurate tide tables for the port of London. Spearheading much of the tidal research from the second quarter of the nineteenth century was the formidable Cambridge don and future Master of Trinity College, William Whewell, who became the key figure in mobilizing what would come to be a global army of tidal fact-gatherers. Whewell also helped promote graphical representations of scientific data and attempted to define the practices and method of science. His work went on to inform other global “big science” projects such as terrestrial magnetism and barometer fluctuations. According to Reidy, it was within this collaboration of various interests that Whewell defined “the social and intellectual role of the modern scientist” (p. 9).

However, the real heroes of Reidy’s book are the calculators like Dessiou and surveying engineers, most notably Thomas Bunt at Bristol—all crucial to the development of tidal prediction and Whewell’s work, but always “subordinate labourers.” Because Bunt was paid for his work, the fruit of his labor was owned by Whewell. Debates over intellectual property had already become a source of tension and confrontation. (Consider, for example, Charles Babbage’s controversy over ownership of the tools created by Joseph Clement to make his Difference Engine.) Reidy is rightly keen to rescue the work of the army of ocean fact-gatherers whose labor has subsequently been erased from the history of science and technology.

Whewell agreed with Pierre-Simon Laplace’s hydrodynamic theory but criticized him for not adequately testing it and producing predictive tide tables that would differentiate and account for all the variables that impacted on the sea, which was enormously difficult. Whewell worked to present a global graphical representation of tides (cotidal maps) aided, partly, by the development of self-registering tide gauges first introduced by the civil engineer Henry Palmer. As was consistent with his view of abstract analysis in general, Whewell was determined to make sure it was not remote from “reality.” The study of tides was informed by and, in turn, informed his philosophy and history of science.

Nonetheless—and this is one of Reidy’s key claims—the end result is not quite what it evidently seems to be. Following the recent work on imperial land maps by geographical historians like Matthew Edney, he writes: “Whewell’s graphs related the variables of time and space of the globe, but they hid much more than they revealed. They masked the embedded authority relations between the individuals assembling the maps. Indeed, this is the object of the graph: not to exemplify but to simplify, not to make real but to make useful. In this sense graphs do not depict nature, they create it” (p. 192). Hidden are the reams of calculations, the people gathering the data around the world, the instruments used, the naval officers, the army of missionaries, vessels used, and so on.

Reidy convincingly welds this developing hierarchical division of scientific labor and the forging of...