The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture (review)

This volume of twelve essays (plus introduction) aims to be a “first attempt at surveying the observatory’s multiple roles in nineteenth-century scientific, economic, and cultural life.” (p. 2). Historians of technology will find many of these essays a rich resource for their field: the book’s contributors emphasize “the observatory’s material culture . . . the telescopes, polariscopes, spectroscopes, magnetometers, clocks, and thermometers” and their role in establishing astronomy as the “first precision science” (p. 9). The emphasis on precision measurement within the nineteenth-century observatory made astronomy the cultural model of scientific exactness; as a result, controlling the observatory, its instruments, and its data became a political necessity.

Simon Werrett makes this point in his essay on Tsar Nicholas I’s patronage of Pulkovo Observatory. Staged to mirror Nicholas’s rule of Russia, Pulkovo’s technical and administrative complexity operated (under Wilhelm Struve) with conspicuous order and ease; much was made of the fact that the complex mechanisms required to open the observatory’s dome were controlled with just one finger pushing one lever. Similarly, Massimo Mazzotti argues that Pope Pius IX’s support of the Jesuit astronomer Angelo Secchi and the Collegio Romano observatory explicitly proclaimed pontifical Rome’s independence in the face of Italian unification. Here the instruments themselves were emblematic: Secchi placed three domes (“packed with telescopes and electrical machinery,” p. 61) on the roof of the church of Saint Ignatius in the Collegio Romano. Although the observatory was confiscated by the Italians in 1879, Secchi’s astrophysical researches provided other papal observatories with a framework supporting both religious dogma and scientific innovation.

Simon Schaffer’s essay on the implosion of the Paramatta Observatory while under the watch of Thomas Brisbane demonstrates that when the techniques behind the technologies fail, so does an observatory’s political usefulness. Accurate celestial knowledge was almost a precondition of colonial control. Brisbane’s Australian observatory promised control, but couldn’t deliver. Paramatta’s failures were not caused by its instruments but rather by the inconsistent techniques of recording and reducing the data gathered by the observers at those instruments. The fatal combination of sloth (of the German mathematician Carl Rümker, who couldn’t be bothered to accurately reduce his observations into useful lists and books) and termites (who simply ate the books) shows what happened to precision science when discipline collapsed.

Guy Boistel also discusses the relationship between discipline and astronomical precision in his essay on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century French naval observatories. Sven Widmalm continues the military theme in his discussion of the Swedish military’s use of astronomy in the first half of the nineteenth century. And Martina Schiavon rounds out the role of the military with her essay on geodesy and mapmaking between France and Algeria. In all three cases astronomical and mapmaking techniques dovetailed with European militaries’ ingrained requirement for precision as a foundation of discipline and control.

Further essays cover a handful of relevant topics: Richard Staley considers Albert Michelson’s appeal to the authority of “standards . . . in the measurement practices of old-school astronomers” (p. 246) in his precise, instrument-based physics experiments. David Aubin carefully balances the political tensions between French and Thai interpretations of the total solar eclipse of 1868. In separate essays Theresa Levitt and Charlotte Bigg assess the relationship between observatories and popular culture. And the two remaining essays, by John Tresch and Ole Molvig, consider the observatory from a Humboldtian perspective. Tresch in particular (drawing on recent work on objectivity by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston) notes that as the nineteenth century wore on, Alexander von Humboldt’s view of scientific instruments, “free citizens in a cosmic polity,” gave way to that of “increasingly inflexible, lifeless and inhuman” devices with qualities of “automatic action and self-inscription” (p. 276).

The Heavens on Earth represents the most comprehensive work yet produced...