Part 24

Footnote 89:

Sundry astronomical observations were made by this officer, while a captain in the British navy, in the years 1757, 8, and 9; which were reported to the admiralty on the 14th of April, 1760, by Dr. Bradley, then astronomer-royal. See Dr. Bradley’s letter of that date, to the Secretary of the Admiralty; published (among other papers) in the year 1770, by order of the board of longitude, at the end of T. Mayer’s Tables and Method of finding the Longitude; edited by Dr. Maskelyne.

Footnote 90:

The Observatory, a very handsome and respectable one, was constructed at Gotha in the year 1788, under the auspices of the then reigning Duke of Saxe-Gotha, a zealous patron of astronomy. It is placed on an eminence, a league from the city, and is built entirely of hewn stone. Mr. de Zach, a native of Hungary, an experienced astronomer, was appointed by the duke its director.

The instruments with which the Gotha Observatory is furnished are chiefly English, as are those of most of the celebrated European observatories. Among these, is a transit telescope, by Ramsden; and Mr. Lalande mentions, in his Astronomie (in the year 1792,) that there were to be added, two murals of eight feet radius, an entire circle of eight feet diameter, a great zenith-sector, &c. but that Mr. Ramsden, who was employed to make them, found great difficulty in supplying all the demands for instruments, which his great reputation occasioned.

It is well known, that the first improvements in astronomical instruments took place in Great-Britain; and both Lalande and de Zach, as well as other foreign astronomers of eminence, have done ample justice to the superior ingenuity and skill of the artists of that country, in this department of mechanism. The ingenious Mr. Edmund Stone, in his Supplement to the English Translation of Mr. Bion’s Construction and Use of Mathematical Instruments, (published in 1758, nearly forty years after he translated Mr. Bion’s work into English,) observes—that, having set about the business (the translating of this latter work,) he soon perceived that many French instruments were excelled by some of the English of the same kind, in contrivance; and that, as to workmanship, he never did see one French instrument so well framed and divided as some English have been. “For example,” says Mr. Stone, “Mr. Sutton’s quadrants, made above one hundred years ago,” (before the middle of the seventeenth century,) “are the finest divided instruments in the world; and the regularity and exactness of the vast number of circles drawn upon them, is highly delightful to behold. The mural quadrant at the Royal Observatory, at Greenwich, far exceeds that of the Royal Observatory at Paris. Also, the theodolites of Messrs. Sisson and Heath, the clocks and watches of Messrs. Graham, Tompion and Quare, the orreries of Mr. Graham and Mr. Wright, and many more curiously contrived and well executed mathematical instruments which I could mention, far exceed those of the French, or indeed any other nation in the world.—The making good mathematical instruments,” continues Mr. Stone, “is almost peculiar to the English; as well as their skill in all branches of the mathematics and natural philosophy has been generally superior to that of other nations.”

Without wishing to derogate from the justly acquired fame of British artists, for the excellence of their mathematical and astronomical instruments, M. Rittenhouse’s skill and accuracy, displayed in such as he made, stand unsurpassed by similar works of their most celebrated mechanicians: while his profoundness in astronomical science, and his wonderful ingenuity of invention and contrivance, manifested in the construction of his Orrery, leave him without a rival, in the two-fold character of an Astronomer and a Mechanic. The idea of the fine planetarian machine constructed by Mr. Rowley, under the name of the Orrery, and supposed to have been invented by Mr. Graham, is said to have been taken from a very similar machine, of which that eminent philosopher, Dr. Stephen Hales, had the credit of being the original contriver. But Mr. Rittenhouse was, incontrovertibly, the Inventor, as well as the Maker, of that sublimely-conceived and unrivalled machine, which bears the name of the Rittenhouse-Orrery: and Dr. Morse, in noticing some of the more prominent productions of scientific ingenuity and skill, in America, observes, with good reason, that “every combination of machinery may be expected from a country, a native son of which,” (referring in a note to “David Rittenhouse, Esq. of Pennsylvania,”) “reaching this inestimable object in its highest point, has epitomised the motions of the spheres that roll throughout the universe.” See Morse’s American Geography, first published in 1789.

Footnote 91:

The accuracy of some of the fine pocket-chronometers constructed by the celebrated artists named by Mr. de Zach, and by some others, such, for instance, as the one made by Emery for the count de Bruhl, mentioned in the text, has rendered them, on some occasions, useful assistants in making astronomical observations on land. Dr. Rittenhouse occasionally used one for such purposes, many years. It was an excellent pocket-watch, made by Le Roy of Paris for the late Matthias Barton, Esq. who was induced to let Dr. Rittenhouse have it. After his decease, this watch was gratuitously restored to its former proprietor, by Mrs. Rittenhouse’s desire, and as a testimonial of what she knew to have been her late husband’s regard for his nephew. Mr. M. Barton bequeathed it, by his last will, to his brother and physician, Dr. Benjamin S. Barton.

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This very respectable testimony of an eminent German astronomer affords incontestable proof of the great accuracy, of which nautical chronometers are susceptible, and to which they have actually been brought by some artists of celebrity, mostly English.

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Footnote 92:

The Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, for the year 1729, contain an article that furnishes additional evidence of the extraordinary skill and ingenuity manifested by English artists in the construction of watches, as well as other pieces of mechanism which require great accuracy in the workmanship: it forms a pleasant little narrative in an eulogium on Father Sebastian, a Carmelite Friar of singular mechanical ingenuity; and it indicates, at the same time, that the repeating-watch was invented in England. The story is thus told:—

“Charles II. roy d’Angleterre, avoit envoyé au feu roi deux Montres à Repetition; les premieres qu’on ait vues en France. Elles ne pouvoient s’ouvrir que par une secrete précaution des ouvriers Anglois, pour cacher la nouvelle construction, et s’en assurer d’autant plus la gloire et le profit. Les montres se dérangérent, et furent remises entre les mains de M. Martineau, horloger du roi, qui n’y put travailler faute de les sçavoir ouvrir. Il dit a M. Colbert, et c’est un trait de courage digne d’etre remarqué, qu’il ne connoissoit qu’un jeune Carme capable d’ouvrir les montres, ques’il n’y réussissoit pas, il falloit se resoudre à les renvoyer en Angleterre. M. Colbert consentit qu’il les donnât au P. Sebastien, qui les ouvrit assez promptement, et de plus les raccommoda sans sçavoir qu’ elles étoient au roi, ni combien étoit important par ses circonstances l’ouvrage dont on l’avoit chargé.”

Footnote 92a:

His baptismal name was John Truchet.

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The general use of the common clock ought not to derogate from the ingenuity of an invention of such universal importance in the affairs of human life. The pendulum-clock now in use was brought to some degree of perfection, if not invented, by Huygens, who was one of the first mathematicians and astronomers of the age in which he lived: and the date of this invention is about the middle of the seventeenth century; although Galileo disputed with him the discovery, a few years earlier. Clocks of some kind date their antiquity much higher; some writers pretending to carry their invention back as far as the year 510 of the Christian era. However, on the authority of Conrad Gesner, the honour of inventing the clock, before the application of the pendulum to these machines was made by Huygens, belongs to England: He says, that “Richard Wallingford, an English abbot of St. Albans, who flourished in the year 1326, made a wonderful clock by a most excellent art; the like of which could not be produced in all Europe.” This was forty-six years before Henry de Vic, a German, made his clock for Charles V. king of France; and fifty-six years before the duke of Burgundy ordered one, which sounded the hour, to be carried away from the city of Courtray, in Flanders.

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Footnote 93:

This great man, who was the son of Christian Huygens lord of Zuylichem, a counsellor of the prince of Orange, was born in the year 1629, at Zuylichem, in the province of Guelderland, the country of the ancestors of Rittenhouse. Having resided for some time in France, he quitted that country on account of his religion, in 1684, in consequence of the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He died in Holland in 1695, at the age of sixty-six years.

Galileo, who was a native of Florence, lived to the age of eighty-seven years. He died fifty-three years before Huygens; and about fourteen before Huygens’s application of the pendulum to clocks, so as to effect an isochronal regulation of their movements. Galileo’s use of the pendulum, for the purpose of measuring time, seems to have been nothing more than the annexation of a short pendulum to clock-work.

Footnote 94:

This celebrated naturalist and physician, who was styled by Boerhaave, Monstrum Eruditionis, was born at Zurich in 1516: He was, probably, of the same family as that of the late Solomon Gesner the poet, who was a native of the same city, and appeared more than two centuries afterwards. Conrad Gesner was so distinguished a writer, as a naturalist, that he was called the Pliny of Germany. A splendid edition of Pliny’s Natural History, under the title of the Historia Mundi of Caius Plinius Secundus, with a dedication by Erasmus to Stanislaus Turzo, bishop of Olmutz, was printed at Basil, by Froben, so early as 1525. This copy of Pliny (which is now very rare) having been published in the vicinity of Conrad Gesner, during his youth, that circumstance may have prompted him to direct his attention to those pursuits in science, which distinguished this learned Swiss.

Footnote 95:

About two centuries after that period when the sciences had begun to revive and the mechanical arts to flourish, the construction of clocks appears to have been much improved. And in the reign of Henry VIII. a stately clock was made by an artist, the initials of whose name are “N. O.” in the year 1540, and placed in the royal palace at Hampton-Court. This not only shewed the hour of the day, but an orrery-part, connected with it, exhibited the motion of the sun through all the signs of the zodiac, and also of the moon, with other matters depending on them. A similar one, in the cathedral of Lunden in Denmark, is mentioned by Heylin: But Martin, in his Philosophia Britannica, speaks of a piece of clock-work in the cathedral of Strasburg, in Alsace; “in which, besides the clock-part, is the celestial globe or sphere, with the motions of the sun, moon, planets and fixed stars, &c.” This was finished in the year 1574, and is represented as being much superior to a pompous clock at Lyons, in France, which also has an orrery department.

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