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Making Kew Observatory: the Royal Society, the British Association and the politics of early Victorian science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2015

LEE T. MACDONALD
LEE T. MACDONALD*
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Built in 1769 as a private observatory for King George III, Kew Observatory was taken over in 1842 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). It was then quickly transformed into what some claimed to be a ‘physical observatory’ of the sort proposed by John Herschel – an observatory that gathered data in a wide range of physical sciences, including geomagnetism and meteorology, rather than just astronomy. Yet this article argues that the institution which emerged in the 1840s was different in many ways from that envisaged by Herschel. It uses a chronological framework to show how, at every stage, the geophysicist and Royal Artillery officer Edward Sabine manipulated the project towards his own agenda: an independent observatory through which he could control the geomagnetic and meteorological research, including the ongoing ‘Magnetic Crusade’. The political machinations surrounding Kew Observatory, within the Royal Society and the BAAS, may help to illuminate the complex politics of science in early Victorian Britain, particularly the role of ‘scientific servicemen’ such as Sabine. Both the diversity of activities at Kew and the complexity of the observatory's origins make its study important in the context of the growing field of the ‘observatory sciences’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 409 - 433
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Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2015 

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References

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48 Sabine to Herschel, 6 July 1840, National Archives, Papers of Sir Edward Sabine (subsequently TNA: BJ 3), TNA: BJ 3/26. Many letters from Herschel to Sabine in the National Archives are not listed in Crowe, Dyck and Kevin, op. cit. (19).

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