Easily Cracked

Scientific Instruments in States of Disrepair

By Simon Schaffer*

ABSTRACT

There has been much scholarly attention to definitions of the term “scientific instrument.”
Rather more mundane work by makers, curators, and users is devoted to instruments’
maintenance and repair. A familiar argument holds that when a tool breaks, its character
and recalcitrance become evident. Much can be gained from historical study of instru-
ments’ breakages, defects, and recuperation. Maintenance and repair technologies have
been a vital aspect of relations between makers and other users. Their history illuminates
systems of instruction, support, and abuse. These systems were, for example, evident in
the development of astronomical instruments around 1800 within and beyond the Euro-
pean sphere. Episodes from that milieu are used to explore how instrument users sought
autonomy, how instruments’ mutable character was defined, and how judgments of
instruments’ failure or success were ever secured.

Receivers fit for our turn are more easily crack’d than procur’d, and therefore ought
not to be unnecessarily thrown away as unserviceable.
—Robert Boyle (1660)

T WO MONTHS AFTER ITS LAUNCH in April 1990, it emerged that the Hubble
Space Telescope’s ninety-four-inch mirror, completed a decade earlier, suffered from
spherical aberration. A committee found that a misplaced fleck of nonreflective paint had
led to a distortion of the lens dimensions for the mirror’s optical template and that this had
been missed in cross-checks because, frustrated when the lens wouldn’t fit into its
housing, technicians had fixed the problem with some domestic washers. Senator Al Gore
held that “a very dark veil fell on the world of astronomy and astrophysics research.” Yet
after an already planned service mission, by late 1993 the Corrective Optics Space
Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR), a set of small mirrors engineered to compen-
sate for the main mirror’s flaw, had been installed and judged successful. COSTAR is now
displayed at the National Air and Space Museum. As its historian Robert Smith pointed

* Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge
CB2 3RH, United Kingdom.

Isis, 2011, 102:706 –717

©2011 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/2011/10204-0006$10.00

706

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 F
O
C
FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011) 707
U
out in a timely afterword, this tale cannot be reduced to ineptitude and jobbery. Not every S
ingenious fix ends up in a national museum, but every instrument is liable to failure and
repair. At the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, a senior astronomer
commented: “it’s a safe prediction that everything’s not going to work. The big question
is, how much of it will work?”1
Faults are defaults, yet instruments perform. A principle of science studies is that
dissensus is instructive, not pathological, and that agreement is not inevitable, but to be
explained. Instruments’ adequate function needs comparable analysis. Then “the big
question” is how it’s judged that instruments are working and, indeed, what they are.
Many have a stake—not just technicians and other users but also, for example, conser-
vators, who offer valuable reflections on the materials and techniques involved in recov-
ering instruments’ common functions.2 Aesthetics as well as conservation are involved,
attitudes to the authenticity or the anachronism of restoration and of ruins.3 It’s plausible
that the category of scientific instrument depends on such curatorial interests. Despite
remarks about the museum as a site where such objects are somehow removed from the
economic circuit, inventory maintenance has been vital for scientific devices and their
social life. States of disrepair are not often deemed worthy of display, even though—
perhaps because—they show signs of use. What follows can be read as a plea for shows
of shards and fragments alongside glamorous devices.4
There have been many ways to manage instruments in states of disrepair, from
preemptive design to artful tinkering or forensic diagnosis. Major modern industries
emerged from the work of repair shops, while these same industries backed the new
discipline of retrospective failure analysis.5 The Hubble aberration shows that in failure
analysis, the qualities of persons and things need simultaneously to be evaluated, espe-
cially in such cases of complex collaboration. In another Baltimore example, the eminent
optical physicist John Strong recalls Henry Rowland’s cautionary dictum about ruling
diffraction gratings: “no mechanism operates perfectly—its design must make up for
imperfections.” Such designs are necessary but rarely sufficient. “The apparatus con-
stantly needs repairs,” Rowland told his university president in 1888, and so his machinist

1 Robert W. Smith, The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Technology, and Politics, with contributions by

Paul A. Hanle, Robert H. Kargon, and Joseph N. Tatarewicz, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1993), pp. 414 (Gore), 402 (Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer), 411– 414. Cf. Diane Vaughan, The
Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,
1996). For the epigraph see Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall Touching the Spring of the Air
(Oxford: H. Hall, 1660), p. 72.
2 W. J. Read, “Renovation and Repair of Scientific Instruments,” in The History and Preservation of Chemical

Instrumentation, ed. John T. Stock and Mary Virginia Orna (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), pp. 157–162.
3 Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine (Princeton, N.J.: Weiner, 1995); and

Christopher Woodward, In Ruins: A Journey through History, Art, and Literature (London: Chatto & Windus,
2001).
4 Deborah Jean Warner, “What Is a Scientific Instrument, When Did It Become One, and Why?” British

Journal for the History of Science, 1990, 23:83–93. David Edgerton reports that in the 1960s the U.K.
government proposed the term “terotechnology” for maintenance engineering: The Shock of the Old: Technology
and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile, 2008), p. 77. For artifacts’ removal from context see Krzysztof
Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500 –1800 (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 30 –34. For
the virtues of “wounded artifacts” in museum collections see Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in
Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 171–172. For the case of scientific instruments see J. A.
Bennett, “Beyond Understanding: Curatorship and Access in Science Museums,” in Museums of Modern
Science, ed. Svante Lindqvist (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2000), pp. 55– 60.
5 For the case of electronics see Yuzo Takahashi, “A Network of Tinkerers: The Advent of the Radio and

Television Receiver Industry in Japan,” Technology and Culture, 2000, 41:460 – 484; and Henry Petroski,
Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 41, 51.

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
708 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011)

Theodore Schneider was “an absolute necessity”: the ruling engine “cannot be run without
a person near it all the time to oil it & keep it in repair . . . to see that no accident
happens.”6
States of disrepair refer simultaneously to tools and humans that interact with them and
each other. As usual, sociology offers better resources than does epistemology to make
sense of this essential if obscure repair work. Fixing requires artisan tinkering, in contrast
with more formal rule systems. “The materiality of instruments only surfaces in their
making and breaking,” writes Davis Baird in his account of scientific hardware. Nor is
repair simply conservative; it is transformative. Labor politics of class and gender matter
to repair work: it was long reckoned that infrastructural maintenance was unproductive,
unregistered in economic accounts. But in a brilliant 1926 essay on the idealization of
broken devices in Neapolitan technology, the Marxist sociologist Alfred Sohn-Rethel
observed that there “technology’s essence lies in getting what is broken to work. And in
the handling of defective machines,” artisans’ “capacities go well beyond the merely
technical.” Naples was a city-state of disrepair. Sohn-Rethel saw how breakage accom-
panied definition: “that which is intact, that which just works, arouses misgivings and
doubts, because the fact that it just works means that it can never be known how and for
what it will work.”7
Mending has been so seductive for sociological study that phenomenologists first
stressed ubiquitous repair: how participants in conversation repair flow of dialogue, how
observers’ discrepant accounts need repair to sustain a shared world, or how machine
users repair devices’ outputs to fit them into society. In each case, it is argued, repair
passes unnoticed.8 More literal repair work, in laboratories and elsewhere, was then
subjected to sociological analysis: fixing all the relations between customers, technicians,
and machines is crucial.9 Historians have paid welcome attention to the problems of
instrument error and disturbance. Jutta Schickore’s studies of imperfection in microscopes
show how, from the earlier nineteenth century, instrument users acquired the job of repair
and maintenance, while it was no longer assumed that instruments from the same maker
could be treated as identical for all practical purposes. Yet, as David Edgerton indicates
in his study of the political economy of maintenance, “we are not in a position to give an
overview of the main trends in the history of maintenance and repair.”10 Some histories of
broken instruments and their fixes might help.

6 John Strong, “Rowland’s Diffraction-Grating Art,” Vistas in Astronomy, 1986, 29:137–141, on p. 137; and

George Sweetnam, “Precision Implemented: Henry Rowland, the Concave Diffraction Grating, and the Analysis
of Light,” in The Values of Precision, ed. M. Norton Wise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), pp.
283–310, on p. 293. Cf. Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments (Berkeley: Univ.
California Press, 2004), pp. 150, 152.
7 Baird, Thing Knowledge, p. 146; and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Das Ideal des Kaputten (1926), ed. Carl Freytag

(Bremen: Wassmann, 1990), pp. 33–38 (my translation). On the visibility of materiality in making and breaking
see Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture,
and Society, 2007, 24(3):1–25; and Edgerton, Shock of the Old (cit. n. 4), pp. 77– 81.
8 The phenomenology of repair is discussed in H. M. Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and

Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 60, 62–71; and Steven Shapin, A Social History
of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 30 –34.
9 Julian Orr, Talking about Work: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996),

p. 79; Frank Nutch, “Gadgets, Gizmos, and Instruments: Science for the Tinkering,” Science, Technology, and
Human Values, 1996, 21:214 –228, esp. p. 215; and Christopher Henke, “The Mechanics of Workplace Order:
Toward a Sociology of Repair,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 2000, 44:55– 81, esp. p. 61.
10 Jutta Schickore, “Ever-Present Impediments: Exploring Instruments and Methods of Microscopy,” Per-

spectives on Science, 2001, 9:126 –146, esp. p. 136; and Edgerton, Shock of the Old (cit. n. 4), p. 81. For aspects

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 F
O
C
FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011) 709
U
Managing states of disrepair is salient during scientific practices’ periods of dislocation S
and reorganization, such as the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific,
industrial, and political revolutions. Established instrument typologies were displaced by
new styles of hardware and classes of makers and users, not least in the global deployment
of these devices during world war and imperial aggression. The numbers and kinds of
those with a stake in instruments’ behavior significantly increased.11 Hagiographies of
industry and empire told of heroic recuperation of disorderly hardware. The mathematical
instrument maker James Watt was a capable maker of Hadley’s quadrant, a newfangled
navigational device touted by elite mathematicians but, unlike the more common back-
staff, often liable to disrepair. His first job at Glasgow University involved fixing
high-class astronomical instruments by Jonathan Sisson and others; from 1758 he main-
tained lecturers’ apparatus, including a John Bird quadrant. Decisive was the 1763
commission to put a Sisson demonstration steam engine into working order. The move
from restoration to experiment is celebrated: his preeminent modern biographer remarks
that “this request changed not only Watt’s career but also the history of world civiliza-
tion.” He also suggests that Watt’s decisive interest in perfecting such machines was
prompted partly by interests in marine chronometers, devices notoriously involved in
makers’ reparation and navigators’ maintenance.12
Six years later, repair of a Bird quadrant became celebrated in “the history of world
civilization.” The device helped check the astronomical regulator used to time the transit
of Venus. In 1769 a well-guarded quadrant was taken by the chief Monaamia from James
Cook’s astronomical base in Tahiti. After the quadrant’s recovery, the astronomer Charles
Green “began to overlook the instrument to see if any part or parts were wanting.” While
the stand was lost, “nothing else was wanting but what could easily be repair’d.” Hermann
Spöring, a Swedish émigré who traded as a London watchmaker, fixed the Bird device and
“makes all easy again.”13 Yet the repair did not make all easy. On Tahiti, it was associated
with penal reprisals against Polynesian hosts. In London, the Astronomer Royal Nevil
Maskelyne stated that the transit observations were inconsistent, especially when judged
against those made using “quadrants of the same size and made by the same artist.” Cook
responded privately that Maskelyne “was not unacquainted with the quadrant having been
in the Hands of the Natives, pulled to pieces and many of the parts broke, which we had
to mend in the best possible manner we could.” States of disrepair helped distribute

of maintenance and repair in seventeenth-century experiment see Simon Werrett, “Recycling in Early Modern
Science,” Brit. J. Hist. Sci. (forthcoming).
11 J. A. Bennett, “Instrument Makers and the ‘Decline of Science in England’: The Effect of Institutional

Change on the Elite Makers of the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Instruments and
Their Makers, ed. P. R. de Clercq (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985), pp. 13–28, esp. pp. 13–15; and A. D.
Morrison-Low, Making Scientific Instruments in the Scientific Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp.
36 – 46.
12 Richard L. Hills, James Watt: His Time in Scotland, 1736 –1774 (Ashbourne: Landmark, 2002), pp. 56 –57,

72–73, 84, 312, 319. For the sea quadrant’s commercial career see Jim Bennett, “Catadioptrics and Commerce
in Eighteenth-Century London,” History of Science, 2006, 44:247–278, esp. p. 264.
13 Joseph Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768 –1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole, 2 vols., 2nd ed.

(Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963), Vol. 1, pp. 268 –271, 309, 269 (quotations pertaining to Green’s efforts);
and James Cook, The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768 –1771, ed. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1955), pp. 86 – 89, 89 n 1 (“makes all easy again”). For “theft” in these contacts see W. H. Pearson, “The
Reception of European Voyagers on Polynesian Islands, 1568 –1797,” Journal de la Société des Océanistes,
1970, 27:121–153, esp. p. 140; and I. C. Campbell, “European-Polynesian Encounters,” Journal of Pacific
History, 1994, 29:222–231.

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
710 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011)

Figure 1. Long-term maintenance: a polished mahogany box for a sextant made by Edward
Troughton around 1820, with a repair label from Troughton and Simms dated September 1915.
(National Maritime Museum, F6815.)

responsibility across cultures and spaces, offering resources to defend some reputations
and damn others.14
In global surveys maintenance and repair became debatably dependent on relations
between makers, users, and travelers. (See Figure 1.) The career of the Board of Longitude
illuminates the problem. The mechanization of instruments’ scale division by Jesse
Ramsden, Edward Troughton, and others from the mid 1770s answered the board’s
demands for reliable devices. But to sustain this normal function new systems of repair
and maintenance had to be developed.15 On the First Fleet journey to the New South Wales
penal colony in 1787, the board provided the marine William Dawes with a set of
instruments from Cook’s voyages, including an “old sextant” by Ramsden. Dawes decided
that there was an index glass fault, sending both a drawing of the bad image and a demand
for replacement. “I will answer for it, Mr Ramsden will allow a defect in this instrument,
whatever his opinion may be now.”16 The young marine gave reasons for demanding this
fix: if other instruments failed he could use his sextant, and if he died anyone who could
use a sextant could maintain his program. Dawes reported to Maskelyne about the
unsteadiness of instrument design, of environmental conditions, and of officers’ habits.
The capacity to act at a distance, and preemptive guarantees of reliability in what seemed
remote and thus vulnerable sites, raised crises within the instrument trade.17 A couple of

14 G. M. Badger, “Cook the Scientist,” in Captain Cook: Navigator and Scientist, ed. Badger (London: Hurst,

1970), pp. 30 – 49, on pp. 38 –39; and David Turnbull, “Cook and Tupaia, a Tale of Cartographic Méconnais-
sance,” in Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth
Century, ed. Margarette Lincoln (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), pp. 117–131, on p. 125.
15 A. N. Stimson, “Some Board of Longitude Instruments in the Nineteenth Century,” in Nineteenth-Century

Scientific Instruments and Their Makers, ed. de Clercq (cit. n. 11), pp. 93–115, esp. p. 98.
16 William Dawes to Nevil Maskelyne, 25 Jan. 1787, Cambridge University Library, Royal Greenwich

Observatory MSS 14/48, fol. 249v; Philip S. Laurie, “William Dawes and Australia’s First Observatory,”
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1988, 29:469 – 482, on pp. 470 – 471; and Anita McCon-
nell, Jesse Ramsden (1735–1800): London’s Leading Scientific Instrument Maker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007),
pp. 105–106.
17 Dawes to Maskelyne, 8 Feb. 1787, 26 July 1790, Cambridge University Library, Royal Greenwich

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 F
O
C
FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011) 711
U
years later, on a mission for the Vancouver expedition’s North Pacific surveys, the young S
Cambridge mathematician William Gooch was issued two sextants, one by Troughton, the
other “by Dollond, new divided by Troughton.” But in the Atlantic he soon found that the
Troughton device had its micrometer screw jammed and the other “was eaten through with
rust and the horizon glass loose.” At Rio, he found in harbor another ship bound for New
South Wales with convicts the government judged useful for the penal colony; among
them was one of Ramsden’s former employees, who fixed both sextants in Gooch’s
presence. The convict reckoned that the screw stuck because wax hadn’t been promptly
applied to its shaft and that the other instrument’s horizon glass must have been shattered
for some time. Gooch was supposed to train crewmen in using these instruments; his status
as astronomer depended on their adequate performance. Even his killing on Oahu in 1792,
and the loss of his instruments, was treated as something like a mere problem of inventory
maintenance.18
Social status affected makers’ and users’ relations. Principal instrument makers such as
Bird, Ramsden, and Troughton scarcely understood themselves as servants but, rather, as
partners—if not, indeed, as judges. Users such as Green, Dawes, and Gooch all had
questionable competence. Hence the social sense of repair work. The new century
witnessed fresh investment in scientific infrastructure, observatories, laboratories, and
museums. In the wake of these changes, as Schickore points out in the case of microscopy
manuals, it was recognized that all instruments are flawed and hardware’s materiality
salient. Workplace sociology reminds us that normal sites needed no fixing, but institu-
tionalized repair lay at their heart. This was clear in meridian astronomy, which was
supposed to demonstrate norms of both social and celestial conduct.19 In anticipation of
Rowland’s dictum about disrepair and design, the leading astronomer John Herschel
insisted: “though we are entitled to look for wonders at the hands of scientific artists, we
are not to expect miracles. The demands of the astronomer will always surpass the powers
of the artist; and it must, therefore, be constantly the aim of the former to make himself,
as far as possible, independent of the imperfections incident to every work the latter can
place in his hands.” Scientists sought to free their work from the makers’ idiosyncrasies,
yet depended on them. According to Herschel’s colleague Benjamin Gompertz, “the
inquiry of the best use to be made of a bad instrument becomes an interesting subject.”20
States of disrepair became the norm, yet adequate performance was hard to define. In
the 1820s, many committees conducted forensic analyses of equipment failure. In 1828 an
East India Company inquiry had eminent London astronomers and instrument makers
judge the adequacy of instruments shipped to Bombay, then returned by the irate astron-
omer there: while “the instruments arrived in the most perfect manner” in India, it was
claimed that the principal instrument supplied was “the worst and the most common that

Observatory MSS 14/48, fols. 251–252, 302–303; and Laurie, “William Dawes and Australia’s First Observa-
tory,” pp. 475– 479.
18 William Gooch to Maskelyne, 17 Nov. 1791 (copy in Joseph Banks’s hand), Cambridge University Library,

MSS Mm.6.48, fol. 196r; Greg Dening, The Death of William Gooch: A History’s Anthropology (Melbourne:
Melbourne Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 119, 128; and McConnell, Jesse Ramsden (1735–1800) (cit. n. 16), p. 147.
For Gooch’s instructions see Cambridge University Library, Royal Greenwich Observatory MSS 14/9, fols.
61– 64.
19 Schickore, “Ever-Present Impediments” (cit. n. 10), p. 140; and Henke, “Mechanics of Workplace Order”

(cit. n. 9), p. 57. For meridian astronomy see David Dewhirst, “Meridian Astronomy in the Private and
University Observatories of the United Kingdom: Rise and Fall,” Vistas Astron., 1985, 28:147–158.
20 John Herschel, A Treatise on Astronomy (London: Longman, 1833), p. 66; and Benjamin Gompertz, “On

the Theory of Astronomical Instruments, Part 1,” Memoirs of the Astronomical Society, 1824, 1:349 –354, on pp.
349 –350.

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
712 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011)

Figure 2. A telescope in a state of disrepair: James South’s “View of the Lots into which the . . .
useless Twenty feet Equatorial . . . was distributed, previous to its Sale by Auction on the 8th of
July 1839.” (Library of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.)

has ever been made in London for a public observatory.” The committee found otherwise
and instead sacked the Bombay astronomer. Observatory managers should be able to
improvise repairs on site, not demand perfection. According to another committee mem-
ber, the grand amateur James South, in judgments of a competent instrument and
reasonable reparations “any astronomer is left to his own fancy.” From 1832, South
himself was involved in a more violent fight about repairs and social status. The idiosyn-
cratic equatorial telescope he commissioned from Troughton for his Kensington obser-
vatory was reckoned “a useless pile” by the astronomer; it was eventually destroyed and
its remnants sold. (See Figure 2.) There had been no prior stipulation of the standard the
instrument should meet: “we are not aware of our having at any time engaged that your
polar axis should possess a specified degree of perfection,” Troughton’s firm told South.21
The notorious difficulties of new southern observatories launched in 1821 at the Cape
of Good Hope, promoted by the Board of Longitude, and at Parramatta by the New South
Wales governor Thomas Brisbane, showed how hard it was to secure autonomy, manage
instrument failures, and negotiate long-range relations between administrators, astrono-
mers, and the trade. The favored British model, sustained by Troughton, demanded
separate measures of right ascensions using a transit instrument and of zenith distances
with a mural device.22 Other makers, such as Thomas Jones, copied the Troughton mural
circle for the Cape, though it was never reliable for altitudes: visiting the Cape in 1834,
Herschel saw no visible damage and suggested how to compensate for the apparent errors.
When the instrument was sent back to Greenwich at the end of the 1830s, a design fault
with its pivot collar was finally diagnosed. “The Cape Astronomical Establishment has

21 John Curnin to Bombay Council, 21 Apr. 1827; James South to Charles Wilkins, 21 Feb. 1828: British

Library MSS IOR F/4/940/26363, pp. 81– 82, 154; Morning Chronicle, 27 Nov. 1828, p. 2; and Michael Hoskin,
“Astronomers at War: South v. Sheepshanks,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 1989, 20:175–210, esp. pp.
184 –186.
22 On the problems of the southern observatories see Brian Warner, Astronomers at the Royal Observatory,

Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town: Balkema, 1979), p. 2; and Shirley D. Saunders, “Sir Thomas Brisbane’s
Legacy to Colonial Science: Colonial Astronomy at the Parramatta Observatory, 1822–1848,” Historical
Records of Australian Science, 2004, 15:177–209. Regarding the favored British model see Derek Howse,
Greenwich Observatory, Vol. 3: The Buildings and Instruments (London: Taylor & Francis, 1975), pp. 26 –29,
38 – 40; and J. A. Bennett, The Divided Circle (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987), pp. 169 –172.

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 F
O
C
FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011) 713
U
cost the country upwards of £20,000 sterling. Cui bono?” South asked in the newspapers.23 S
The Parramatta observatory also descended into controversy after an official inquiry in
which Herschel and South again played polemical roles as guarantors of repair discipline.
The fight was partly over its Troughton transit: “I find it difficult to imagine the nature of
a defect which, escaping all the usual modes of verification employed by astronomers on
their transits, should yet produce errors of the amount in question,” Herschel remarked.
When Jones’s newfangled meridian circle reached Parramatta, its spirit level burst in the
antipodean heat: “the level is broken, and index circle was very badly graduated”; the
astronomer judged it “quite useless.”24
Mary Louise Pratt uses the term “anti-conquest” for Europeans’ accounts of seemingly
innocent, if not victimized, survey work, projects nevertheless entirely incorporated into
colonial power relations. Instruments’ sufferings were part of these anti-conquest narra-
tives. Like other imperial projects, British surveys in India had their own hagiographic
repair story. In 1808 the Rajarajeshwara temple in Tanjore and a three-foot circular
theodolite built by one of Ramsden’s former apprentices were both severely damaged
when they came into violent contact. George Everest, later the Indian Survey’s superin-
tendent, turned the theodolite’s mending into a foundation myth. Contrasts between heroic
repair and ghastly hardware were telling.25 Everest paid many visits to the London shop
of Troughton and his new partner William Simms, tried to change their designs, and then
recruited Herschel and South as allies. Everest judged the theodolites that the company
proposed to supply mere “rattletraps.”26 He understood that no instrument could survive
unscathed, after it left the maker’s workshop, “in countries where instrument makers are
not to be procured,” so had to make his system independent both of the vagaries of the
London officials and those of the Indian field, to counteract the effects of “a puff of wind
or a careless native.” The principle that astronomers should not expect “miracles” became
a geographical claim about indigenous skills. Everest eventually hired Sayed Mir Mohsin
Hussain to repair the instruments at the survey as its principal artisan on the Troughton
and Simms altazimuth circles.27 Even then, Everest found these instruments’ spirit levels
were not proof against tropical heat, so he summoned the maker to correct the design and

23 Warner, Astronomers at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, pp. 25, 45– 46, 56; Brian Warner,

Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, 1820 –1831: The Founding of a Colonial Observatory (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1995), pp. 134 –140, 174 –175; and James South to the Editor, Morning Chronicle, 27 Nov. 1828.
24 John Herschel to George Gipps, 26 Dec. 1837, Royal Society MSS HS 19.72; John Service, Thir Notandums

(Edinburgh: Pentland, 1890), p. 198; and Saunders, “Sir Thomas Brisbane’s Legacy to Colonial Science” (cit.
n. 22), pp. 194 –196.
25 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.

38 –39; and R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, 4 vols. (Dehra Dun: Survey of India,
1954 –1958), Vol. 2, pp. 241–244, Vol. 3, pp. 212–213.
26 Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, Vol. 4, p. 144. See also Matthew Edney, Mapping an

Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1997), pp.
241–250; J. E. Insley, “Instruments of a Very Beautiful Class: George Everest in Europe, 1825–1830,” in
Colonel Sir George Everest (London: Royal Geographical Society, 1990), pp. 23–30, esp. p. 26; and Anita
McConnell, Instrument Makers to the World: A History of Cooke, Troughton, and Simms (London: Sessions,
1992), p. 27.
27 Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, Vol. 3, p. 188, Vol. 4, p. 458. For Everest on the lack

of “instrument makers” see George Everest, “Memoir Regarding the Survey Establishment in India and
Particularly the Great Trigonometrical Survey,” British Library MSS IOR L/MIL/5/402, fol. 369; on “a puff of
wind” see Everest, “Memoir Containing an Account of Some Leading Features of the Irish Survey and a
Comparison of the Same with the System Pursued in India,” British Library MSS IOR L/MIL/5/302, fols.
315–316. Regarding indigenous surveyors see Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the
Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), pp. 211–216.

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
714 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011)

recommended that “some place [be] erected for the express purpose of making experi-
ments with the instruments” before they were shipped.28
In these instructive fights, improvised mending deranged tests to calibrate instruments
against expected behavior. When these failed—as in cases such as South’s equatorial or
the Indian equipment—a sociologically familiar regress arose. Was the difference due to
change in conduct or faults in the instrument? Agreement on competent performance
required consensus on the phenomena devices helped determine.29 And this depended on
the sense that the “same” instrument survived repair work. One familiar example was the
career of the great reflectors that then dominated much extrameridional astronomy. Large
metal mirrors needed permanent maintenance that was hard to codify and rarely public.
From the 1780s, the tradition’s founder William Herschel accumulated experience at
polishing, employed as many as twenty-two laborers, then sought optimistically to
mechanize. When William’s son took his family’s twenty-foot reflector to South Africa in
1834, John Herschel spent hours each month polishing its mirror. Sometimes it worked
well: “as the polisher at first starting had no figure and did not touch in the middle, I
expected to find the figure destroyed . . . to my great surprise and satisfaction I found on
trying it at night that I have thus luckily blundered out one of the finest figured mirrors I
ever beheld.” Sometimes it didn’t: after a session of 2,700 strokes, “a successful process
and very little trouble,” Herschel sadly found “it is a bad figure.”30 Unpredictable mirror
mending mattered because these reflectors were to determine whether nebulae were
nearby gas clouds or distant star clusters by resolving them into stars or mapping their
changing shapes. Protagonists needed to assay mirrors without tautologically appealing to
images they made. As the Earl of Rosse admitted in his summary of observations made
in 1848 at Birr Castle, in western Ireland, with the giant reflector his father built there,
there had been “no arrangement for testing it in the workshop.” Mirror performance varied
in unpredictable ways. “The reflector of this year may be as to defining power practically
a totally different instrument from what it may be in the next.” The “great reflector” was
therefore the name of a series of subtly changing devices. As its historian Jim Bennett
notes, the establishment of normal work would demand “new systems of manufacture and
protocols of research in a reformed telescope culture.”31
The challenges of such new systems were made clear when Rosse’s colleague, the
Dublin engineer Thomas Grubb, was commissioned in the 1850s to build the world’s
largest equatorial reflector, designed to help Melbourne astronomers trace any changes in
nebulae’s shapes. Scholars are still divided about reasons for the instrument’s failure— or
if it failed. Every feature of maintenance and repair work raised in this essay bore on its
fate: the importance of normal repair work, its tacit and improvised quality, the difficulty

28 George Everest to Court of Directors, 21 May 1829, British Library MSS IOR L/MIL/5/402, fol. 455.
29 H. M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London: Sage, 1985), pp.
84, 105; and Donald MacKenzie, “How Do We Know the Properties of Artefacts? Applying the Sociology of
Knowledge to Technology,” in Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology, ed.
Robert Fox (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996), pp. 247–263, esp. pp. 260 –261.
30 J. A. Bennett, “‘On the Power of Penetrating into Space’: The Telescopes of William Herschel,” J. Hist.

Astron., 1976, 7:75–108, on pp. 89, 91; Bennett, “The Era of Newton, Herschel, and Lord Rosse,” Experimental
Astronomy, 2009, 25:33– 43, esp. pp. 39 – 41; and David S. Evans, Terence J. Deeming, Betty Hall Evans, and
Stephen Goldfarb, Herschel at the Cape: Diaries and Correspondence of Sir John Herschel, 1834 –1838 (Austin:
Univ. Texas Press, 1969), pp. 91, 329.
31 Earl of Rosse, “Observations of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars Made with the Six-Foot and Three-Foot

Reflectors at Birr Castle,” Scientific Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society, 1879 –1880, 2:1–178, on pp. 4 –5;
and Bennett, “Era of Newton, Herschel, and Lord Rosse,” p. 41.

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 F
O
C
FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011) 715
U
of reliance on and autonomy from the instrument maker, the mutability of maintained S
devices. Rosse, Herschel, and their colleagues debated how and whether to train on-site
technicians in fixing the instrument. It was soon found that the mirror was pinched in its
cell, that mirror varnish had not been properly removed, and that mirror definition was
unpredictably variable. As with the Hubble Telescope’s traumas, news quickly reached
the press, where the state of disrepair was labeled “a gigantic philosophical blunder.” The
Dublin manufacturer published a long defense of his firm’s work and instructions on how
better to run the machine. The astronomer who best managed the instrument initially
guessed that nebulae were becoming fainter, when in fact it was the mirror that was
tarnishing. Financial crisis deprived the observatory of the maintenance resources needed
to keep its prized instrument at work.32
This essay joins the body of work in science studies that examines states of disrepair of
instruments and users. It offers some material for understanding how and why it was
decided that a device and its milieu were in such a state and how they were managed. An
admirable recent collection of studies of past error, including investigation of the perfor-
mance of extant instrumentation, classifies the “malfunctions” of scientific tools: “epis-
temologically, the case is not too troubling, since the standard against which the instru-
ment can be calibrated is (at least in principle) known.” Sociologically, however, the case
is grave, because social and material disorders are interdependent.33 A final example
shows this interdependence in cross-cultural context.
In 1791 an East India Company delegation shipped a vast planetarium to Peking to
impress the Qing Emperor. (See Figure 3.) Orreries and clocks were stock-in-trade for the
tribute systems between Europe and Qing China. Their repair was a nice political matter.
The delegates claimed that the instrument would take weeks to assemble “without
damage.” Fixing it was a British skill. But one of its glass panes had cracked. At first the
British were relaxed, claiming that Qing officials were impressed that the company men’s
luggage contained spare glass, since no glass was made in the Empire. Yet when the
delegation’s watchmaker and instrument maker tried in vain to cut a replacement pane
with a diamond, they smashed three pieces in the process. In contrast, a Chinese workman
quickly managed the business with hot iron wire. “The edge was not straight, but
sufficiently so to answer the purpose.” The East India Company men drew a nervous if
condescending conclusion: Chinese workmen could not make glass, but “their imitative
powers have always been acknowledged to be very great.”34 The British added that Qing
officials wrongly imagined “that labour, not skill, was the only thing necessary, and that
putting together so complicated a machine as the whole universe was an operation almost
as easy and simple as winding up a jack.” In fact, court officials had good reason to doubt
Western pretensions. The imperial court declared that since the company’s legate “has

32 I. S. Glass, Victorian Telescope Makers: The Lives and Letters of Thomas and Howard Grubb (Bristol:

Institute of Physics, 1997), pp. 39 – 61; S. C. B. Gascoigne, “The Great Melbourne Telescope and Other
Nineteenth-Century Reflectors,” Hist. Rec. Aust. Sci., 1995, 10:223–245; and W. Lewis Hyde, “The Calamity of
the Great Melbourne Telescope,” Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 1987, 7:227–230, on p.
229.
33 Giora Hon, Jutta Schickore, and Friedrich Steinle, “Introduction: Mapping ‘Going Amiss,’” in Going Amiss

in Experimental Research, ed. Hon et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), pp. 1–7, on p. 5.
34 J. L. Cranmer-Byng, An Embassy to China (London: Longmans, 1962), p. 99; Cranmer-Byng and T. H.

Levere, “A Case Study in Cultural Collision: Scientific Apparatus in the Macartney Embassy to China, 1793,”
Annals of Science, 1981, 38:503–525, on p. 524 (“without damage”); William Proudfoot, Biographical Memoir
of James Dinwiddie (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1868), p. 49 (“edge was not straight”); and John Barrow,
Travels in China (London: Cadell, 1804), p. 306 (“imitative powers”).

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
716 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011)

Figure 3. The planetarium shipped to China by an East India Company delegation in 1791. One of
the glass panes on the right-hand dome cracked in shipment to the Summer Palace. To the
delegation’s amazement, a local artisan fixed the glass—after their own workmen failed. The Qing
Emperor doubted company claims that this machine would take weeks to erect and that it could
scarcely be disassembled and sent his officials to study its construction and repair. (Albert de
Mylius, Description of a Planetarium or Astronomical Machine [London, 1791], p. 32.)

seen that there are people in the Celestial Empire who are versed in astronomy and
clock-repairing and are now helping alongside those who are setting up the articles, he can
no longer boast that he alone has got the secret.”35 It was incredible that this “astronomical
and geographical clock” could not be fixed. Both the machine and its artisans must be
scrutinized. “If we do not profit from this occasion,” decreed the Emperor, “attentively to
study the way of setting it up and dismantling it and thence to grasp the essential points,
once the artisans have returned to their country if the vital elements of its internal
mechanism undergo the slightest damage, who will there be to fix it? Won’t it end up

35 Cranmer-Byng, Embassy to China, p. 146; and J. L. Cranmer-Byng, “Lord Macartney’s Embassy to Peking

in 1793 from Official Chinese Documents,” Journal of Oriental Studies, 1957–1958, 4:118 –187, on p. 152. For
machines and tribute see Catharine Pagani, Eastern Magnificence and Western Ingenuity: Clocks of Late
Imperial China (Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 99 –124; and James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men
from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), p.
154.

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
 F
O
C
FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 4 (2011) 717
U
becoming fit to be thrown away?”36 Disorder linked civilization with mechanics. Taking S
so seriously the show of a machine in a state of disrepair, the Son of Heaven was
absolutely right.

36 Harriet T. Zurndorfer, “Comment la science et la technologie se vendaient à la Chine au XVIIIe siècle: Essai

d’analyse interne,” Études Chinoises, 1988, 7(2):59 –90, on pp. 76 –77.

This content downloaded from 187.170.099.213 on July 04, 2018 22:26:35 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).