British Military and Scientific Engineers

British military cartography before the Ordnance Survey was poorly developed. The only important surveys outside England had been conducted in response to emergencies, like the measurements in Scotland as part of the pacification of the Highlands after the 1745 rebellion. The young draftsman William Roy led the fieldwork of the Scottish survey and later became director of the whole operation.^[13] After completing the work in 1755, he joined the corps of engineers under the Board of Ordnance and became a lieutenant in the army. Throughout his career Roy held double ranks in the engineers and in the army, the latter always being the higher.^[14] This elevated him to a higher social as well as military position than that of mere engineers, who did not acquire military rank before 1757. The status of the mere engineers rose in the 1770s, partly as a result of a new policy of

[11] M.-A. Borgeaud, "Cartographie genevoise de XVIe au XIXe siècle," Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences , no. 6 (1949), 363–74.

[12] Marussi, "Italian pioneers," 475.

[13] J.B. Harley and Yolande O'Donaghue, "Introductory notes," in The old series Ordnance Survey maps of England and Wales, 1 (Lynpne Castle: Harry Margary, 1975), xi; R.A. Skelton, "The military survey of Scotland 1747–1755," The Scottish geographical magazine, 83:1 (1967), 1–15.

[14] R.A. Gardiner, "William Roy, surveyor and antiquary," The geographical journal, 143 (1977), 441–50, on 443–4.

the Board of Ordnance that required cadets in the corps of engineers to have had some formal technical education; the requirement functioned as a social filter, favoring sons of army officers. At the same time the American war gave rise to a greater recognition of the importance of cartographic skills and to the acceptance of engineers as staff officers.^[15] By the 1780s the engineers had achieved the same social status as army officers.

Because of their specialist abilities, members of the corps of engineers (and of the artillery) saw themselves as a part of the scientific community. Some achieved membership in the Royal Society. They figured among the opposition during the so-called dissensions of 1783–4, when Sir Joseph Banks, who had been president of the Society since 1778, was attacked by practically or mathematically oriented Fellows for favoring antiquarianism and natural history—that is, "gentlemen's science."^[16] Banks' forces managed to defeat their opposition. It might therefore come as a surprise that the Banksians in the Royal Society, not the mathematical practitioners, effected the cooperation with Cassini de Thury.^[17] The key figure in their mobilization was William Roy, who belonged

[15] Douglas W. Marshall, The British military engineers 1741–1783: A study of organization, social origin, and cartography (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1976), 1–7, 119–24, 130, 317, 343–4.

[16] David Philip Miller, The Royal Society of London 1800–1855: A study in the cultural politics of scientific organization (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1981), 6–14, 36–104, 115, 120, 135; W.A. Seymour, ed., A history of the Ordnance Survey (Folkestone: William Dawson, 1980), 3, 29, 67; Charles Richard Weld, A history of the Royal Society , 3 (London: J.W. Parker, 1848), 151–70; Hector C. Cameron, Sir Joseph Banks (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1966), 128–34; Henry Lyons, The Royal Society 1660–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 202–5, 211–4, 342. There is no evidence that Banks suppressed mathematically oriented science in the Philosophical transactions .

[17] These Banksians on the triangulation included Charles Blagden, Henry Cavendisch, John Lloyd, and John Smeaton, as well as Roy; all were members of the Royal Society Club, a center of Banksian sympathies. Letters of Blagden to Banks, 1783–4, as listed in W.R. Dawson, ed., The Banks letters: A calendar of the manuscript correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks (London: British Museum, 1958), 61–2, 64–5; Archibald Geike, Annals of the Royal Society Club (London: Macmillan, 1917), 174–5; Seymour, A history of the Ordnance Survey , 134.

socially and intellectually to both the Banksian and the mathematical camps.^[18]

In the 1760s Roy had settled in London and had become a Fellow of the Royal Society and a firm friend of Joseph Banks. Roy's strong interest in antiquities resulted in a major work on Roman Britain, published after his death; thus he qualified as a member of the "Banksian Learned Empire." By the early 1780s, Roy had also established a scientific reputation through painstaking work in the field of barometric hypsometry. As a major-general in the army and a lieutenant-colonel in the corps of engineers, he was an influential proponent of a national military survey, the realization of which was his main objective in the Paris-Greenwich triangulation.^[19]