The Program of the Academy
Professional Imperatives
By 1789 the French had made three measurements of arcs along the meridian passing through Paris. The earliest, made by Jean Picard between 1668 and 1670, on an arc of about 1°20', gave a value for the length of a degree of latitude near Paris that differed by less than three parts in ten thousand from what the metric measurers later obtained with much greater labor and much better instruments.[24] The second arc, extending over 8°30' from Dunkirk to Perpignan and completed under Jacques Cassini in 1718, authorized a new Atlantic coastline that brought some French towns a hundred or more kilometers East of their previous positions. Louis XV lost more land to his cartographers than his successors have to the Germans. The measurements were not accurate enough, however, to settle the much agitated question of the shape of the earth. In the 1730s, the Paris Academy sent out its expeditions to Peru and to Lapland to measure arcs far enough apart to reveal the departure of the earth's profile from perfect sphericity. Their results, which confirmed Newton's conclusion that mechanics required the equatorial axis to exceed the polar, agreed with the third measurement along the Paris meridian, made during 1739 and 1740 by the Abbé Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille.[25]
As the general shape of the earth came into view, its finer features loomed ever larger in academic minds. Lacaille contributed another data point by measuring an arc at the Cape of Good Hope. The Pope, the Austrian-Hungarian Empress, and the King of Sardinia commissioned surveys of meridians traversing their domains, with the consequence, as one of the surveyors put it, that the more the earth
[24] Jean Picard, Mesure de la terre (Paris: Impr. royale, 1671); republished in MAS , 1666–99, 7, 133–90, and in P.L. Moreau de Maupertuis et al., Degré du méridien entre Paris et Amiens déterminé par la mesure de M. Picard (Paris: Martin, Coignar, and Guerin, 1740), 1–106. Picard gives 57,060 toises (fathoms) per degree, which was nominally 15 toises off the definitive value. In fact, the difference came to about 30 toises when Picard's measurements were corrected for refraction and a small error in his baseline; see Méchain and Delambre, Base, 1 , 7–8.
[25] Delambre, Grandeur , 63–72.
was measured, the more uncertain its shape became.[26] The British then ran an arc through Greenwich, to serve as the backbone for a military map of Scotland. The Paris academicians looked upon it rather as an opportunity to improve geodesy, and in 1783 they proposed a linking of the Paris and Greenwich observatories by triangles based on the meridians already determined. The proposal had a sporting side. The linking would pit the small repeating circle then recently invented by Charles Borda, a prominent academician and a former naval officer, against the large theodolite built by the world's leading instrument-maker, Jesse Ramsden, for the triangulations in England.[27]
Jean Dominique Cassini (Cassini IV), who took nominal charge of the French party, retrospectively threw down the challenge: "we dared to flatter ourselves that we had on our side an instrument that yielded nothing to the English in point of precision." The showdown took place in the late summer of 1787. The British turned their great theodolite toward Calais; the French aimed their delicate circle at Dover. The British took their single observations quickly; the French multiplied their repetitions slowly. The season grew late. Fog descended. The weather did not remit long enough to permit the full circle of French measurements, and the contest between the repeater and the theodolite ended indecisively.[28] As Delambre wrote much later, however, "a more important occasion soon presented itself to demonstrate the advantages of the new instrument."[29]
[26] R.J. Boscovich and Christoph Maire, Voyage astronomique et géographique dans l'Etat de l'Eglise: Entrepris par l'ordre at sous les auspices du pape Benôit XIV (Paris: Tilliard, 1770), 492, cited in Djordje Nikolic, "Roger Boskovic et la géodésie moderne," Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences, 14 (1961), 315–35, on 315.
[27] Jean Mascart, La vie et les travaux du chevalier Jean-Charles de Borda (1733–1799) (Lyon: A. Rey; Paris: A. Picard, 1919), 370–1, 381–3, 488–9, 501–2. Cf. S. Widmalm, chap. 6 in this volume.
[28] J.D. Cassini, "De la jonction des observatoires de Paris et de Greenwich, et précis des travaux géographiques exécutés en France, qui y ont donné lieu," MAS , 1788, 706–17, on 710–3.
[29] J.B.J. Delambre, Histoire de l'astronomie au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Bachelier, 1827), 758.
Institutional Considerations
In exchange for their salaries, status, and grants for special projects like geodetic surveys, the Paris academicians acted as technical advisers to the Crown. Their advice tended to be conservative and elitist, especially in respect of unsolicited proposals from inventors asking for state subventions or monopolies for their novelties. Experience confirmed what arrogance had suspected: most of the proposals were worthless and most of the proposers ignorant. The Academy suggested that artisans might be licensed, but only after passing an examination in geometry and other useful arts. During the Revolution, the Academy faced the hostility directed at all enclaves of privilege and the special anger of frustrated inventors, manufacturers, and would-be scientists who had suffered at its hands.[30]
Well into 1790 the Academy held its meetings, read papers, and planned projects as usual. Some academicians favored the new regime, but few wished it to further; almost all lamented the disturbances that kept them from their work. Many recognized, however, that they would have to reorganize their company in keeping with the new style, especially after the establishment in 1791 of a patent law that took from them their chief public service.[31] As a partial offset, academicians became increasingly involved in government technical projects. Of these, the most important, "repeatedly paraded as a prime example of science's potential value to the nation and a concrete instance of the Academy's proper function in society," was the reform of weights and measures.[32]
[30] C.C. Gillispie, Science and polity in France at the end of the ancien régime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 97–9, 461–3; Roger Hahn, The anatomy of a scientific institution. The Paris Academy of sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 118–21; Gillispie, "The Encyclopédie and the Jacobin philosophy of science: A study in ideas and consequences," in Marshall Clagett, ed., Critical problems in history of science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 255–89, on 257, 268–74.
[31] C.P. Molard, Description des machines et procédés spécifiés dans les brevets d'invention, de perfectionnement et d'importation, dont la dureé est expiré (Paris: Huzard, 1811), 7–27; Hahn, Anatomy , 186–9; Henry Guerlac, Essays and papers in the history of modern science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 467–8.
[32] Hahn, Anatomy , 162–3.
A month after the storming of the Bastille, academician Jean Baptiste Le Roy, physicist, mathematician, and one-time clockmaker, suggested that the Academy propose to the National Assembly a dissolution of the over-rich metrological heritage of the Republic. The proposal, probably drawn up by the Academy's secretary, the marquis de Condorcet, and certainly presented to the Assembly by Talleyrand, set aside all existing units in favor of the length of a pendulum that beat seconds at the 45th parallel of latitude, which passes just north of Bordeaux. Talleyrand proposed further that the British be invited to join in the determination and in promoting the result, "so that all nations might adopt it."[33]
On 8 May 1790 the Assembly considered the Talleyrand or Academy proposal together with several others to the same effect, notably one by Prieur, who expressly opposed using an arc of the meridian as a basis. "Besides the magnitude of the fundamental operation required, the difficulty of verifying it, and the impossibility of doing so daily, it is not easy to decide how exact the method might be." Here Prieur spoke as a military engineer familiar with surveying practice and with the lingering uncertainties over the earlier measurements of arcs. The same considerations caused Thomas Jefferson to give up his project of taking a decimal part of Cassini's degree as the basis of a new American unit: "the various trials to measure various portions of [meridians], have been of such various result, as to show there is no dependence on that operation for certainty."[34]
The seconds pendulum had been proposed as a standard-setter for over a century. The pioneer geodecists preferred it: Picard, in 1671, proposed defining the pied as a third, and the toise as twice, the length of the seconds pendulum at a convenient place; Jacques Cassini observed that all domestic measures could usefully be referred to
[33] Hahn, Anatomy , 163–4; Bigourdan, Système métrique , 14–5; Talleyrand in Miller, Speeches , 59.
[34] Bouchard, Prieur , 287–90; William David Pattison, Beginnings of the American rectangular land survey system, 1784–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 48–9, after Jefferson, Papers , ed. Julian P. Boyd et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950+), 7, 25, 150–60; Bigourdan, Système métrique , 10.
such a unit, and even all European measures, since the length of a seconds pendulum is about the same throughout the Continent; La Condamine proposed international cooperation and a pendulum regulated at the equator, as determined by himself and "the hands of nature"; and Turgot, as controller of finance under Louis XVI, almost initiated a nationwide reform based on the seconds pendulum at 45°.[35] Just before the Revolution, Gaspar de Prony, who would play an important part in the metrication of France, declared the pendulum to be the ultimate arbiter of length; and after the promulgation of the meter, a compiler of dictionaries, no doubt lifting from his predecessors, held that "the length of the simple pendulum, an invariable quantity always easy to recover, seemed given by nature to serve as a measure in all countries."[36] The British had also considered the advantages of Cassini's suggestion, and of calibrating their yard by the pendulum, in order that "all future generations [may] obtain similar measures of length, capacity, and weight, and thereby render it altogether needless to cut them on stone, or to engrave them on brass, to perpetuate their existence."[37]
Miller was about to introduce proposals for the reform of English weights and measures based on the pendulum when a letter from Talleyrand inviting Britain to join France in finding the length of a seconds pendulum came to hand. The plan was simple, and a natural successor to the linking of the observatories of Paris and Greenwich, "which all Europe would take as a guarantor of rigorous exactitude."[38] While Parliament pondered the opportunity, the Revolution became too hot for Anglo-Saxon reformers, and the Paris Academy removed the rationale for collaboration by deciding not to take the
[35] Bigourdan, Système métrique , 6–11; Jacques Cassini, De la grandeur et de la figure de la terre (Paris: Impr. royale, 1720), 250; La Condamine, "Nouveau project," 501–5, 511; Charles Henry, Correspondance inédite de Turgot et Condorcet (Paris: Charavay, 1883), xxv, 234–5.
[36] Gaspar de Prony, "Discours préliminaire," in William Roy, Description des moyens employés pour mesurer la base de Hounslow-Heath (Paris: Didot, 1787), xvi-xvii; Lunier, Dictionnaire des sciences et des arts , 3 vols. (Paris: Normant and Nicolle, 1806), 2, 615, s.v. "mesure."
[37] John Whitehurst, "An attempt toward obtaining invariable measures," in The works (London: W. Bent, 1792), iii (text of 1787); Miller, Speeches , 44.
[38] Talleyrand in Miller, Speeches , 71.
pendulum as primary. Its decision seemed odd to many.[39] The rationale must be sought, not in the requirements of measurement, but in the circumstances into which the Revolution propelled the Academy.
The National Assembly accepted Talleyrand's proposal and sent it and a question about the most useful division of weights, measures, and monies to the Academy, which referred both matters to a committee composed of Borda, Lagrange, Lavoisier, Tillet, and Condorcet. The committee reported on 27 October 1790 that everything should be decimal.[40] It then handed what remained of its charge to a committee consisting of Borda, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, and Condorect. On 19 March 1791 these geometers reported that the pendulum was the poorer of the two universal and natural units they could imagine. They plumped instead for a piece of the Paris meridian and yet another measurement of it.
Their objections to the pendulum suggest a hidden agenda. In obtaining a length from pendulum beats, they wrote, a unit of time, which has nothing to do with distance, must be invoked; and this unit, the 86,400th part of a day, had the additional blemishes of being both arbitrary and nondecimal. "It is much more natural, in fact, to refer distances from one place to another [the academicians were thinking of a standard for cartography, not for commerce] to a quarter of a terrestrial circle rather than to the length of a pendulum." The committee did appreciate the greater convenience of the pendulum standard, for which they provided: the Academy would undertake to determine the length of a seconds pendulum at the Paris Observatory, to serve as a secondary reference, the primary to be one ten-millionth of the distance from pole to equator.[41]
[39] Hansard, 28 , cols. 315–17; Miller, Speeches , 43–4; George Evelyn Shuckburgh, "An account of some endeavors to ascertain a standard of weight and measure," Royal Society of London, Philosophical transactions, 88 (1798), 133–82, on 165–6.
[40] Borda, Lagrange, Lavoisier, et al., "Rapport," 1–6; Méchain and Delambre, Base, 1 , 14; Bigourdan, Système métrique , 16.
[41] Charles Borda, J.L. Lagrange, and Gaspard Monge, "Rapport. . .sur la systême général des poids et mesures," HAS , 1789, 1–18, on 1–6 (decimalization), 7–16 (arc over pendulum). Cf. Bigourdan, Système métrique , 17–8; Méchain and Delambre, Base, 1 , 14–9.
Although the ambition of the academicians did not extend to measuring the full quarter meridian, it opened a task sufficiently large. Borda's committee proposed to redo the arc from Dunkirk to Perpignan and to extend it to Barcelona, to obtain latitudes astronomically, to lay out new baselines, to observe the pendulum, to determine the weight of an exactly measured volume of distilled water at the temperature of melting ice, and to compare all the old units in use in France with the new standards. They saw no advantage in British cooperation: "we have excluded from our advice every arbitrary determination, we have used only the common property of all nations. . . .In a word, if the memory of all our work disappeared and only the results remained, they would disclose nothing to show what nation conceived the idea and carried it through."[42] The Academy as a whole did not readily accept the recommendations of its committee of interested mathematicians: some objected that the arc had received enough attention; others, that the pendulum was easier. In the end, however, the Academy endorsed the recommendations and sent them to the National Assembly.[43]
The speciousness of the argument that the choice of Borda's committee was the most satisfactory and least arbitrary stands forth from their anticipation of the charge that enlightened people everywhere might not regard a section of the meridian through Paris and lying almost entirely within France as a unit dictated by nature. They argued: the section should extend equal distances on either side of the 45th parallel because there the seconds pendulum and the size of a degree have their mean values; it is a mere coincidence that the 45th parallel runs through France. But all meridians are bisected at 45°. Why take one through Paris? Because only there do meridians have arcs bisected at 45° that terminate at either end at sea level and that are short enough to measure. "There is nothing here that can give the slightest pretext for the reproach that we wished to assert any sort of dominance." Or, as Laplace put the point in a lecture in 1795, "had savants from all countries come together to fix the
[42] Borda, Lagrange, and Monge, "Rapport," 13–6, 19.
[43] Bigourdan, Système métrique , 19–21.
universal measure, they would not have made a different choice."[44] This flim-flam was perfectly clear to Jefferson: "The element of measure adopted by the National Assembly excludes, ipso facto , every nation on earth from a communion of measurement with them; for they acknowledge themselves, that a due portion for admeasurement for a meridian crossing the forty-fifth degree of latitude, and terminating at both ends at the same level, can be found in no other country on earth but theirs."[45]
Jean-Baptiste Biot wrote in 1803, when surveying the progress of science since the Revolution: "if the reasons that the Academy presented to the Constituent Assembly were not altogether the true ones, that is because the sciences also have their politics: sometimes to serve men one must resolve to deceive them." Biot gave as the hidden agenda the Academy's wish to settle the shape of the earth once and for all.[46] According to Delambre, Borda convinced his committee to opt for the arc because his circle, as suggested by the Paris-Greenwich measurement of 1787, made possible a determination of the meridian far more accurate than Lacaille's. This consideration left a trace in the committee's report to the Academy in March 1791. Today's instruments, it said, are so good that future improvements would not sensibly change the length of the meter that they determine; "or at least the length of time separating us from an age when everyday transactions would require and could attain such a precision is so great in comparison with the life of a man as to amount to infinity itself."[47]
[44] Borda, Lagrange, and Monge, "Rapport," 15–6; Bigourdan, Système métrique , 56; Laplace, Oeuvres complètes, 14 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1912), 141, 145 (quote).
[45] Jefferson to William Short, 28 July 1791, quoted by C. Doris Hellmann, "Jefferson's efforts towards decimalization of United States weights and measures," Isis, 16 (1931), 266–314, on 286. The academicians' grantsmanship has succeeded with some historians: Léon Bassot, "Notice historique sur la fondation du système métrique," in France, Bureau des Longitudes, Annuaire , 1901, D. 1–43, on 2, 16; C.C. Gillispie, "Laplace," in Dictionary of scientific biography, 15 (New York: Scribners, 1978), 273–403, on 334–5.
[46] Jean Baptiste Biot, Essai sur l'histoire générale des sciences pendant la révolution française (Paris: Duprat and Fuchs, 1803), 355–6. Cf. Adrien-Marie Legendre, "Suite du calcul des triangles qui servent à déterminer la différence de longitude entre l'Observatoire de Paris et celui de Greenwhich," MAS , 1788, 747–54, on 753.
[47] Delambre, Rapport 5; Crosland, in Bugge, Science , 20; Borda, Lagrange, and Monge, "Rapport," 15.
To these objectives—the old scientific imperative and the desire to vindicate and promote French instrumentation—should be added the social and strategic concerns of forging bonds with the new state. The metric project had high priority since the abolition of feudal rights had raised the gathering of rents and taxes in kind to a new level of confusion and litigation.[48] During the several years the project would last, the Academy could expect to enjoy strong government support and a useful flow of cash. On 8 August 1791 some 100,000 livres, more than the Academy's annual state subvention, was placed at its disposal; estimates of the entire cost of the project ran from 300,000 livres into the millions; and one can scarcely criticize the Academy if it saw in this commitment a pledge on the part of the government to see it through troublous political times.[49]