| Popis: |
In 1674 Charles II appointed a Commission to examine the hitherto closely guarded and long standing claim of Henry Bond, to have discovered a means of calculating longitude at sea from observations of magnetic variation and inclination. With the single exception of the King’s Master of Mechanicks, the inventive virtuoso Sir Samuel Morland, the six members of the Commission were all Fellows of the Royal Society. It was not, however, a Royal Society committee. Morland was responsible for calling the members together, though it was the diligent Royal Chaplain, John Pell (F. R. S. 1660), who ensured that the Commission prosecuted the investigation of Bond’s proposals. An unnoticed aspect of the affair is the use of the Royal Society’s name by Henry Bond and the instrument maker Henry Wynne to imply approval of the longitude hypothesis and the artifact respectively. This situation indicates that two London mathematical practitioners were of the view that, within two decades of its foundation, the Royal Society was widely accepted as a disinterested judge of scientific quality, and worth using to convince others of the validity of an argument or the superiority of a product. |
