Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire by Sujit Sivasundaram

Author:Sujit Sivasundaram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Collins
Published: 2020-08-19T23:00:00+00:00

A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY OBSERVATORY FACING THE SEA

Goldingham had already made lunar observations and observations of Jupiter’s moons at Bombay, and chronometer readings between Bombay and Madras before becoming astronomer to the Madras government between 1796 and 1830.[6] His published scientific work bears out his interest in multiple observations: he weighed up the value of observing the moons of Jupiter and their eclipses to determine the position of a point. He deemed this to be far preferable a route to using ‘eclipses of the sun, of the moon, or of occultations’, which ‘happen but seldom’.[7] He determined the longitude of Madras as also Madras Time, which he correlated to Greenwich Time.

He worked out the velocity of sound at Madras, noting the results of observations of the sounding of a gun on the ramparts of Fort St George in Madras and also on St Thomas’ Mount. The observatory was placed between these two sites: ‘each observer begun to count the beats in the interval of the flash and report.’ These beats were correlated with the thermometer, the barometer and hygrometer and the state of the wind and weather at the time. Goldingham concluded with satisfaction: ‘The mean velocity of sound deduced from these experiments appears to be 1142 feet in a second which closely corresponds with the estimate of Newton and Halley.’[8] Elsewhere he also roamed into antiquarianism and architecture.[9] The generality of observation is what is noteworthy – the tabulation of all this data was interrelated. The more data there was, the more systematisation resulted and the more extraction from the physical space of the Earth and its peoples. The folding of data and space regularised nature as an understandable and universalised tableau.[10]

This regime of calculation thrived at the seafront because sea-facing locales could provide especially good platforms from which to observe the sky. Accordingly, John Warren, who between 1805 and 1810 acted instead of Goldingham at the observatory, wrote that he spent much time digesting observations which could not be undertaken in Europe. On one occasion in 1809 he wrote with pleasure of how he observed stars ‘of a higher Southern Delineation which from circumstance of their not being visible in Europe, are in many instances very inaccurately laid down in the Catalogues in the hands of most Navigators’.[11]

Warren, along with others, was successful in detecting comets at Madras. A ‘Great Comet’ of 1807 detected by Warren was probably easier to spot from a location like Madras, despite the interruptions of bad weather. Warren wrote that it had been seen in Bengal, Penang and at sea before he spotted it on 2 October. Nevertheless he was probably one of the first to observe this comet.[12] A sea-facing observatory allowed different kinds of questions and results to be related. For instance, in publishing readings of the barometer, Goldingham pondered whether the action of the moon on the sea, in creating the tides, had a counterpart in its action on the air. In his words, were there ‘tides of the atmosphere’? Using his calculations, he answered negatively.

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