John Pell’s mathematical papers and the Royal Society’s English Atlas, 1678–82

Abstract

In 1678 a committee of Fellows of the Royal Society was appointed to oversee the production of an ‘English Atlas’ in co-operation with the printer Moses Pitt. The new atlas was to be large and grand, published in eleven volumes with hundreds of maps. It was, as the official proposal put it, no less than ‘a new and Accurat description of the World’. However, it was never brought to completion. This article examines unpublished mathematical papers which document John Pell’s attempts to devise a projectional model in accordance with the published proposals for the atlas. Proposals and advertisements for potential collaborators, composed and circulated by the committee, put forward a representation of idealised cartographic practice. However, when it came to calculating the projection, Pell struggled to accommodate these idealised practices. Pell’s mathematical papers, previously unexamined, afford an unusual perspective on the Royal Society’s methods, and suggest that failures, as well as successes, influenced the developing identity of the scientific community.

Acknowledgements

This article originated in the research for my doctoral thesis, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and carried out at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters and Queen Mary, University of London. I would like to thank my supervisor Lisa Jardine, and also Professors Markman Ellis and Anne Janowitz for commenting on drafts, and Alex Filby for checking my translations. I am grateful to the librarians and archivists at the Royal Society and the British Library for helping locate materials. I am also grateful to Peter Barber for information and advice on cartography.

Notes

¹For meanings of abbreviations see the manuscript bibliography.

²In 1671, Johann Blaeu printed Catalogue des atlas, theatre des cite, globes, spheres & cartes geographiques & marines (see Blaeu 1671; Koeman 1988). This was a specialist list printed exclusively for the French market, and does not register any of the Dutch- or German-language cartographic collections which contributed to Blaeu’s domestic trade. Even without home trade, the list of products runs to four pages, and includes townbooks, ten different kinds of globes, armillary spheres, nautical charts, fifteen geographical maps, ‘Grandes Cartes Geographiques’ in 21 sheets, town views and wall-chart world maps. Pitt’s catalogue, compiled three years later, (BL Sloane 1674, ff. 157r–162r), has no such focus. He has books on everything from popular fiction to religious writings; from ‘Oeconomics’ to fruit trees. Even allowing for the fact that Pitt would not begin work on the English atlas for another three years, and that the catalogues were drawn up for different purposes, there is a sharp contrast between two very different types of business portrayed.

³Beyond these studies, some incomplete Society projects have been studied as failures, in a literary-philosophical context (Borges 2000), but also, more recently, in a scholarly light, through Sachiko Kusukawa’s account of John Ray’s Historia piscium, as ‘a flop’ (2000, 179). There can still be a tendency, naturally enough, to subordinate failures to successes in the historical account – in Kusukawa’s article, for example, the failure of the Historia piscium is used to contextualize a more successful project, Isaac Newton’s Principia.

⁴These proposal papers are not integrated with the pages of notes dealing with financial proposals within Hooke’s folio (BL MS Sloane 1039). The first section of the volume is concerned exclusively with projections and cartographic practice.

⁵This cylindrical projection means that lines of longitude on the Mercator world map run parallel, rather than converging at the poles. In order to circumvent this distortion at its most extreme point, the atlas committee abandoned the equatorial Mercator projection in favour of an azimuthal polar projection (that is, a map centred around the pole for their map of the northern polar regions. In the event, this was the only original plate to be completed for the atlas, making Pell’s workings, which deal for the most part with workings related to the Mercator projection, unfortunately redundant in this instance.

⁶Discussions of Wright’s charts are recorded in Hooke’s diary in a context of prolific committee activity within the wider Society. For instance, an entry of 20 September 1678 mentioning Pitt, Wren, and Lamb the engraver:

Lamb here 2 hours about atlas […] To Pitts spoke for Kirchers China tooke Fraazin Round Temple 2s 6d not paid. With Sr Chr. Wren to Childs, talkd about […] wright correction of a Seachart and the making of a large Seachart and his Voyage to the Azores (1935, 377).

⁷The ‘proposal-paper’ refers to the paper proposed by Pitt rather than to the paper on which his proposal is printed (which is smaller). Letters supplied in square brackets have been cut off by the binder.