In the 1830s and 1840s, the Hydrographic Office of the British Admiralty developed and oversaw one of the major state-run surveying projects of the nineteenth century. This involved a range of instruments whose circulation was increasingly regulated. Using extant museum collections and the correspondence of those involved, this article explores how such objects can be used to discuss both bureaucratic organization at a time of expanding government and the complex issues of sociability involved in hydrographic surveying. Surveying officers worked in a context in which the propriety of property on public service was a pervasive question. Instruments might be given as gifts between officers, appropriated as recompense, absorbed as state property, and disputed between friends. The ownership, provision, and treatment of instruments in particular could be used to demonstrate an officer’s peculiar zeal or institutional neglect. To those outside the ship, what was understood as over-instrumentation became amusing spectacle. On board, their use was part of a deeply hierarchical order of work in regions of colonial and mercantile importance. In examining the relationships around these instruments of survey, the paper proposes a richer understanding of the material culture of hydrography in the early nineteenth century.
...More
Chapter
Bennett, Jim;
(2000)
State Policy on Scientific Instruments in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB000401103/)
Book
Jason W. Smith;
(2018)
To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire
(/isis/citation/CBB129164251/)
Article
Mörzer Bruyns, Willem F. J.;
(2007)
The Navigating Instruments of the National Maritime Museum Greenwich: Research in Progress
(/isis/citation/CBB000831651/)
Book
James Poskett;
(2019)
Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920
(/isis/citation/CBB218438079/)
Book
Danielle C. Skeehan;
(2020)
The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650-1850
(/isis/citation/CBB516070638/)
Book
Erika Behrisch;
(2022)
Discovery, Innovation, and the Victorian Admiralty: Paper Navigators
(/isis/citation/CBB883054576/)
Article
Simon Naylor;
(2015)
Log Books and the Law of Storms: Maritime Meteorology and the British Admiralty in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB583747568/)
Chapter
Meltem Kocaman;
(2019)
Scientific Instrument Retailers in Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century, and Verdoux’s Optical Shop
(/isis/citation/CBB723943842/)
Chapter
Vetter, Jeremy;
(2012)
Field Life in the American West: Surveys, Networks, Stations, and Quarries
(/isis/citation/CBB001210267/)
Article
Amanda Paxton;
(2021)
The Hard Math of Beauty: Gerard Manley Hopkins and "Spectral Numbers"
(/isis/citation/CBB150662150/)
Chapter
Patrice Bret;
(2019)
Instruments of Knowledge and Power in a Colonial Context: Scientific Instruments during the French Occupation of Egypt, 1798–1801
(/isis/citation/CBB412844931/)
Thesis
Xan Sarah Chacko;
(2018)
Moving, Making, and Saving Botanic Futures: The History and Practices of Seed Banking
(/isis/citation/CBB692555133/)
Article
Lachlan Fleetwood;
(2018)
“No Former Travellers having Attained such a Height on the Earth’s Surface”: Instruments, Inscriptions, and Bodies in the Himalaya, 1800–1830
(/isis/citation/CBB221245616/)
Article
Barritt, Michael;
(2015)
Agincourt Sound Revisited
(/isis/citation/CBB001422547/)
Article
Iwan Rhys Morus;
(2019)
Looking into the Future: The Telectroscope That Wasn’t There
(/isis/citation/CBB208206746/)
Article
Morar, Florin-Stefan;
(2015)
Reinventing Machines: The Transmission History of the Leibniz Calculator
(/isis/citation/CBB001202247/)
Book
Tom Williamson;
Andrew Macnair;
Anne Rowe;
(2015)
Dury and Andrews's Map of Hertfordshire: Society and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB987949857/)
Article
Broughton, Peter;
(2009)
The Accuracy and Use of Sextants and Watches in Rupert's Land in the 1790s
(/isis/citation/CBB000932061/)
Article
Fanny Gribenski;
David Pantalony;
(2023)
Sounding Acoustic Precision: Tuning Forks and Cast Steel’s Nineteenth-Century Euro-American Networks
(/isis/citation/CBB913576480/)
Article
Sven Dupré;
(2023)
The Nature of Glass: Technologies of Transparency, Materials on the Move
(/isis/citation/CBB891087905/)
Be the first to comment!