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CHAPTER 2 Science, Business and Society in Britain

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Whole branches of continental discovery are undiscovered, and indeed almost unknown even by name … We are fast dropping behind.

Sir John Herschel, British astronomer, Treatise on Sound, 1831

The contrast between France, where scientists were enlisted by the lighthouse authorities to apply their knowledge to improving lighthouse illumination, and Britain, which preferred an ad hoc approach, could not have been more marked. One of the first Britons to apply scientific principles to lighthouse illumination, Joseph Huddart, was not a trained scientist at all, and simply picked up his knowledge as he went along. He characterized the British approach at the time: effective if not particularly elegant. Though elected a Fellow of the Royal Society - remarkable for one without a university degree - his work was not widely published in learned scientific journals and debated among the highest scientific authorities of the land. Instead he learned from experience and converted this into solutions that worked.

Huddart was born a farmer’s son in Cumbria in 1741. His was almost a rags-to-riches story, albeit with influential help as he progressed in the early days. His father owned shares in a fishery enterprise, and, rather than follow his father into farming, Joseph decided to join the fishery. By the age of 22 he was commanding a brig, and by 28 had amassed sufficient funds to buy a brig of his own to trade with Ireland and the Americas. Through a family connection he was introduced to the East India Company and quickly rose through its ranks. Throughout his life he was interested in many scientific matters, including astronomy, the physics of light, ship construction and engineering. He also invented and patented rope-making machinery, and assisted in the building of the London docks and numerous other civil-engineering projects.

Joseph Cotton, the Deputy Master of Trinity House, held Huddart in high esteem so it is no surprise that he was elected an Elder Brethren on 15 September 1791. He was one of the most active Elder Brethren until his death 25 years later. During his time with the fraternity, he carried out surveys for placing light vessels at the Nore, Owers and Goodwin Sands. During the negotiations to improve St Ann’s Head in West Wales at the turn of the 19th century, Huddart was one of the Elder Brethren responsible for surveying the existing lights and making proposals for the new towers and equipment. He supervised the building and equipping of Flamborough Head lighthouse. Here he met George Robinson with whom he worked to fit the catoptric light system that used coloured panels and one of the first lenses used in a lighthouse. He was the first to use the idea of colour for the characteristic of a light, though Robert Stevenson had claimed the idea as his. John Rennie, the Scottish engineer who took much of the credit for building Bell Rock lighthouse, which was mainly the work of Robert Stevenson, set the record straight in a letter dated 12 March 1814 to Matthew Boulton, the Birmingham manufacturer, when he wrote ‘… he [Stevenson] has assumed the merit of applying coloured glass to lighthouses, of which Huddart was the actual inventor …’ In Huddart’s time at Trinity House, the Robinson–Wilkins reflector with its Argand lamp reigned supreme (see chapter 1).

Huddart made a significant contribution to lighthouse engineering and he was arguably the most scientifically accomplished man associated with Trinity House until Michael Faraday arrived on the scene in 1835. But while he and his generation were concentrating on building towers and installing reflectors, work was carrying on in France that radically changed lighthouse illumination for ever, based on the new application of optical science, which was alien to the British tradition. In England, to get more light all you needed was more Argand lamps and more reflectors – the light at Dungeness, installed in 1797, had 18 lamps producing so much heat that the burners often had to be replaced, while the smoke emitted meant lighthouse keepers were constantly having to clean the glass chimneys and reflectors of layers of soot.

The Fresnel revolution involved a paradigm shift of such proportions that it took the British by surprise. The path taken by British lighthouse authorities between 1820 and the 1850s was characterized by scepticism and bureaucratic procrastination. In particular, the British failed to make the connection between optical science and lighthouses, which in France was entrenched in the Lighthouse Commission through the appointment of Fresnel. Furthermore, France’s ability to apply the laws of optical science to the building of lenses was made possible by her expertise in the making of optical glass, which was not mastered in England until the 1840s. The two men responsible for the eventual breakthrough in Britain, David Brewster and James Chance, were both optical scientists. But Brewster’s work on optics was not familiar to the lighthouse authorities; when it became so it was eschewed for many years. Chance, a generation younger than Brewster, was only called upon to apply his knowledge after earlier attempts by a lone British firm, Cookson’s, had run aground. Nevertheless, the endeavours of Brewster and Chance led to Britain’s recovery of her supremacy.

In 1800, Britain and France were competing with each other on several fronts. The naval and military conflict initiated by Napoleon’s continental ambitions threatened Britain’s policy of maintaining the balance of power in Europe, as well as her colonial supremacy abroad. At Trafalgar in 1805 and Waterloo in 1815 France eventually succumbed to a broad coalition of opposing forces and the brilliance of the heroic leaders Nelson and Wellington. Britain was ahead of France in the industrialization of her economy, while France challenged established systems of government and society in Britain and the rest of the world through her revolutionary adoption of ‘liberté, egalité et fraternité’. In the scientific realm, France claimed to hold the lead, to the chagrin of the British scientific establishment. Since Sir Isaac Newton changed the face of natural philosophy and the understanding of man’s place in the firmament more than 100 years earlier, British science had rested on its laurels and was beginning to encounter criticism from within its own ranks. [Note: natural philosophy is what today we would call the natural sciences].

To understand the interrelations between science and society in Britain and the effect these had on her lighthouses requires investigation into how she lost her lead in lighthouse science, technology and administration to France between 1800 and 1860, and then recovered it. One important thread in this story, which general histories of lighthouses have tended to overlook, is how the worlds of science and government in Britain interacted with that of business. In Britain, they hardly had anything to do with each other whereas in France there was far tighter co-operation. It was only when Britain woke up to this fact that she was able to reassert her lead.

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