An Empire of Magnetism : Global Science and the British Magnetic Enterprise in the Age of Imperialism

During the 1840s and 1850s, the British government financed a world-wide investigation into how the Earth's magnetic phenomena operated, consisting of a network of naval expeditions and colonial observatories. Questions surrounding terrestrial magnetism were not just philosophical, but engendered urgent concerns over accurate navigation, on which Britain's commercial and colonial power relied. The British Magnetic Survey was celebrated at the time as the most extensive state-orchestrated scientific enterprise ever conducted. Yet although it was a fundamentally global endeavour, both in terms of its scale and its impact, the experimental instruments and techniques required were to be found amid Britain's booming local industry, where the harnessing of coal and iron, and use of steam power, shaped a scientific culture prominently concerned with the relationship between heat, pressure, and motion. In particular, it was philosophical apparatus fashioned within the mines of Cornwall that the government was able to conscript within this world-wide magnetic investigation. These locally produced experimental techniques and technologies proved capable of transformation into a system for obtaining magnetic measurements from over great expanses of time and space. As An Empire of Magnetism demonstrates, this not only sustained an immense world-wide scientific investigation, but became inseparable from the proliferation of empire, sustaining colonial expansion and unprecedented multi-cultural exchanges as British naval crews and natural philosophers surveyed previously unknown regions in the search for magnetic data. In so doing, Edward Gillin argues that the British Magnetic Survey had broader implications over the formation of the 'modern state', the expansion of nineteenth-century empire, and the development of global science. Cover An Empire of Magnetism: Global Science and the British Magnetic Enterprise in the Age of Imperialism Copyright Dedication Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures List of Abbreviations Preface 0° 24′ North, 330° 19′ East: 3 December 1839 Introduction: Empires of Magnetism 0.1. A History of a Global Science 0.2. The State of Science 0.3. From Regional Experiment to Global System 1: Steam-Engine Economy and the Heat of the Mine in Early Nineteenth-Century Cornwall 1.1. Economies of Coal 1.2. Cornwall’s Societies and Patrons of Science 1.3. Pressure, Steam, and Subterranean Heat 1.4. The Earth’s Great Heat 1.5. Conclusion 2: The Earth’s Laboratory: Underground Experiments, Philosophical Miners, and Knowledge from the Mine 2.1. Mine Experiments 2.2. Rejection at the Royal Society 2.3. Philosophical Miners 2.4. Credibility and Consensus 2.5. Conclusion 3: Survey and Science: Polar Expeditions, Terrestrial Magnetism, and the Instruments of Empire, 1815–1839 3.1. The Science of Terrestrial Magnetism 3.2. Fox’s Dipping Needle 3.3. Sir John Franklin and the Magnetism of the British Isles 3.4. Europe and the Atlantic 3.5. Conclusion 4: The Antarctic Foxes: Dipping Needles on James Clark Ross’s South Pole Expedition, 1838–1843 4.1. International Fox: The Navy, Europe, and the Atlantic 4.2. The British Magnetic Scheme 4.3. Dipping Needles on the Atlantic 4.4. Into the Southern Hemisphere 4.5. Magnetic Contributions 4.6. Conclusion 5: Expedition and Experiment: The British Magnetic Scheme, 1841–1843 5.1. The Niger Expedition 5.2. Instrumental Upheavals 5.3. Lefroy and the North American Challenge 5.4. Conclusion 6: Discovery, Disaster, and the Dipping Needle: Britain’s Global Magnetic System, 1843–1850 6.1. Science on HMS Samarang 6.2. Magnetic Miseries 6.3. The Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake 6.4. Relics and Rejects: The Franklin Expedition 6.5. Conclusion 7: The Twilight of Cornish Science and the Systematization of Oceanic Navigation, 1850–1907 7.1. Trusting Wilton 7.2. Reporting the BMS 7.3. The British Isles Survey of 1857 7.4. Systems of Navigation 7.5. Conclusion Epilogue: Global Science in an Age of Empire 8.1. Reputation and Endurance 8.2. Global Systems Select Bibliography 1. Primary Material 1.1. Manuscripts 1.2. Parliamentary Papers 1.3. Periodicals 1.4. Printed 1.5. Private Papers 2. Secondary Material 2.1. Published 2.2. Unpublished Index