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Gratitudes, plans, and a people’s history

A moment to give thanks, look ahead to 2025, and indulge in a fascinating snippet of a people’s history

Kevin Thomas

Dec 22, 2024

[Painting in progress by

April Burke

]

“Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number—

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many—they are few.”

― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy: Written on Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester

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It’s not quite a full year since the launch of Marx & friends—Jan 25, 2024—but with the calendar year coming to an end, it’s a good time to take a moment to give thanks, look ahead to what’s to come for next year, and indulge in a fascinating snippet of a people’s history.

So first of all, to all my readers and subscribers—especially my paid subscribers:

THANK YOU!

And thanks to all those who have engaged with my articles in comments and shares, and other writers who have recommended Marx & friends on their own platforms.

Plans for next year

Along with mixing in occasional topical or reflective pieces as the inspiration strikes me, here’s what I have planned for Marx & friends in 2025:

More on Marx and more on Deleuze & Guattari.
Some essays on Spinoza, Kant, maybe Bergson, as well as on some of Deleuze’s solo works.
More essays on fascism and its manifestations historically and in our era.
More Critique of Big History, and what I’m calling the historical logic of late capitalism:
- A few more essays on Harari’s Sapiens.
- Likely some essays on Jared Diamond’s 1997 Guns, Germs & Steel, as well as on works of other public figures representing similar, evolutionary psychology-oriented ideologies: Steven Pinker’s 2018 Enlightenment Now, Jordan Peterson’s 1999 Maps of Meaning.
- I also want to include some pieces on a book which could be categorized as Big History but which I view positively, one offering a radically different view of human history, Clifford D. Connor’s 2005 A peoples History science. Connor’s thesis is essentially that modern science rests on a bed of intellectual development by masses of ordinary, usually anonymous, often illiterate people in productive and economic activity, producing science more broadly defined as knowledge of nature, empirically, through trial and error.

And on that last note, I’ll share an excerpt from Connor’s book which tells a story I find utterly fascinating, on “the longitude problem,” which was “the central scientific problem of the so-called Age of Exploration.”

In short, it was a carpenter who solved the problem of tracking longitude in the open ocean, so crucial to navigation and intercontinental trade, despite many of the greatest minds of the era trying their best to solve it. Precisely, it was a carpenter who was also a self-taught clockmaker and who solved the problem by inventing a precise-enough clock to accurately measure long distances in the open sea.

And while so many others failed to solve the problem, much of the research devoted to it led to alternative discoveries—for example, Newton couldn’t solve the problem, but his research into it contributed to his formulation of the law of gravity and invention of the calculus—resulting in what I think is a powerful testament to the case made by the late great anthropologist David Graeber on how research funds ought to be allocated.

In a 2014 debate against the ghoulish billionaire Peter Thiel, Graeber explains:

If you want to have maximized possibilities of unexpected breakthroughs, it’s pretty obvious what the best policy is. You get a bunch of creative people, you give them the resources they need for a certain amount of time, you let them hang out with each other, but basically you leave them alone. Most of them are not going to end up coming up with anything at all. But a few of them will come up with something that will even surprise themselves.[1]

The longitude problem [An excerpt from Connor’s A People’s History of Science]

Sailors could tell by the stars where they were on a north-south meridian but not how far east or west they were. To locate themselves precisely during a transoceanic voyage, they would have to know their longitude as well as their latitude. Navigators attempted to estimate distances by dead reckoning—that is, multiplying the length of time they had been at sea by the average speed of the ship. The problem was that there was no reliable way of measuring a ship’s speed as it moved through the moving waters. Experienced pilots could make reasonably good guesses at how fast they were going by spitting in the water and timing (by saying Hail Marys) how quickly the spittle was carried away, but that was obviously not a high precision method.

More sophisticated dead-reckoning techniques were devised over the centuries, but truly accurate measurement of longitude at sea remained a virtual impossibility. It was the central scientific problem of the so-called Age of Exploration; the Spanish, French, Dutch and British governments mobilized their resources in an attempt to solve it, and the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution gave it their best efforts. But in spite of the cumulative brain power of the likes of Galileo, Newton, William Gilbert, Christian Huygens and Edmund Halley, it was not a member of the scientific elite but a skilled craftsman—a clockmaker named John Harrison—who finally, well into the eighteenth century, provided the solution to the longitude problem. […]

One [method] that proved workable in principle was Galileo’s proposal to utilize the four moons of Jupiter that he had discovered with his telescope. The predictability and frequency with which they eclipsed their mother planet made it possible to draw up tables that could tell an observer with a telescope the exact time at some other place that could be used as a prime meridian or “zero point” for longitude. Then stellar measurements could determine the observer’s exact local time at any location, even in the middle of an ocean. Subtract one time from the other, and
voilà, the longitude has been calculated, because clock time is a function of the earth’s rotation and the time differential is equivalent to a specific east-west distance. The circumference of the earth is by convention divided into 360 degrees of longitude; in 24 hours the earth rotates through 360 degrees; therefore each hour of time differential equals fifteen degrees of longitude. If the time at the prime meridian is noon, and your local time is 3:00 pm, then your longitude is 45 degrees east of the prime meridian.

Galileo’s method was eventually found to be usable on land but not at sea, because precise telescopic observations of the moons of Jupiter proved impossible to perform on a rolling, pitching ship. An analogous method based on measuring the position of the earth’s moon was thoroughly investigated by Isaac Newton. Newton’s intensive analysis of “lunar distances” turned out to be scientifically fruitful in serendipitous ways—it led him to his formulation of the law of universal gravitation and contributed to his development of the calculus—but he was unable to predict adequately the moon’s erratic motions. It was, he declared, the only problem that made his head ache. […]

A third method, championed by Edmund Halley (for whom the famous comet was named), had nothing to do with astronomy, but relied instead on characteristics of the earth’s magnetic field [via compass readings]. […] It was a logical and worthwhile course to pursue, but it did not give the hoped-for answer because the earth’s magnetic field proved to be insufficiently uniform and unpredictably variable. That conclusion was based on observations made by a craftsman named Robert Norman. Norman, an instrument-maker by trade, also discovered that magnetic compass needles rotate and point around not only one axis, but two. In addition to pointing approximately toward the north, the needle also tends to “dip” and point slightly downward. The needle’s dip varied with longitude, which suggested another measurable variable that might serve to determine longitude at sea. William Gilbert brought Norman’s suggestion to the attention of the scientific elite, and it, too, was systematically investigated with the collaboration of working seamen, but again the instability of the earth’s magnetic field rendered it futile. Although the two attempts to determine longitude by means of the compass needle were unsuccessful, it stimulated knowledge of geomagnetism.

Theoretically, the most straightforward way to measure longitude at sea would be to carry aboard ship an accurate clock set to the time of the prime meridian. A simple comparison with local solar-measured time would then give longitude. But the operative word is “accurate”: no existing clocks were even remotely accurate enough for that purpose. Even on land, the best portable clocks tended to gain or lose several minutes a day, but the ship’s motions and the variability of temperature and humidity at sea made timekeeping all the more difficult. A clock that lost or gained only one minute a day would have yielded errors of hundreds of miles after just a few days at sea—and crossing the Atlantic typically took two months.

This challenging problem stimulated Chrsitian Huygens and other savants to study the theoretical mechanics of timekeeping, and their work resulted in the development of pendulum-controlled clocks. But alas, pendulums are particularly unsuitable for conditions aboard a rocking ship, so scholars looked elsewhere for a solution to the longitude problem. It would be found, Isaac Newton said with hauteur, “not by Watchmakers or teachers of Navigation … but by the ablest Astronomers.” He was wrong—it was a persistent “watchmaker,” John Harrison, who in the 1760s eventually succeeded. Harrison was not, in fact, a clockmaker by trade but a carpenter who had taught himself to make clocks as a sideline. His first precision clocks were made of the carpenter’s material, wood, rather than metal. […]

After creating a timepiece adequate to the task (a clock that lost only five seconds on an eighty-one-day test voyage to Jamaica!) Harrison encountered a great deal of resistance on the part of the gentleman scientists, who refused to acknowledge his accomplishment. Eventually, after repeated demonstrations made his triumph undeniable, he was awarded the large cash prize that the English Parliament had promised for more than half a century to anyone who could find a way to measure longitude accurately at sea. […]

Meanwhile, the quest for finding longitude at sea had stimulated investigations that made it possible to measure longitude on land, and that in turn gave a great impetus to progress in mapmaking.[2]

This history of the longitude problem is one which demonstrates how the history of science has generally been driven by the need to solve real world problems, practical problems often to do with productive, economic activity. In this case, much of the challenge to solving the problem had to do with the impracticality of so many of the methods theorized when tested in practice on a rocking ship.

Even Galileo’s telescope, contrary to popular belief, was not in invented by Galileo. As Galileo himself noted, it was invented by a spectacle-maker, the initial motivation for which was not astronomical but nautical, “not to look at the stars,” as Connor explains, “but to spot and identify ships far out at sea.” Even the telescope’s convex-lenses, the invention of which is often attributed to inspiration drawn from scientific principles of Oxford scholars, were evidently invented by craftsmen: “The evidence suggests […] ‘that eye-glasses emerged not by scientific inspiration but from the world of glass-makers and the cutters of glass, gems, and crystals’ (that is, in the empirical science of craftsmen rather than the theoretical science of schoolmen).”[3]

I should say, although it was one of the many failed attempts to solve the longitude problem, one of my favorite parts of the history is Galileo’s vision for tracking longitude in the open ocean via observations of the moons of Jupiter, moons he had himself discovered.

Notes

[1]. David Graeber vs Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go – YouTube

[2]. Connor, A People’s History of Science (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 228-233.

[3]. Ibid, 233-4.