The explanation of the Great Enrichment is people. Paul Romer says so, as do a few others, among whom are some students I did not teach price theory to at the University of Chicago. On the other hand, Paul sets it down to economies of scale, which mysteriously drop down on England in the 18th century and gradually on us all. Yet China had peace, science, and enormous cities when Europeans were huddled in small groups inside town walls, or isolated villae.
In particular, it is ideas that people have for commercially tested betterment that matter. Consider alternating-current electricity, cardboard boxes, the little black dress, The Pill, cheap food, literacy, antibiotics, airplanes, steam engines, screw-making machines, railways, universities, cheap steel, sewers, plate glass, forward markets, universal literacy, running water, science, reinforced concrete, secret voting, bicycles, automobiles, limited access highways, free speech, washing machines, detergents, air conditioning, containerization, free trade, computers, the cloud, smart phones, and Bob Gordon’s favorite, window screens. …
And the Great Enrichment depended on the less famous [but] crucial multitudes of free lunches prepared by the alert worker and the liberated shopkeeper rushing about, each with her own little project for profit and pleasure. Sometimes, unexpectedly, the little projects became big projects, such as John Mackey’s one Whole Foods store in Austin, Texas resulting in 479 stores in the U.S. and the U.K., or Jim Walton’s one Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas resulting in 11,718 stores worldwide.
Letting people “have a go” to implement such ideas for commercially tested betterment is the crux. It comes, in turn, from liberalism, Adam Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty”, “the liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice”. Liberalism permitted, encouraged, honored an ideology of “innovism” — a word preferable to the highly misleading word “capitalism,” with its erroneous suggestion that the modern world was and is initiated by piling up bricks and bachelors’ degrees.
Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.
July 5, 2022
QotD: The Great Enrichment
July 4, 2022
QotD: The French solution to trench warfare
On the defensive, the French had adopted many of the same principles of the German defense-in-depth we’ve already discussed. On the offense, they came to favor (particularly under the influence of Philippe Pétain and […] Ferdinand Foch) an offensive doctrine designed to maximize France’s position in an attritional contest: that is to limit losses and maximize enemy casualties while still taking and holding ground. The system favored limited “bite-and-hold” attacks, ideally limited such that the attack stopped before triggering the inevitable German counter-attack. Remember that it was when the attacker ran out of steam and the defender’s counter-attack came that the casualty ratios tended to shift to favor the defender. In French thinking, the solution was just to not reach that point.
Instead, the French came to favor – and the British and Americans picked up the same method by the end – elaborately prepared small offensives. The elaborate preparation meant planning out the attack carefully, using shorter but carefully planned hurricane barrages (all of this planning, of course took time) and then seizing the enemy’s forward positions and just their forward positions. Instead of then trying to push through – the old French notion of assault brutal et continu (“brutal and continuous” – a “keep up the pressure till they break” method) which Robert Nivelle had favored – methodical battle focused on “bite-and-hold”.
Once you hit your limited objectives in that first rush where enemy resistence is disoriented (from the short, hurricane barrage) and weaker – and thus where the casualty ratio favors you – you stop and begin fortifying your position. You dig those communications trenches, move up your artillery and brace for the counter-attack. By the time the enemy realizes you aren’t going to attack his second or third line positions (and trigger his devastating counter-attack), you are dug in and prepared for his attack (the hold part of “bite-and-hold”). To reestablish defense in depth, the defender now has to back up to establish new lines to the rear (or launch his own fresh offensive, but by late 1918, the Germans were too weak for this). A long series of such attacks – with significant intervals for fresh careful planning and stockpiling resources – could slowly but surely lever your opponent off of key positions, one by one. It would also preserve a favorable balance of casualties, ensuring that in the end, the enemy runs out of men and shells before you do (that is the “rupture” that Joffre had always hoped for, but which arrived but two years too late for his career).
Such a slow, expensive, bloody and unglamorous strategy was in some ways only politically possible once, by 1918, it had become apparent that all other options were exhausted. That said, to argue that this bite-and-hold operational doctrine broke the trench stalemate is probably not fair either. The progress of allied offensives in 1918 was extremely slow by even the standards of 1914. The German Spring Offensive was well and truly done in July and the Allied offensive picked up in August and ran through November as fast as it could (with Foch doing everything short of getting out and pushing the offensive to try to speed it up) and yet the final allied positions by November were not even in Germany. Even at its greatest distance in 100 days of unbroken victories by a force with materiel and numerical superiority, the front moved less than 100 miles and the overall casualty ratio was roughly even (around a million on both sides).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
July 2, 2022
Incredibly Rare WW2 Tank Wreck Located
Mark Felton Productions
Published 5 Mar 2022The story of an incredibly rare WW2 tank that remains forgotten on a UK gunnery range.
Many thanks to Destination Discovery (ADTV) for tank footage. Please visit their wonderful channel for more footage: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxyc…
Dr. Mark Felton is a well-known British historian, the author of 22 non-fiction books, including bestsellers Zero Night and Castle of the Eagles, both currently being developed into movies in Hollywood. In addition to writing, Mark also appears regularly in television documentaries around the world, including on The History Channel, Netflix, National Geographic, Quest, American Heroes Channel and RMC Decouverte. His books have formed the background to several TV and radio documentaries. More information about Mark can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fe…
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June 27, 2022
Look at Life — The Jumping Jets (1965)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018The revolutionary vertical take-off capacity of the RAF Kestrel.
[Wikipedia: “The Hawker P.1127 and the Hawker Siddeley Kestrel FGA.1 are the British experimental and development aircraft that led to the Hawker Siddeley Harrier, the first vertical and/or short take-off and landing (V/STOL) jet fighter-bomber.
“Development began in 1957, taking advantage of the Bristol Engine Company’s choice to invest in the creation of the Pegasus vectored-thrust engine. Testing began in July 1960 and by the end of the year the aircraft had achieved both vertical take-off and horizontal flight. The test program also explored the possibility of use upon aircraft carriers, landing on HMS Ark Royal in 1963. The first three aircraft crashed during testing, one at the 1963 Paris Air Show.
“Improvements to future development aircraft, such as swept wings and more powerful Pegasus engines, led to the development of the Kestrel. The Kestrel was evaluated by the Tri-partite Evaluation Squadron, made up of military pilots from the United Kingdom, the United States, and West Germany. Later flights were conducted by the U.S. military and NASA.
“Related work on a supersonic aircraft, the Hawker Siddeley P.1154, was cancelled in 1965. As a result, the P.1127 (RAF), a variant more closely based on the Kestrel, was ordered into production that year, and named Harrier – the name originally intended for the P.1154 – in 1967. The Harrier served with the UK and several nations, often as a carrier-based aircraft.”]
June 20, 2022
Claude Chappe and the Napoleon Telegraph
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 2 Mar 2022The development of technology for speedy long-distance communication dates back to antiquity, and reached its pre-electronic peak in the telegraph before Samuel Morse’s telegraph. Before wires crossed the world, Napoleonic France could send a message from Paris to Lille, a distance of some 250 kilometers, in ten minutes.
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June 15, 2022
QotD: The gobsmacking magnitude of “The Great Enrichment”
The exactitude, of course, is inessential. In Japan and Finland it was roughly the factor of 30. But it could be the worldwide factor since 1800 of 10 only, about $2 or $3 to $30 a day (to $10,000 a year, the level of Brazil now, to fix ideas), and still be utterly novel. As a Brit might say, the Great Enrichment was gobsmacking.
The enrichment was actually much greater than the factor of 30, because price indices, especially recently, do not adequately reflect improvements in quality, as was determined in the early 1990s by the Boskin Commission … Consider your cell phone, your auto tires, your medical treatment — all greatly better, recently. Even economic facts and analyses are better. (Well, sometimes.) The downward bias from inadequately deflating money prices for improved quality is not far from 2% per year, which would double recent growth rates in the rich countries.
Its magnitude, novelty, recency, and location are all crucial to explaining the Great Enrichment, because together they strongly suggest that there was something deeply peculiar about Britain in the 18th century, and that afterwards the peculiarity spread to the rest of the world. Such facts make “run-up” theories such as in Stephen Broadberry et alii look implausible, because they depend on a metaphor of an airplane taking off, with little else by way of explanation for why the Industrial Revolution (a factor of 2) happened or, especially, its follow-on the Great Enrichment (a factor of 20 or 30). Likewise, it is dubious to attach the Great Enrichment to remote causes within Europe, such as the Black Death — which originated in China, with similar terrors, and yet yielded no Great Enrichment there. Also dubious is the Eurocentric belief, prominent in conservative circles, of some ancient superiority of melanin-challenged Volk back in the Black Forest. (Did you know, for example, that all European countries had common law in the Middle Ages, that is, judge-found-and-made, not legislated or codified?)
The Great Enrichment is the second most important secular event in human history, second only to the domestication of plants and animals making for cities and literacy.
Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.
June 11, 2022
The steam engine — one of the keys to the industrial revolution — was actually pretty late to be invented
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes gives the first part of what promises to be a fascinating deep dive into steam engine development pre-dating the commonly accepted chronology of its invention:
What did I discover that so shocked me? When researching my last post on the inventors surrounding Prince Henry in the 1610s, and because I’ve been looking into the history of energy at the urging of Apoorv Sinha and others at Carbon Upcycling, I had a read through the published work of one of the inventors, Salomon de Caus.
De Caus often features in histories of the steam engine, as someone who in 1615 wrote about and depicted the expansive force of steam — heat up water in a copper vessel with a narrow tube coming out the top, and see how water or steam can be made to rise! He was even briefly known as the “true”, French inventor of the steam engine, because of a nineteenth-century hoax.
To historians of science and technology today, however, de Caus’s illustration is pretty unremarkable. He usually just gets a brief name-check, more or less copy-pasted from older histories. This is because the expansive force of steam would turn out not to be all that important in the development of the steam engine, as we’ll see, and because it was ancient.
3D animation of an aeolipile or Hero’s engine.
Animation by Michael Frey via Wikimedia Commons.Hero of Alexandria, writing sometime in the first century, had already exploited the fact that when you boil the water in a metal vessel with a long, narrowing spout, the steam will come out with quite some force. This aeolipile, as it was sometimes called, was known and used throughout the middle ages and well into the seventeenth century. Sometimes it was shaped a bit like an alchemist’s retort, and known as the “philosophical bellows”. Other times, it was shaped as a human face, the steam issuing from its mouth — like the Greek god Aeolus, blowing the wind.
This was no mere toy, but found plenty of practical use. The spout of the philosophical bellows was often directed at a lamp’s flame, to have a sort of blow-torch effect. It was used, for example, to do finer tasks like bending glass pipes, or in fine metalwork — there are loads of accounts of this throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, with some authors even talking about its merits relative to other instruments, suggesting real-life use. Its heat could, apparently, also be used to get fires going in wet weather, or from damp wood (provided you had some dry wood on hand to get the aeolipile itself going).
It could also be put to more sophisticated uses. Hero explained how the principle of thermal expansion — of either water or air — could be exploited to spout steam or even wine onto an altar’s fire to make it flare, to make water issue from a fountain, to make miniature dancers rotate and jump up and down, and to push air through bird-shaped automata to make them sing. A 1630s English version claimed to make the figure of a dragon hiss.
It could even be used to do some light mechanical work. Hero described a version that might make a hollow ball spin, by having the steam issue from bent nozzles. He even described a version where water could be forced by steam from one container into another, which would pull on a weight to open some doors. Taking his idea and running with it, engineers from at least the fifteenth century onwards wrote about directing the aeolipile’s narrow spout at miniature turbines to turn a roasting spits above a fire — suggested in Italy in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, and in a 1551 Ottoman manuscript by Taqi ad-Din — or to do light industrial work like stamping ores and minerals into powders.
The principle of using heat to expand air or steam was even tried for much heavier-duty tasks. In 1605, the French inventor Marin Bourgeois developed an air-powered gun — known as the “wind-gun” — which used air that was pumped and compressed into the barrel. Within just a couple of years, having heard of the demonstration before the French court, and after paying a visit to Bourgeois, the mathematician David Rivault began experimenting on how the same effect might be achieved by heating water in a cannon. In the same decade, the Spanish military engineer Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont also tried to use the expansionary force of steam to drive water up and out of mines — essentially, an industrial version of what Hero had done with fountains.
June 8, 2022
The Story Behind the Dambuster Raid – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 7 Jun 2022The thousand-bomber offensive was about to begin as Air-Marshall Harris was assembling his forces. Yet one man was to challenge his strategy. The aircraft designer Barnes Wallis thought: “What if there was a way to destroy Germany’s industrial might not by simply dropping thousands of bombs over its cities, but by a precision strike against its dams?” For this, a new kind of bouncing bomb was to be delivered.
(more…)
June 5, 2022
Winchester G30M
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Jul 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
With the death of Jonathan “Ed” Browning in 1939, development of the Winchester G30 rifle was passed into the hands of a new employee at Winchester by the name of David Marshall Williams. Williams would become widely known as “Carbine” Williams in later years thanks to Jimmy Stewart and Hollywood, but we will get to that part of the story later.
What Williams did to the G30 was to replace Browning’s annular gas piston with his own short stroke tappet system (this being the first rifle to use that system of Williams’). This substantially improved the gun’s reliability, and Winchester was able to submit it to Marine Corps trials in 1940 alongside the Garand and Pedersen rifles under the designation G30M. The Marine Corps was legitimately interested in the G30M, as it was expected to be both faster and cheaper to manufacture than the Garand.
Ultimately the trials were won by the Garand, with the G30M placing third in total malfunctions and broken parts. This had involved 37 different tests and more than 12,000 rounds through each rifle. The Garand had 1,480 total malfunctions and 49 parts broken, replaced, or repaired. The Johnson had 1,547 and 72 respectively, and the G30M 2,864 and 97 (roughly double the number of problems as the Garand).
Despite this failure, Winchester was encouraged to continue working on the rifle, if for no other reason than the possibility of foreign purchasers. Williams’ next step would be to replace the Browning tilting bolt with a Garand-type rotating bolt, which would result in a rifle Winchester would call the M2, or “the seven and a half pound rifle”. We will examine that rifle in the next video …
June 2, 2022
M1915 Howell Automatic Rifle Enfield Conversion
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Mar 2017The M1915 Howell Automatic Rifle is a conversion of a standard No1 MkIII Lee Enfield rifle into a semi-automatic, through the addition of a gas piston onto the right side of the barrel. Despite its very steampunk appearance, the Howell is actually a quite simple conversion mechanically. The rifle action had not been modified at all, and a curved plate on the end of the gas piston is used to cycle the bolt up, back, forward, and down just as it would be done manually.
The additional metal elements added to the gun are there to prevent the shooter from inadvertently getting their hand or face in the path of the bolt. The crude tubular pistol grip is necessary because the shooter’s hand on the wrist of the stock would normally be in the path of the bolt’s travel. Note that the Parker-Hale bipod on this example is a non-military addition from its time in private ownership.
In addition to these elements, the Howell has been fitted with a 20-round extended magazine to better exploit its rate of fire. However, the Howell was made as a semiautomatic rifle only, and not fully automatic. It was offered to the British military circa 1915, but never put into service. Instead, the British would significantly increase production and deployment of Lewis light machine guns. Howell would offer his conversion in basically the same form to the military again at the onset of World War 2, but was again turned down.
Shooting the Howell was remarkably successful — I had expected it to be very malfunction-prone, but in fact it ran almost completely without fault. In retrospect, I would attribute this to the simplicity of its conversion, which made no changes to the feeding and extraction/ejection elements of the SMLE. The gun was a bit awkward to hold, and the offset sights left one with really no cheek weld at all, but recoil was gentle thanks to the gas system’s function and added weight. Quite a remarkable gun, and one I am very glad to have been able to shoot.
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May 25, 2022
M1915 Villar Perosa
Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Aug 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The Villar Perosa is one of the first small machine guns developed and used by a military force. It was designed in Italy and introduced in 1915 as an aircraft weapon, to be used in a flexible mount by an airplane’s observer. The gun consists of two independent firing actions mounted together. Each fires from an open bolt as a rate of 1200-1500 rounds/minute, feeding from a 25 round magazine of 9mm Glisenti cartridges. This allowed the maximum possible volume of fire in an aerial combat situation, where in 1915 ballistic power was not particularly important.
As aircraft armaments improved and synchronized, belt-fed machine guns became practical, the Villar Perosa was quickly made obsolete in aerial use. The Italian military experimented with several applications of the weapon in ground combat, including slings and belt fittings for walking fire, tripods, mounts with integral armor shields, and bicycle mounts. None of these proved particularly successful, as the elements that made the gun well adapted to early aerial use (high rate of fire with a small cartridge) made it relatively ineffective for infantry use.
Ultimately, the best use of the Villar Perosa was to break them up and convert the actions into shoulder-fired submachine guns. Designs to do this were developed by both the Beretta company and Villar Perosa themselves, and in 1918 these guns entered service in the same approximate period as the first German MP-18 submachine guns. Because of this recycling, intact M1915 Villar Perosa guns are quite rare today.
May 22, 2022
HMCS Bras D’Or; The world’s fastest warship and the pinnacle of hydrofoil development in Canada
Polyus Studios
Published 3 Feb 2022Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudiosHMCS Bras D’Or was the pinnacle of over 100 years of hydrofoil development in Canada. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell and ending with the Proteus, hydrofoils held the promise of faster travel over the waves. Unfortunately the technology never found a comfortable fit in either military or civil fleets. It was designed to be an ASW hunter but by the time she was ready, the Navy was settled on using the now familiar Destroyer/Helicopter combos.
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Alexander Graham Bell and Casey Baldwin
2:28 The R-100 Massawippi
5:46 The R-103 Baddeck
7:15 The Rx
8:48 Anti-submarine warfare hydrofoil concept
12:24 FHE-400 Bras D’Or
17:23 Testing and refinement
19:25 Cancellation
20:18 Proteus
20:45 ConclusionMusic:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello Project
“Your Suggestions” – Unicorn Heads#BrasDor #CanadianAerospace #PolyusStudios
May 15, 2022
The young man who might have been King Henry IX of England
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers what might have been had the eldest son of King James I and VI lived to take the thrones of England and Scotland:
Portrait of Prince Henry Frederick (1594-1612), Prince of Wales by Isaac Oliver
National Trust, Dunster Castle; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/prince-henry-frederick-15941612-prince-of-wales-99804 via Wikimedia Commons.
Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, was the eldest son and heir of James I of England. He would presumably have become Henry IX had he managed to outlive his father. But he died in 1612 aged just 18. The kingdom instead ended up with his younger brother Charles I and civil war. I’m not sure how far Prince Henry was influenced, but it seems that many of the major innovators of the period were purposefully cultivating him as a kind of inventor-scientist king.
It reminds me of a very similar and successful scheme, which I noticed when researching my first book on the history of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. This was the scheme to cultivate George III — famed for his madness and losing the Thirteen Colonies, but also for his collection of scientific instruments and interest in agricultural innovation. Those interests were no accident: his upbringing had included lessons in botany from the inventor Stephen Hales, in art and architecture from William Chambers, and in mathematics from George Lewis Scott. These were not just experts, but active innovator-organisers. Hales was a key founder of the Society of Arts; Chambers helped organise the artists who split off from it to form the Royal Academy of Arts; and Scott was involved in updating Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences — an early encyclopaedia focused on technical knowledge. And their efforts bore fruit. Unlike his predecessor and grandfather George II — whose interests mainly fell under the headings of Handel, Hanover, hunting, and heavy women — George III became an active patron of science, invention, and the arts.
Given how successfully the inventors cultivated George III, it makes me wonder how things might have looked had Prince Henry lived to be king. His younger brother Charles I had an education heavily geared towards languages, theology, and overcoming various health issues through sports. But Henry — naturally athletic and charismatic — had an upbringing tightly controlled by Sir Thomas Chaloner, who had a major financial stake in innovation.
Chaloner housed and supported his alchemist cousin (also, confusingly, called Thomas Chaloner). This cousin had published an early treatise on the medical applications of saltpetre, or nitre (what we now call potassium nitrate), and had tried to produce alum on the isle of Lambay, off the coast of Ireland. Alum was a valuable substance used to fix cloth dyes, which had hitherto been monopolised by the Pope, who owned Europe’s only alum mine. Opening a competing, English-controlled, Protestant supply of alum was not just about starting a new industry. It was a matter of Europe-wide religious and strategic urgency.
[…]
Henry’s circle also included the Dutch polymath Cornelis Drebbel, who would become famous all over Europe for travelling in a submarine under the Thames, for his improvements to microscopes, and for inventing a perpetual motion machine (which isn’t as silly as it sounds — it was effectively a kind of barometer, exploiting changes in temperature and air pressure to move).
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The more I look into the circle of inventors around Prince Henry, the more familiar names crop up. There even seems to be some connection to Simon Sturtevant, one of the original patentees of a method to make iron by using coal instead of wood — Chaloner was seemingly responsible for evaluating Sturtevant’s inventiveness, to see if he merited a patent. I found it very striking that when Sturtevant’s iron-making business was about to get going, Prince Henry was to have a share.
Given such innovative company, we can only imagine what kind of a king Prince Henry might have been. If George III grew up to be “Farmer George”, might a Henry IX have become associated with navigation or hydraulic engines? We’ll never know. But even during his brief lifetime, there was plenty of patronage to be had for inventors at the court of their would-be Inventor-King.
May 11, 2022
M1944E1/M1945 Johnson Light Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Aug 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
After getting his Model 1941 machine gun purchased in small numbers by the US military, Melvin Johnson continued to press for more sales and a general adoption. Following testing results and recommendations from soldiers in the field, he made a number of modifications to the gun and developed the M1944, which was quickly tweaked to become the M1944E1, also called the M1945. This new version included several improvements including:
* Replacing the bipod with a monopod less prone to interfering with barrel removal
* Improved stronger bolt anti-bounce latch
* Metal dual-tube buttstock in place of wood
* and most significantly, a gas-boosted hybrid recoil operating systemThis new model of the Johnson was in testing at the end of WWII, and weapons development budget cuts at the conclusion of the war prevented it from replacing the BAR as Johnson and many in the Marine Corps had hoped.
This particular M1945 Johnson is fully transferrable, as came out of the Winchester Museum Collection (now the Cody Firearms Museum) back many years ago when curators would occasionally sell items from the collection to raise money.
April 23, 2022
Historic “innovation prizes” (somewhat) debunked
In the most recent Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes does a bit of heavy lifting to debunk some accreted nonsense about the origins and success of early innovation prizes:
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudsley Shovell (1650-1707).
Portrait by unknown artist from the National Maritime Museum collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday I had a piece in Works in Progress magazine, on the best ways to design modern innovation prizes — and why many of them fail.
I examined the famous “Longitude Prize” of 1714, and in the process busted some major myths about it. Almost every element of the popular story is wrong — something that experts on the topic like Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt have been going on about for years. The popular story’s hero, John Harrison, often portrayed as an inventor shunned by a haughty scientific establishment, actually received massive amounts of funding from the committee for awarding the prize. The story’s villain, the Astronomer Royal Neville Maskelyne, was no villain at all. And there’s very little evidence that the prize actually incentivised people to innovate. The Board of Longitude, for that matter, ended up more like a grant-giving agency — a kind of navigation-themed DARPA — than just a committee of prize judges.
You can read the full piece here.
So what is the rest of this week’s newsletter about? Well, I’d like to take the chance to bust even more myths about innovation prizes!
Let’s start with a fairly small one, to do with longitude, that I’d missed. Take the narrative about the 1707 naval disaster off the Isles of Scilly, which led to the demise of the wonderfully-named admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. The disaster is usually cited as having been the direct cause of the institution of the 1714 reward, and, of course, gives most Youtubers, bloggers, and TV presenters discussing longitude the opportunity to say the name “Sir Cloudesley Shovell”. Who wouldn’t?
I had already been sceptical of the disaster’s relevance to Parliament’s creation of the longitude reward, because of the seven-year delay. I had then noticed, when researching for the piece, that the disaster was hardly mentioned at all by those lobbying for the reward, by those consulted on it, or by the MPs who voted on it. It seemed to be irrelevant as a cause, so I repurposed that part of the popular story to simply use as a general example of a naval disaster caused by not knowing one’s position at sea.
But even my downgrading of its relevance, it turns out, may have been over-generous. Yesterday, after I published my piece, Richard Dunn pointed out to me that not only was the 1707 disaster irrelevant as a cause of the 1714 reward, but that the disaster itself may not have had very much to do with a specific failure to find longitude. It certainly wasn’t singled out as a cause at the time.
As for the actual causes, they were probably compass error, inconsistent charts, and even uncertainty over the fleet’s latitude, not just its longitude. And to the extent that not knowing the fleet’s longitude appears to have been a major part of the problem, it was also related to failures to accurately calculate longitude on land — something that could already be done using existing techniques. The navigational text-books, for example, disagreed on the position of Cape Spartel, in Morocco, from which the fleet departed and took its bearings. As the maritime historian William E. May put it, when he looked into the detail of the fleet’s route and navigational measurements, “the errors in longitudes in the accepted text-books must have introduced a danger just as great as any errors in reckoning the longitude.”
