Page - 144 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 3144 2 An Imperial Astronomer’s Network Displayed The Venus transit projects of the 1760s have been described as the first ever instance of large-scale international cooperation in science,18 despite them taking place amid unprecedented scales of great power rivalry—in 1761, actu- ally at the climax of the Seven Years’ War—with the two leading nations of astronomy, France and Britain, at the helm of rival coalitions. While astrono- mers themselves managed to cooperate, the military events created some con- tingencies and disruptions: the French astronomer Guillaume le Gentil de la Galaisière (1725–92), for instance, set out to carry out the observation from the fortified town of Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast in Southeast India, but before his arrival the town fell to the British who razed it to the ground. (Thanks to the 1763 Treaty of Paris, by the 1769 transit the town was in French hands again; Le Gentil duly returned and constructed a small observatory among the ruins of the former governor’s palace, to be thwarted this time by the clouds.) Despite such difficulties, the number of successful endeavors was quite im- pressive. A mappemonde indicating where the transit would be visible had been issued by French astronomers and given worldwide distribution ahead of the transit,19 and in 1761 astronomers—most of them British and French— took up positions in places as exotic as Tobolsk in Siberia (Chappe d’Auteroche), Jakarta in the Dutch Batavia (Johan Maurits Mohr [1716–75]), and St. Helena in the Southern Atlantic (Nevil Maskelyne [1732–1811]). The informal center of coordination lay in Paris, where senior astronomer Delisle, assisted by his colleagues Messier, Cassini de Thury, Lacaille, and La- lande (all characters with whom Hell corresponded regularly), were pulling the strings. They were all active in the planning of the project, distributing 18 “The conjunction of enlightened interest and scientific practice, actually achieved in the observations of the transits, also gave rise to the first international, co-operative scientific expeditions in modern history.” Woolf, Transits of Venus, 4. Others include the project of cartography, mentioned above, between Vienna and Paris that started in 1761, on the initiative of Cassini de Thury, as one of three international projects of cooperation in eighteenth-century science—the other two being the Venus transit project of the 1760s (counted as a single project) and the Societas Meteorologica Palatina of Mannheim, founded in 1780. See Moutchnik, Forschung und Lehre, 18. The cartographical project of Cassini de Thury, however, included far fewer participants from a limited area and cannot be compared to the universal interest invested in the Venus transit project from the entire scientific community. A similar, small-scale but international undertaking of much great- er geographical distribution than Cassini de Thury’s cartography project would be the lunar parallax project of 1751–52, in which several astronomers from at least five countries took part (see further Aspaas, “Maximilianus Hell,” 223–24.). 19 Reprint in Woolf, Transits of Venus, fig. 8, 98–99, cf. the distribution list, 209–11.