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279Observing
Venus and Debating the Parallax
in May–June 1770),62 the observations of Chappe and his companions in Baja
California in present-day Mexico (which reached Paris in December 1770),63
and those of Captain Cook’s crew in Tahiti, in what is now French Polynesia
(which reached Paris in September 1771).64 For all these cases, there were good
excuses for the delay. Lowitz continued his expedition in Siberia for several
years until he was actually killed by rioting local inhabitants,65 and it took a
while before the package containing his manuscripts arrived in St. Petersburg.
Islen’ev’s site of observation had been Iakutsk, almost 8,500 kilometers east of
the capital, and even he continued his expedition for a long while before re-
turning to St. Petersburg. Chappe, along with nearly all his travel companions,
had perished from a plague while still in America; and Cook and his team had
observed the transit literally from the other side of the planet and still had
some explorative tasks ahead of them before they returned home. The profes-
sional astronomer of Cook’s crew, Charles Green, even lost his life in Asia.
In the web of swift and open collaboration characterizing the Venus transit
projects of the eighteenth century, Denmark–Norway had been—or had let
itself be—left in a backwater in 1761. Its non-communicative mode of behavior
continued in 1769, and it is reasonably clear that neither Hell nor the organiz-
ers in Copenhagen asked for Lalande’s advice in the planning of the Vardø ex-
pedition. The Venus transit report from Vardø did indeed arrive quite late, it
was unusually—and perhaps unnecessarily—long and detailed, and both its
lateness and its wealth of detail left it open to attack. Let us now briefly look
at the immediate reactions to Hell’s report among four of his peers who, be-
sides being astronomers of an international reputation, had another thing in
62 On June 19, 1770, Johann Albrecht Euler sent to Hielmstierne (secretary of the Royal Soci-
ety of Sciences in Copenhagen) the two reports, “which were published quite recently”
(dkdvs). As of March 18, 1770, Lalande had still not received any news concerning the
observations of Lowitz and Islen’ev (letter to Euler, dated Paris, March 18, 1770 [ran]). On
April 16, Lexell informed Wargentin that the manuscript of Lowitz had just arrived and
was about to be printed (letter to Wargentin in Stockholm, dated April 16, 1770 [cvh]).
63 Cassini iv, “Avant-Propos” in his edition of Chappe, Voyage en Californie (Paris, 1772),
unpaginated.
64 Lalande, “Lettre sur le passage de Vénus […],” JS (December 1771): 825–26. Observations
made at Jesuit observatories in China had the potential of being valuable as well. Indeed,
the observations of two Jesuits—François-Marie D’Ollières (1722–80) and a certain
Dollas—in Beijing are commented on by Lalande in a paper originally read in 1771 at the
Académie Royale des Sciences, but he does not state when the letter containing their
observations reached him, cf. Lalande “Mémoire sur la parallaxe du Soleil, déduite des
observations faites dans la mer du Sud, dans le royaume d’Astracan, & à la Chine” (1774),
789–91.
65 See, e.g., the “Précis de la vie de M. Lowitz,” in Bernoulli, Nouvelles littéraires de divers pays,
6:41–50.
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book Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe"
Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Title
- Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
- Subtitle
- And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Authors
- Per Pippin Aspaas
- László Kontler
- Publisher
- Brill
- Location
- Leiden
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-90-04-41683-3
- Size
- 15.5 x 24.1 cm
- Pages
- 492
- Categories
- Naturwissenschaften Physik
Table of contents
- Acknowledgments VII
- List of Illustrations IX
- Bibliographic Abbreviations X
- Introduction 1
- 1 Shafts and Stars, Crafts and Sciences: The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces 37
- 2 Metropolitan Lures: Enlightened and Jesuit Networks, and a New Node of Science 91
- 3 A New Node of Science in Action: The 1761 Transit of Venus and Hell’s Transition to Fame 134
- 4 The North Beckons: “A desperate voyage by desperate persons” 172
- 5 He Came, He Saw, He Conquered? The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum 209
- 6 “Tahiti and Vardø will be the two columns […]”: Observing Venus andDebating the Parallax 258
- 7 Disruption of Old Structures 305
- 8 Coping with Enlightenments 344
- Appendix 1 Map of the Austrian Province of the Society of Jesus (with Glossary of Geographic Names) 394
- Appendix 2 Instruction for the Imperial and Royal Astronomer Maximilian Hell, S.J 398
- Bibliography 400
- Index 459