Page - 301 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

301Observing Venus and Debating the Parallax Upon inspection of the astronomical notebook, the younger von Littrow also concluded that Hell had altered and manipulated the datasets, often with a different kind of ink. He claimed that the Venus transit observations of Hell and Sajnovics—as published by Hell in the Observatio transitus Veneris […] 1769—were worthless, whereas that of the untrained Borchgrevink, whose mo- ments differed many seconds from those of the two Jesuits, was “the only true” observation and could be used.150 Von Littrow thereby restored the Vardø ob- servations, but in doing so, he furnished the reader with “proofs” of Hell’s unre- liable character and incompetence as a scientist. Through von Littrow’s book, the name of Hell became tainted with the worst thinkable scientific crime: manipulation of datasets. Von Littrow’s publication found an immediate response from the expert on the solar parallax to whom it was dedicated, Encke. At a session of the Berlin Academy of Sciences on April 30, 1835, Encke explained that his skepticism toward the veracity of Hell’s Vardøhus observation originated in the general impression that he had formed of his personality, first and foremost because “he was a Jesuit.”151 Encke had now gladly embraced von Littrow’s account and found that it confirmed all his prejudices toward the late Viennese Jesuit, who clearly not only had altered his datasets in a very clumsy and incompetent manner but had also been unable to keep correct track of the running of his clocks and had calculated the longitude and latitude of Vardø wrongly. Thanks to von Littrow’s edition of the original astronomical notebook of Hell, Encke was now able to apply what he believed to be the necessary reductions of all the data. He entered the “restored” Vardø observation into his calculation, and found that it supported a solar parallax of 8.57116″, only 0.0064″ different from the one he had found without using the Vardøhusian datasets ten years earlier.152 The conclusions of the 1830s remained unchallenged for more than three decades. In 1864, however, astronomer Karl Rudolph Powalky (1817–81) at the University of Kiel defended a doctoral thesis on the Venus transit of 1769 and the solar parallax that could be calculated thereof. He inspected von Littrow’s book as well as Encke’s treatises, but could not bring himself to agree to their hostile conclusions. Instead, Powalky found that the corrections that Hell allowed himself to make in his manuscript ap- pear to have been extremely unimportant. This, the good quality of the 150 Von Littrow, P. Hell’s Reise nach Wardoe, 77. 151 Cf. Encke, “Über den Venusdurchgang von 1769,” 301. 152 Encke, “Über den Venusdurchgang von 1769,” esp. 309.