The British Society for the History of Mathematics
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Written by David Singmaster (zingmast@sbu.ac.uk ). Links to relevant external websites are being added occasionally to this gazetteer but the BSHM has no control over the availability or contents of these links. Please inform the BSHM Webster (A.Mann@gre.ac.uk) of any broken links.
[When the gazetteer was edited for serial publication in the BSHM Newsletter, references were omitted since the bibliography was too substantial to be included. Publication on the web permits references to be included for material now being added to the website, but they are still absent from material originally prepared for the Newsletter - TM, August 2002]
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In the churchyard at Tallreuddyn, near Barmouth, is one of the two recorded UK examples of a 'cross' sundial, whose shape is like an unfolded hypercube - see under Bramdean [Peter Ransom, "Sundial corner No. 7: The cross dial at Bramdean, Hampshire", BSHM Newsletter 29 (Summer 1995) 17-19].
Thomas Young (1773-1829) was born in Taunton [Guthrie, p.374].
Francis Drake (c1540-1596) was probably born at Crowndale Farm, on the outskirts of Tavistock. The house is not extant, but there is a plaque nearby. There is a section on him in Tavistock Museum, Drake Road, and a statue with scenes from his life at the end of Plymouth Road which leads to Crowndale or at the western entrance to Tavistock from the Plymouth Road). [Stainer, pp.56-57 & 88; B. Bailey, p.13]
The church has an hourglass stand attached to the pulpit [Mary Gray, Devon's Churches, James Pike Ltd, St. Ives, 1974, p.38].
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is in Teddington, Richmond upon Thames, TW11, near Hampton Court.
In 1895, Douglas Galton's Presidential Address to the BAAS urged the establishment of a National Physical Laboratory. The BAAS set up a committee with Galton as Chairman and including Rayleigh. A deputation, including Rayleigh, presented their case to the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury (Rayleigh's uncle-in-law) and the Government agreed to set up a committee of enquiry with Rayleigh as chair. On 6 July 1898, the committee reported setting up NPL under the control of the Royal Society. Parliament approved. Rayleigh was Vice Chairman of the General Board and Chairman of the Executive Committee. On 5 Jul 1899, Richard Tetley Glazebrook was appointed first Director, commencing on 1 Jan 1900. He continued until 1919. NPL is located near Bushy House, which was given to the Laboratory in 1900. Bushy House was used as the Director's residence and the administrative offices. The Laboratory opened in Mar 1902. [A.T. Humphrey, "Lord Rayleigh - the last of the great Victorian polymaths", Bull. Inst. Math. Appl. 31:7/8 (Jul/Aug 1995) 113-120]
It is often said that Bushy House was left to Newton's niece, Catherine Barton Conduitt, by George Montague, first Earl Halifax and Keeper of Bushy Park [Craig, p.28], but [White & Foster, p.17, 22-28] gives a detailed history showing that Halifax and Barton lived at Upper Lodge, which was replaced by 1840 and was on the site used by the Admiralty Research laboratory in 1945-1994. Bushy House was built in 1663 by a courtier of Charles II, possibly as a place for the king to meet his mistresses. It was embellished by George Montagu, first Earl of Halifax of the second creation, nephew of Charles Montagu, who succeeded his uncle as Keeper, and the House was generally the Keeper's residence from then on. In 1797, the Keepership was given to William, Duke of Clarence, third son of George III, who lived there with his mistress, Dorothy Jordan, the leading comedy actress of the time. They already had three children and they had seven more at Bushy House, resulting in appropriate alterations. When it became apparent that William might succeed to the kingdom, he dumped Mrs Jordan in c1812, who had supported him for twenty years - she had to flee her creditors and died in poverty near Paris in 1816. William then married Princess Adelaide of Saxe Meiningen and brought her to Bushy House and the house was then expanded considerably in 1820-1832. In the mid nineteenth century, the Keepership appears to have disappeared. In 1896, the occupier of Bushy House died and it reverted to the Crown. Victoria exchanged it for two government houses in Pall Mall and the government then assigned it to the new National Physical Laboratory. [White & Foster, pp.29-41]
Glazebrook had been Maxwell's assistant at the Cavendish Laboratory and worked with him on electrical standards. He was Assistant Director of the Cavendish in 1891-1899. He brought the electrical standards work with him. The Laboratory was originally supervised by the Royal Society and Kew Observatory was a part of it from 1900 to 1912. NPL was transferred in 1918 to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Later it was part of the Ministry of Technology. Kelvin and Rayleigh were early supporters and consultants. There are roads and buildings named for Glazebrook, Kelvin and Rayleigh.
Lewis Fry Richardson was here c1903-c1908, NPL resisted carrying out experiments based on Lanchester's theory of aerodynamic lift, which consequently was not developed until the work of Prandtl in the 1920s [G.R. Taylor, pp.41-42]. Robert Alexander Watson-Watt (1892 1973) was superintendent of the Radio Department at NPL in 1934 when the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence was formed in November and asked his opinion whether a 'death-ray' was feasible. He said there was no way enough energy could be projected, but that a plane ought to reflect enough energy that it could be detected and, using more than one station, even located - this was the practical invention of radar. Hertz had observed reflections of radio waves c1888; Richardson had patented the idea of echo-location, covering both sound and radio, in 1912?; Baird had patented the idea in 1926 and detected a plane in 1927; Kühnold had detected ships in 1933. [Weber, pp.62-63; Storer, pp.118-121.] See also Daventry, Seaview. Watson-Watt later coined the term 'operational research'.
W. L. Bragg was Director in 1937. About 1938, J.S. Clarke used a reversible pendulum to determine g as 9.81183 m/sec^2 to probably better than one part in a million. C.G. Darwin was Director 1938-1949. Olga Taussky was here, 1940-1947.
J. R. Wormersley was head of the new Mathematics Division from 1944. It was then located in Cromer House, but later moved to Teddington Hall. Turing was here 1945-1948 and produced the proposal for the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) but no action was taken until after Turing had left for Manchester. The Pilot ACE was then built and it ran in 1950. J.H. Wilkinson was here for many years, beginning as Turing's assistant on the ACE in 1946. Leslie Fox was also here in 1945-1957.
Donald Watts Davies (1924-2000) joined NPL in 1947 to work with Turing on the Pilot ACE after hearing Turing lecture about it. He remained until retirement in 1984. In 1965, he conceived of packet switching as the method for computer to computer communications. He picked the name 'packet' with care to be sure there were related words in many languages. In Oct 1967, the idea was presented at a US conference and ARPANET soon was redesigned to use it. Paul Baran, at Rand Corporation, independently developed the same idea, perhaps earlier, but originally in the context of telephone networks where it was not very suitable.
Louis Essen joined NPL, c1930. In the 1930s, he developed the quartz ring clock, the first clock accurate enough to routinely determine variations in the speed of the earth's rotation, which are several parts in 108. In the war he developed the cavity resonance wavemeter, later widely used. He then adapted the devices to measure the speed of light to greater accuracy than ever done before, getting 299,792 km/sec in 1946 and 299,792.5 km/sec in 1950 (the current value is 299,792.458 km/sec and is now used to define the metre). He became Deputy Director of NPL in charge of frequency standards. In the early 1950s, he visited the US and saw early but unsatisfactory caesium clocks. Returning to NPL, he and J.V.L. Parry designed a built a much better version. A paper read to the Royal Society in Dec 1956 described this and showed it was accurate to one part in 1010, i.e. 1/3 second per century. This clock is now in the Science Museum [F.A.B. Ward (2), p.104]. By the time the paper was published, the accuracy was improved to one part in 1012. This clock became the basis of the present coordinated universal time (UTC) adopted on 1 Jan 1972. International Atomic Time (TAI) had been running since 1956, but the relation to astronomical time had not been thought out and used both frequency adjustments and insertion of tenths of seconds - UTC provides for whole 'leap seconds' to be inserted when necessary to keep UTC coordinated with astronomical time (UT2) - see below. Essen's booklet, see below, describes how observations of time signals over three years (1955-1958 ?) determined atomic time in terms of Universal Time at the US Naval Observatory in Washington which was then related to Ephemeris Time, leading to the definition of the second by the 1967 General Conference of Weights and Measures in Paris as "9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom." By 1973, time standards accurate to about 1 part in 1012 were readily available. The first version of the caesium clock is now in the Science Museum, while the second version is in the NPL Museum. Essen also carried out modern versions of the Michelson-Morley experiment and other basic experiments relating to relativity, leading to some criticisms of Einstein's work. OBE, 1959. FRS, 1960. Retired from NPL in 1972. [Anthony Tucker, "Split-second decisions", The Guardian (4 Sep 1997) 15; Louis Essen, The Measurement of Frequency and Time Interval; HMSO for National Physical Laboratory, 1973]
As of early 1998, 240 atomic clocks were involved in UTC, in 35 laboratories in 24 countries, coordinated by the International Earth Rotation Service at the Observatory in Paris. NPL has 7 of these clocks. The clocks mostly use vibrations of caesium-133 atoms. The earth is found to be running a bit slow by about one second every 400 days, leading to the occasional introduction of 'leap-seconds', which have been added at the end of December or June. 21 leap-seconds were added during 1972-1997, but they were not regularly spaced as the earth's motion is not uniform. All observatories, radio stations, etc., now use UTC, but I have read that GMT is still the legal time!
NPL presently maintains caesium clocks with an accuracy of one part in 1013. Lengths are determined by a He-Ne laser stabilised with Iodine to about 3 parts in 1011. The British copy of the standard kilogram (No. 18) is kept at NPL. NPL's scales are accurate to about one part in 109. The triple point temperature of water, 273.16 K, can be reproduced with an accuracy of 1 mK. Angles can be measured with an accuracy of .1".
NPL is not normally open to the public, but they have some open days for schools each year and other interested parties can attend - telephone 020-8943 6400 to find out when the open days occur. There is also a museum - telephone 020-8943 6054 to arrange a visit. My thanks to Sue Osborne for showing me around.
One of the present buildings is the Glazebrook Aerodynamics Building, but I think it no longer has wind tunnels. There is a Hooke Building. The Laboratory stretches over 82 acres and has about 700 staff.
Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen (1834-1923) was born in Teignmouth, as was George Shoobridge Carr (1837- ) [Kanigel, p.40].
Tenby, in south west Wales, is the birthplace of Robert Recorde (c1510-1558). There is a sculptural portrait monument of 1910 in the church there, based on the presumed portrait in Cambridge [Cassels]. (Alun Morris has kindly loaned me a photograph of this.)
Tenterden has many houses covered with mathematical tiles, cf Lewes [Vigar (2), p.31].
Shirburn Castle, Tetsworth, was the seat of the Parker family, later Earls of Macclesfield. William Jones (1675-1749), originator of the modern usage of ð, was tutor to the family here for some years, teaching both the first and second Earls. George Parker (1697-1764), the second Earl, became a noted astronomer. He was the co-author and co-promoter of the 1751 bill for adopting the Gregorian calendar and then PRS in 1752-1764. [DNB]
Little Thakeham, Merrydown Lane, near Thakeham (but its postal address is Storrington), is an elegant country house by Sir Edward Lutyens in 1902(?), now converted into a hotel and restaurant. The balconies over the main lounge have wrought iron railings with dodecahedral knobs.
George Berkeley (1685 1753) was born at Disert (or Dysart or Dysert) Castle, Kilkerrin, near Thomastown [Crosland, vol. 2, pp.84 & 96; Blue Guide]. But [Houghton] says he was born at Kilkenny and spent his childhood at Dysart Castle. The castle is a ruin.
In 1767, John Michell became Rector of Thornhill, now a suburb of Dewsbury, between Huddersfield and Wakefield. Sometime in the early 1770s, he played music with William Herschel and gave Herschel his first telescope. In 1784, he wrote on astronomy, deducing the existence of black holes from Newton's corpuscular theory of light and suggesting that some stars might have dark companions and how to detect these. He also devised and built the torsion balance for determining the universal gravitational constant G. He died before having time to use it and it was passed to F. J. H. Wollaston, Jacksonian Professor at Cambridge and brother of W. H. Wollaston. Wollaston did not have time to use it and passed it on to Henry Cavendish, who used it at his house in Clapham, south London. Lord Brougham's account attributed the balance to Cavendish - an error which persists to this day. Michell died at Thornhill and is buried in the south chancel of St. Michael's church there, with a commemorative plaque nearby. [John Richard Sutton, The Rev. John Michell, astronomer and geologist, Knowledge 15 (1892) 188-191 & 206-208.]
In Throwleigh, a few miles from Chagford, there is a roof boss of the Tinners' Rabbits in the sixteenth-century north aisle of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. (Thanks to the Rector of Chagford and Throwleigh, P. Louis Baycock, for directing me to this site.)
Sir John Sinclair (1754-1835) was born at Thurso Castle, Caithness (now Highland). He was MP for Caithness, 1780-1784, later for Lostwithiel, Cornwall. His Statistical Account of Scotland (21 volumes, 1791-1799) introduced the words 'statistics' and 'statistical' into English. [Pritchard; James U. Thomson, Edinburgh Curiosities 2, John Donald Publishers, Edinburgh, 1997, pp.17-21]
See Charleston, above.
At Rocky Valley, about a mile north-east of Tintagel, are two ancient carved labyrinths on a rock wall. Map reference SX 073 893, reachable by walking the coast path from Tintagel toward Boscastle or by a path from the B3263 road by the Trout Farm. The dating is uncertain, ranging from about 2000BCE to 500CE. [Pennick, pp.24-25 & plate 3; Fisher, pp.13, 28 & 155, with colour photo on p.13, says the grooves are cut with an iron tool.]
William Froude (1810-1879) was the pioneer in the study of hydraulics and ship design, working for the Admiralty for many years. He introduced the idea of testing models of ship designs - based on Froude's Law which says that wave effects are similar if the velocity is reduced proportionally to the square root of the length. The Admiralty built him a testing tank at Torquay - see also Dumbarton. He also used Bidder's steam launch to tow models. Eponym of the Froude Number. [Clark, p.489]
Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) lived at "Homefield", Lower Warberry Road, Torquay, from 1908. See London for his work and early life, and Paignton and Newton Abbot, above. After the relative who kept house for him died in 1916, he lived alone, becoming even more reclusive than previously. He was frequently behind with his rates (= property taxes) and his gas was cut off several times, once for 15 months. The third volume of his Electromagnetic Theory appeared in 1912 and the set was reprinted in 1922 and 1925. Hon. Mem. American IEE in 1918. In 1923, the IEE awarded him its first Faraday Medal and the PIEE travelled to Torquay to present it to him. He died in a nursing home and was buried in Paignton. [Whittaker (3)]
The family of Charles Babbage (1791-1871) came from Totnes. A grandfather was Mayor in 1754 and is listed on the plaque of mayors in the Guildhall. Although born in London, Charles spent much of his childhood at the family home of Birdwood House, in the High Street, which is now a senior citizens centre. His father also owned an estate near Teignmouth, where young Charles also spent some time. He attended the Totnes (King Edward VI) Grammar School, which was then adjacent to the Guildhall. There is a Babbage Room in Elizabethan House (Totnes Elizabethan Museum), 70 Fore Street, TQ9 5RU, tel: 01803-863821, with an exhibition funded by ICL in 1971 and refurbished by ICL in 1986. This gives a nice survey of his life and his many inventions. There is an excellent descriptive leaflet. There are some first editions of his books, notably a presentation copy of his A Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives of 1826, the first treatise on actuarial theory. There is a life-sized model of Charles, aged about forty(?), apparently an excellent likeness. There is a copy of the well known 1860 photograph, presented by his son General Henry Babbage. Perhaps the most interesting item is a version of his 1851 occulting lighthouse mechanism made by Henry in 1899 and donated by a descendent. [Stanier, p.58; Museum leaflet]
Thomas Bodley (1545-1613), founder of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, married Ann Ball, a wealthy widow of 16 High Street, Totnes. Though he was already well off, his new wife's money helped fund the Library.
There is some material on William Froude (1810-1879), the hydraulics pioneer, cf Torquay, above.
In the church is a fourteenth-century tomb thought to commemorate Dafydd Ddu Hiraddug, "a poet and scientist" [Beazley & Howell, p.45]. Was he at all mathematical?
Donald Watts Davies (1924-2000) was born here, but moved to Portsmouth at the age of a few months.
Hamilton was educated at his uncle's school in Talbot's Castle, Trim [Spearman; Blue Guide; MGG].
See entry for Bayes under London
Twyford House, Twyford, was owned by Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph. In 1768, Benjamin Franklin came here and wrote the first part of his Autobiography. [Eastman, p.202; B. Bailey, p.90]
Written by David Singmaster. Last updated on 28th February 2003 by TM (A.Mann@gre.ac.uk). Copyright © BSHM and David Singmaster 1998 - 2003. All rights reserved.
The British Society for the History of Mathematics is registered as a company limited by guarantee, no. 3326816, and as a charity, no. 1061229. Its registered office is 39 High Street, Syresham, Northamptonshire NN13 5HL, UK.