In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 555-575 [Access article in PDF] Measurer of All Things:John Greaves (1602-1652), the Great Pyramid, and Early Modern Metrology Zur Shalev [Figures]Writing from Istanbul to Peter Turner, one of his colleagues at Merton College, Oxford, John Greaves was deeply worried: Onley I wonder that in so long time since I left England I should neither have received my brasse quadrant which I (...) left to be finished for my journey thither, nor any notice of it [...]. I agreed with mr. Allen upon price and the time that he should finish it, if he hath failed me he hath done me the greatest injury that can be. 1A great injury indeed, because Greaves's journey to Italy and the Levant was all about measuring—luckily the instrument did reach him at some later stage. The thirty-six-year-old Professor of Geometry at Gresham College was taking the measurements of countless monuments and objects in the locations he visited. In Rome he measured, among many other ancient structures, Cestius' Pyramid and St. Peter's basilica. In Lucca, deeply impressed, he counted his paces around the beautiful city walls. In Siena he observed together with a "Mathematical Professor" one of the Sidera Medicea using "a glass." In Egypt he even hurt his eyes gazing at the sun, looking for sunspots and measuring its diameter. 2 His measuring mission, however, culminated in the fixing of the [End Page 555] latitudes of Istanbul, Rhodes, and Alexandria. As Bishop Juxton wrote before the trip to Greaves's employers at Gresham College (apparently using Greaves's own promotional language): This worke I find by the best astronomers, especially by Ticho Brache [ sic ] and Kepler, hath beene much desired as tending to the advancement of that science, and I hope it wil be an honour to that nation and prove ours if we first observe it. 3A mathematician-Orientalist, commanding the ancient and modern astronomical and geographical literature of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian authors, Greaves was arguably the best qualified European at the period to perform the task. That he miscalculated the latitude of Rhodes is of less consequence for his present-day readers. 4 However, one of the most obscure and therefore telling of his measurement activities was the survey of the Pyramids of Giza, which resulted in the Pyramidographia (1646). 5 This remarkable learned treatise and travel account hybrid, which is at the focus of the present study, gives us a glimpse into the rich and complex world of scientific antiquarians.Greaves is most conveniently remembered today as an Orientalist. While we must be thankful to Edward Said for broadening the meaning of Orient-alism—from an academic discipline, accumulating objective knowledge of the East, into a much wider cultural discourse, his emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the European colonial mindset is less useful for making historical sense of what early modern Orientalists were doing—physically and culturally. We can understand Greaves's "Oriental" enterprise in its [End Page 556] depth and variety only within long established European traditions of scholarship and keeping the intellectual concerns of his time in mind. 6But beyond articulating for us the nature of early Orientalism, the Pyramidographia, as well as Greaves's entire scientific career, situated in their wider European context, provide a fine entry point into a foreign world of learned practices and methods. It teaches us how well into the seventeenth century astronomy and philology, observation and bookishness, could coalesce in one figure, in one enterprise. 7 We still lack a modern biography of Greaves, a complex protagonist of a complex period, and even a full evaluation of his intellectual work. While this paper surely cannot compensate for that, I do attempt here a brief exposition of Greaves's Pyramidographia. 8Modern historians of archaeology and Egyptology, preoccupied mostly with the disciplines' progress and development of scientific standards, have noted the Pyramidographia in passing and praised its precise language and rigorous research... (shrink)

In December of 1675, in a desperate race with Christiaan Huygens over a patent for a spring-regulated watch, Robert Hooke, FRS characterized the clock maker Thomas Tompion as a ‘Slug’, a ‘Clownish Churlish Dog’ and a ‘Rascall’, because Tompion was making a watch of Hooke's design too slowly for the latter's taste. It was Hooke's watch, not Tompion's; Hooke was the patron and Tompion the client. Fifty years later Tompion's apprentice, George Graham, made watches and clocks and quadrants for other (...) Fellows of the Royal Society, yet these instruments were known as Graham's clocks and Graham's quadrants. Language such as Hooke had used towards Tompion was inconceivable towards Graham; he was a member of the Royal Society's governing body, the Council, and had published several significant papers in the Society's journal, the Philosophical Transactions, in which his testimony on and experiments in astronomy, magnetism, horology and metrology were unquestioned. Yet in the early decades of the eighteenth century one could still go to his shop in London's Strand and buy a watch or a clock from him. Like Tompion, George Graham, FRS was a shopkeeper. Nor was he alone in the eighteenth century, at that supposed bastion of gentlemen, the Royal Society. Nearly two-thirds of the membership had to work for a living in one way or another, some rather grandly as high government officials, senior army officers, clerics with ample livings and physicians and lawyers with large and successful London practices ; others more modestly as sailors, surgeons, apothecaries, schoolteachers, engineers, attorneys and instrument-makers. The latter group included some of the most scientifically eminent members of the Royal Society in the eighteenth century: the sailor James Cook , the printer Benjamin Franklin , the teacher and preacher Joseph Priestley , the instrument-maker and engineer James Watt , the musician William Herschel , and the silk weaver and optician John Dollond . None of these men were gentlemen yet they made science and were acknowledged to have done so; their papers were published and their best work awarded medals. (shrink)

Francesco Algarotti's Newtonianism for Ladies , a series of lively dialogues on optics, was a landmark in the popularization of Newtonian philosophy. In this essay I shall explore Algarotti's sociocultural world, his aims and ambitions, and the meaning he attached to his own work. In particular I shall focus on Algarotti's self-promotional strategies, his deployment of gendered images and his use of popular philosophy within the broader cultural and experimental campaign for the success of Newtonianism. Finally, I shall suggest a (...) radical reading of the dialogues, reconstructing the process that brought them to their religious condemnation. What did Newtonianism mean to Algarotti? In opposition to mainstream apologetic interpretations, he seems to have framed the new experimental methodology in a sensationalistic epistemology derived mainly from Locke, pointing at a series of subversive religious and political implications. Due to the intervention of religious authorities Algarotti's radical Newtonianism became gradually less visible in subsequent editions and translations. It is only through the study of the first – clandestine – edition of the dialogues that one can begin reconstructing the meaning of Algarotti's experiments and his cultural battle for a regenerated Europe. (shrink)