Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [118]
On 20 February Huygens also wrote to Oldenburg disclosing the solution to the cipher: ‘The arbor of the moving ring [the balance wheel] is fixed at the centre of an iron spiral.’ He proceeded to enlarge on this with a verbal description:
The fact is, this invention consists of a spring coiled into a spiral, attached at the end of its middle [i.e. the interior end of the coil] to the arbor of a poised, circular balance which turns on its pivots; and at its other end to a piece that is fast to the watch-plate. Which spring, when the Ballance- wheel is once set a going, alternately shuts and opens its spires, and with the small help it hath from the watch-wheels, keeps up the motion of the Ballance-wheel, so as that, though it turn more or less, the times of its reciprocations are always equal to one another.7
London’s leading expert in timekeeper development, the Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, learned of Huygens’s claim to be the first to invent a spring-regulated clock while dining with Robert Boyle (son of the Earl of Cork, and a distinguished scientist who had once employed Hooke as his laboratory assistant) on 25 February 1675 (old style). The following day Hooke lodged a formal complaint at a meeting of the Royal Society. He reminded the members that he had himself produced spring-regulated clocks at their meetings on several occasions in the 1660s, and declared that Huygens’s version was ‘not worth a farthing’. The affair rumbled on for several years. In the end, Huygens’s priority claim was by and large accepted, even in England. Although, in spite of Oldenburg’s best efforts, he was never granted an English patent for his balance-spring watch, he was issued with patents or licences in France and the northern Netherlands, and is today generally credited with this significant innovation in horology.
But was this really how it was? Instead of rushing to look for a ‘winner’ in the ‘race’ to find a precise longitude timekeeper (a clock accurate enough over long periods to allow calculation of a vessel’s east–west position on the open sea), perhaps we should take our cue from the draft notes for a lecture by Hooke delivered around 1676, responding to Huygens’s ‘eureka moment’, and preserved in the treasure-trove of Sloane scientific papers in the British Library. In it he queries Huygens’s claim to single- handed solution of the problem:
He should also have Remembred that Golden Rule to doe to others as he would have others doe to him & not to have vaine gloriously & most Disingenuously Indeavourd to Deprive others of their Inventions that he might magnify himself and with the Jack Daw pride himself in the plumes of others.8
In the spirit of which, and in the light of the fact that my story so far has shown that there was a free flow of ideas and culture to and fro between London and The Hague throughout the period in question, I propose to take another look at the evidence, to try to decide whether Hooke might have been right. Did that Anglo–Dutch exchange of ideas effectively amount to an international collaboration, and ought the two men in fact have been given the credit for a groundbreaking horological invention, the balance-spring regulator for a pocket watch? The story begins in the Netherlands in the 1650s, almost twenty years before Huygens’s eureka moment.
Almost a decade after the execution of Charles I, and at the height of the English Commonwealth, the Scottish courtier Sir Robert Moray and his old friend Alexander Bruce (later 2nd Earl of Kincardine) were both living in exile in the Low Countries.9 Bruce was attached to the itinerant