Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [123]
A flurry of letters from Bruce and Sir Robert Moray to Huygens followed, detailing what had happened during the trials, and describing work the two Scots were now carrying out together in London to improve the clocks’ performance against the next trials. On 9/19 January Moray wrote to Huygens from London to tell him that he and Bruce were in discussions about ‘your clocks’, and ‘the design which would make them succeed at sea’. More modifications, then, were being undertaken, this time with the help of the English clockmaker Ahasuerus Fromanteel, whose son John had recently returned from several years’ training in The Hague, learning to manufacture the new pendulum clocks with Huygens’s original clockmaker Salomon Coster.47 The clock which had fallen during the journey was too badly damaged to be repaired, and was replaced by one entirely manufactured in London by Fromanteel.
‘I advised [Mr Bruce] to try the clocks two at a time,’ wrote Moray to Huygens, ‘and to adjust them well beforehand on land.’48 This must have irritated Huygens, who had made precisely these preparations before Bruce set sail.49 He replied immediately, assuring Moray that Bruce had already told him exactly what had happened to the clocks, and that he, Huygens, was undeterred and keen to conduct further, longer-distance trials. In a postscript he added that he was about to write to Bruce, as soon as he had finished some further modifications to ‘my clock’.50
On 16 January 1663 (old style) Bruce wrote to tell Huygens that the damaged clocks were about to arrive (they had been held up at customs): ‘I expect them to morrow and then I shall show them to Sir Robert Moray & lett yow know their [his] opinions of them.’51 Huygens remained optimistic. ‘The lack of success you have had does not bother me,’ he responded, ‘nor does it diminish my good opinion of our undertaking’.52 He told Bruce that he had begun modifying his clock design in consultation with his Dutch clockmaker Severijn Oosterwijk, and would let him know how the improved mechanisms behaved.53
At the beginning of March 1663, Moray wrote to Huygens letting him know that he and Bruce were going to conduct further trials ‘at sea, going as far as the Dunes, to try out Mr Bruce’s clocks, which he is trying to adjust to the best of his ability’.54 (Note that for Moray, ‘your clocks’ (Huygens’s) have now become ‘Mr Bruce’s clocks’, though essentially the same two timepieces are involved.) The usually conciliatory and tentative Moray continues, somewhat testily:
You are right in saying that the movement of large boats is gentler than that of small ones, but in heavy swells, particularly when the wind is head on, or when the ship is at anchor, the shocks are stronger and more violent. But what I fear most is not the agitation the ship gives to the whole body of the clock (though I am worried that that may have its effect also) but rather that the sudden movements of the ship downwards, and in the contrary direction, which in the one case will make the pendulum slow down, in the other will accelerate it, sometimes making it heavier, sometimes lighter, and either way unequally, which it seems to me is bound to cause deregulation in the mouvement of the clock’s mechanism. But it still seems worth testing this experimentally.55
This critical commentary on the whole Bruce–Huygens