Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [136]
I am told from England that Mr Hooke has taken up my objections against his machine in the first book of Philosophical Transactions which I hope will arrive on Sunday. We shall see what he says.
On 23 July Moray added a postscript to a letter to Oldenburg, written from Hampton Court, whence he was about to accompany the King to Salisbury:
I had almost forgot to desire you to send to Mr Hugens either the whole former Transaction [June issue], or so much of it as containes Hooks answer to Auzout & withall to let him know what Hook is doing as to his glasses [lenses and telescopes]. I have told him I would give you that task. L. Brounker will let you have hugens’s letter.43
The exchanges amongst this group shaped received opinion concerning the possibility of machine manufacture of precision lenses, and has continued to be treated as the authoritative account of the episode by historians of science ever since.44 Yet, although Hooke played a starring role in these exchanges, this was an extended conversation in which he had no direct voice, and over which he could exercise no control.
And although Hooke’s close friend Christopher Wren was in Paris throughout this period, in daily contact with the Auzout circle, he apparently did nothing to clarify the nature of Hooke’s machine, nor did he communicate the fact that Hooke was now absent from Royal Society circles. Wren was certainly consulted over the Auzout/Hooke affair. In April 1666 Auzout reported to Oldenburg that he had spoken to Wren shortly before he returned to England, concerning Hooke’s proposed method for increasing the focal length of lenses by filling the space between two lenses with liquid (a topic associated with the lens-grinding machine debate).45
By the end of July the Royal Society members had almost all dispersed because of the plague. Hooke, Wilkins and Petty were at Epsom, together with a substantial amount of experimental equipment, and assistant operators. Boyle was briefly with them, then retired to Oxford. Moray was with the King, first at Hampton Court, then at Oxford. For much of the period we are looking at Brouncker was on a ship off Greenwich seeing to navy business. Oldenburg stayed in London with his family, in a state of considerable agitation about the possibility of his succumbing to the plague (he made a will carefully separating his personal affairs from those of the Royal Society). During this time the Royal Society had two locations: a correspondence address with Oldenburg in London; and a transferred ‘real’ centre of operations in Oxford, where Moray and Boyle had established weekly meetings of a caucus of members.46 Huygens was in The Hague throughout, corresponding with Oldenburg, Moray and Auzout (his father, however, was in Paris for three months in early 1665).47
Wren visited Paris on behalf of Charles II, to inspect new building projects in train there, on 28 July 1665. We know he was frequently in the company of Auzout.48 From then on he provided a direct epistolary route for information from Auzout and his circle in Paris to both Oldenburg and Boyle.49
So we have an epistolary circuit of transmission, detailed explication, claim, counter-claim, assertion, surmise and response, which by mid-1665 has effectively developed a life of its own. The participating correspondents and the readers of the published versions are actually aware of only a small part of the network of exchanges which constitute the ‘controversy’, and the complex webs of influence these create.
Auzout and Oldenburg’s investment in all of this is pretty clear. From the Journal des sçavans in Paris and Philosophical Transactions in London was emerging an entirely new form of intellectual debate, one which reached beyond the bounds of coterie and nation into what was apparently a genuine Republic of Scientific Letters. Both Auzout and Oldenburg had a stake in establishing such an intellectual organ to enhance their own reputations,