Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [197]
22 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.213.
23 Huygens had already made a note to himself to make the iron circle a modification in his own machine six months earlier.
24 13 September 1664 (Huygens archive, Leiden). In October 1665 Moray (in Oxford) reported to Huygens that Oldenburg had informed him by letter that trials were revealing further problems (Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, pp.503–6).
25 For the intimate (indeed, passionately affective) tone of these letters, at least in the early days of the correspondence, see the first letter sent by Moray, 31 May 1661 (Huygens archive, Leiden; also transcribed in Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes).
26 This is confirmed by the fact that on 2 November 1664 Hooke was admonished to ‘endeavour to have his new instrument for grinding optic-glasses ready against the next meeting’ (T. Birch, A History of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, from its first Rise, 4 vols (London, 1756) 1, p.483).
27 McKeon, Établissement de l’Astronome de Précision 2, pp.209–10.
28 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.156. See McKeon 1965 2, pp.111–12.
29 This interest in Campani’s techniques for making high-accuracy telescopes formed part of a larger debate about the Copernican theory of planetary motion, and the Inquisition’s attitude towards it. See for instance the review of Auzout’s Lettre à Monsieur l’Abbé Charles (Paris, 1665) in the Journal des sçavans of 11 January 1666.
30 See McKeon, Établissement de l’Astronome de Précision 2, p.211.
31 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.174, 25 December 1664. McKeon 1965 2, p.112.
32 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.198, minute of a letter dated 15 January 1665.
33 On 2 January 1665 Huygens wrote to Moray impatiently asking for more information about Hooke’s working model of the lathe. He described how, in his own trials, he did better by keeping the circle fixed. Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.186. See also ibid., p.346, and Oeuvres Complètes 22, pp.82–4.
34 This was not the only ‘leak’ of Hooke’s lens-grinding machine. See Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.306.
35 Ibid., pp.441–2.
36 Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle 2, p.493.
37 During the early months of the plague exchange of letters between London and the rest of England was hampered by anxieties over infection.
38 Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.529.
39 Ibid., p.538.
40 Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle 2, pp.610–11.
41 Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.474. The original is bound in the back of a copy of A. Auzout, Réponse de Monsieur Hook aux considerations de M. Auzout. Contenue dans vne lettre écrite à l’auteur des Philosophical Transactions, et quelques lettres écrites de part & d’autre sur le sujet des grandes lunetes. Traduite d’anglois (Paris, 1665), in the BL.
42 Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.516 (author’s translation).
43 Ibid., pp.447, 448, 452–3.
44 The Halls’ annotations to the letters in the Oldenburg Correspondence treat Hooke’s contribution consistently as if it were an ill-conceived and botched project, and as if Auzout were self-evidently correct in all his criticisms.
45 Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.83. Wren’s position was presumably not helped by the fact that he had recently had to concede Huygens’s superior talent as an observational and theoretical astronomer, when Huygens’s model for the rings of Saturn was demonstrably more plausible than the one Wren had himself come up with.
46 See Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle 2, p.544, Boyle to Oldenburg, 30 September 1665.
47 Christiaan Huygens’s father is a key figure in the establishing of his official scientific position in Paris. Several letters show Huygens thanking the King for allowing his father’s intercession on his behalf in the matter