The Science of Shakespeare (18 page)

SCIENCE FIT FOR A QUEEN (AND A KING)

At least some measure of what we would today call “science literacy” filtered through all levels of society, including the very top. Queen Elizabeth herself was something of a science buff. We have already noted her consultations with Thomas Digges, as well as her close association with John Dee, who advised her on both astronomy and astrology. According to Bacon, Elizabeth read extensively about the philosophical and scientific ideas of the day: “This lady was endued with learning in her sex singular, and rare even amongst masculine princes,” he wrote, “whether we speak of learning, of language, or of science, modern and ancient, divinity or humanity: and unto the very last year of her life she accustomed to appoint set hours for reading, scarcely any young student in a university more daily or more duly.”

We also know that Elizabeth showed an interest in the latest gadgets and gizmos, at one point commissioning the construction of a complex set of musical chimes. She even wore a tiny “alarm watch” on her finger; at the appointed hour, a small prong would extend and give a gentle poke. Of course, timepieces weren't just any gadgets; they were, in fact, among the most sophisticated mechanical devices of the age. The first mechanical clocks had appeared in the late thirteenth century, with the first pocket watches dating from the early 1500s. (I explore the history of clocks and timekeeping in some detail in Chapter 5 of my earlier book
In Search of Time
.) But clockwork wasn't just for clocks: A German visitor, strolling along Whitehall in 1598, described a sophisticated “jet-d'eau” which splashed passers-by: It employed “a quantity of water, forced by a wheel, which the gardener turns at a distance, through a number of little pipes” and “plentifully sprinkles those that are standing around.”

Elizabeth's successor, James I, was even more passionate about science and technology. He admired the work of Kepler and Tycho—as mentioned, he once visited Tycho at his island observatory—and even composed a brief verse in praise of the Danish astronomer.
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Elaborate mechanical devices held him in awe. Word of his interest reached the Continent, and in 1609 Rudolf II, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, presented James with a clock and a celestial globe. James's son, Prince Henry, seems to have shared his father's scientific leanings. As Scott Maisano has pointed out, the young Henry relished visits from French and Italian engineers and inventors, and acquired a substantial library; in 1610 he even asked an Italian contact for “the latest book by Galileo.” (Henry would have inherited the throne had he not died of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen; the crown would instead pass to his younger brother, Charles.)

James's relationship with the Dutch scientist Cornelis Drebbel is especially noteworthy. Drebbel moved to London in 1604, at James's request, and presented the king with a (purported) perpetual motion machine—apparently a sophisticated clockwork mechanism that displayed the time, date, and season. The Dutchman is also remembered for building the first working submarines. Using plans drawn up by mathematician William Bourne, Drebbel built and demonstrated a series of underwater craft during his time in London. The craft were built from wood and covered with grease-soaked leather, and employed pigskin bladders that could be filled with water or emptied in order to dive and to ascend, while oars provided forward propulsion. The largest of these vessels is said to have carried up to sixteen passengers and crew, and could remain underwater for three hours—long enough to travel from Westminster to Greenwich and back, at a depth of about fifteen feet—with those on board breathing through a hollow tube that reached the surface.
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When James himself was offered a ride, he became the first king in history to travel underwater.

*   *   *

The submarine was of course a novelty—
too novel even for the navy to fund further research at this early stage—but just about everything else involving the seas and navigation was regarded as a national priority. This push for maritime supremacy was inexorably linked to the English drive to explore and exploit the New World, which had begun under Elizabeth and continued under James, and to defend trade routes, particularly against competing Spanish, French, and Dutch forces. The attempted English settlement on Roanoke Island (in present-day North Carolina) failed, but the later effort at Jamestown, Virginia, succeeded, giving England a permanent presence in America from 1607. A second foothold to the north—at Plymouth, on Massachusetts Bay—would be established in 1620. But the colonies were a small operation in a vast and distant land, and in Elizabeth's time, the New World was almost completely unexplored. (That is, unexplored from the European point of view; the natives who had been living there for millennia of course knew parts of the Continent quite well.) The various Englishmen who helped to explore the American continent are well known, the figure of Sir Walter Raleigh being almost a household name (and deservedly so; he was a poet, linguist, philosopher, astronomer, and all-around man of action). Less well known is the scientist who sailed to the New World under his patronage, a man of multiple talents named Thomas Harriot (ca. 1560–1621).

EXPLORING A NEWFOUND LAND

Harriot was probably born in or near Oxford. He enrolled at the university at the age of seventeen, taking his entrance oath at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. He lived and studied nearby, at St. Mary's Hall. (The church is still there, and still looks much as it did in Harriot's day. St. Mary's Hall—not actually a building but rather a kind of collective—has since been absorbed into Oriel College.) Graduating in 1580, Harriot moved to London, and soon after began working for Raleigh, teaching mathematics and navigation to Raleigh's sailors. He set out across the Atlantic with Raleigh's men in 1585, acting as chief scientist and surveyor for the new colony of Virginia. His observations of the new land and its people appeared in a book called
A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
, published in 1588—the first book about the New World to be printed in English.

Harriot turned out to be an acute observer: He described in detail the vegetation, animal life, and natural resources of the land, and took an intense interest in the indigenous people he encountered. He studied native customs and religious practices, and learned the Algonquin language, even developing a system for transliterating Algonquin words into English so they could be written down. He also may have taken a telescope-like device with him on the voyage. Harriot notes that on the tenth day at sea—a short way into the eleven-week voyage—he observed a solar eclipse from the deck of his ship. Whether he used his optical device to aid in observing the eclipse, we simply don't know; but he definitely showed off some kind of optical instrument to the native people that he encountered in America. He mentions a number of objects which he says fascinated the local inhabitants, including “a perspective glasse whereby was shewd manie strange sightes.” The natives were also much taken with the guns, books, and clocks that he showed them, all of which “were so strange to them, and so far exceedeth their capacities to comprehend … that they thought they were rather the works of Gods rather than of men.…” Harriot was accompanied on the voyage by an artist named John White, whose detailed sketches would appear alongside the scientist's text in
A Briefe and True Report.
The book was partly propaganda; one of its aims was to encourage settlement, and to portray the new lands as bountiful and rich. Yet Harriot himself was more engaged in the new land and its people than many other early European visitors were.

After spending just over a year in Virginia, Harriot returned to England. He continued to work for Raleigh, living briefly in Ireland, where he administered one of Raleigh's estates. He then returned to London, where, beginning in 1595, he found employment with a new patron, Henry Percy, the Ninth Earl of Northumberland, known as “the Wizard Earl” because of his passion for science.

ENGLAND'S GALILEO (ALMOST)

Over the next decade or so, Harriot seems to have developed a keen interest in astronomy. In 1607 he made naked-eye observations of the comet now known as Halley's Comet (long before Edmond Halley's birth). Soon—probably sometime in the summer of 1609—he began to use a new invention from Holland, the telescope, to study the night sky. Clearly this device was different from the perspective glasses that he and other English scientists had been using in earlier decades, and that he had taken to Virginia nearly twenty-five years earlier. Whether it was an improvement on a familiar device or an entirely new design isn't clear—but it definitely opened up new vistas in a way that the earlier instruments had not. Using a device that magnified celestial objects by a factor of six, Harriot was able to sketch the surface of the moon, observe sunspots, and determine the sun's rotation speed. He also observed the moons of Jupiter, calculating their orbits, and observed the phases of Venus.

This was around the same time that Galileo was making his groundbreaking observations in Italy—the observations that would end up in
The Starry Messenger
, published in 1610—and it is only natural to ask who was first. While some of Harriot's observations postdate those of Galileo, his study of the moon, at least, seems to come first. One of his lunar drawings is dated July 26, 1609, while Galileo's first observations likely date from November or December of that year. Allan Chapman writes, “As far as we can tell from the historical record … it was Thomas Harriot who became the first person to look at an astronomical body through a telescope, on or before 1609 July 26, when he came to realize that the image of the moon produced by it was very different from what was seen by the naked eye, although he did not publish his discovery.” The big difference, of course, is that while Galileo shouted his discoveries from the mountaintops, so to speak, Harriot kept his findings under wraps, perhaps telling a few trusted associates but no one else. (Indeed, more than 150 years would pass before Harriot was recognized for his astronomical work. His manuscripts are now in the British Museum, and at Pentworth House in Wiltshire.)

However, he had enough of a reputation in his day that if someone in England wanted a telescope, Harriot was known as the man to ask. Correspondence between Harriot and Sir William Lower, an astronomer and member of Parliament, has survived, and shows that by February 1610—still a month before the publication of Galileo's book—Lower was using telescopes supplied by Harriot to observe the moon. The letters also reveal that Harriot had received a copy of
The Starry Messenger
soon after it was written; indeed, within three months of the book's publication, he had summarized its contents to Lower, and Lower had written back. Clearly, the publication of Galileo's book marked a turning point (which we will examine more closely in Chapter 9).

Fig. 5.1
The grounds of Syon House, in west London, part of the Earl of Northumberland's estate. In the late sixteenth century, it was home to the ninth earl, Henry Percy, patron of astronomer Thomas Harriot. It was from here that Harriot observed the night sky with a telescope—beginning, it seems, a few months ahead of Galileo. Author photo

Although Harriot had been making telescopic observations of the night sky before reading the Italian scientist's book, his encounter with
The Starry Messenger
seems to have sparked a renewed interest in all things astronomical, and he appears to have begun a regular observing program at this time. We know that from 1610 to 1613 Harriot made numerous astronomical observations, most of them carried out from the grounds of Syon House, Northumberland's grand estate near Richmond, on the outskirts of London (
figure 5.1
). He made detailed maps of the lunar surface, produced nearly a hundred drawings of Jupiter with its four bright moons, and made several dozen drawings of the surface of the sun. We might note that his drawing of the full moon, likely dating from the summer of 1610, is, arguably,
better
than Galileo's (compare
figure 5.2
with
figure 9.1
). Though he doesn't have Galileo's knack for realistic, three-dimensional topography, Harriot does a better job of showing various prominent craters and the lunar “seas” (now known to be plains of hardened lava) in their true positions. (Perhaps, having seen Galileo's engravings by this point, he had become more confident of his own observing skills.)

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Harriot kept up
a diligent correspondence with other like-minded scientists of the day—including Kepler (at that time living in Prague), with whom he discussed optical theory and techniques for building telescopes. Within England, he had a diverse array of protégés who watched the sky and reported back to him. By the time of his death, Harriot had accumulated a sizable collection of telescopes, which he bequeathed to his friends and patrons. His will states that he left to the Earl of Northumberland his “two perspective trunks wherewith I use to see Venus horned like the Moone and spotts on the Sonne.”