During the 1680s Huygens's pendulum clocks were involved in two episodes: (i) the great debate between Huygens and Newton over universal gravity and the search for longitude with Huygens’s pendulum clocks, which was arguably the most important technological issue for a country -- the Dutch Republic -- dependent on commerce by sea. The two episodes are linked because in 1690, in his major public response to the Principia, in his Discourse on the Cause of Gravity, Huygens appealed to the evidence provided by his clocks on Thomas Helder’s 1686-7 expedition to the Cape of Good Hope aboard the Dutch East India Company [hereafter: VOC] ship, Alcmaer, to argue against Newton and for his own theory of gravity. The Principia had appeared in 1686. For the details of this story I refer you to the paper I wrote with George E. Smith.
As it happens the recipient of Huygens’s 1688 report was Johannes Hudde; a world class, Cartesian mathematician and natural philosopher of the astounding generation of students of the Leiden professor Van Schooten (who had introduced Descartes's mathematics to a wide European audience); this group included, in addition to Huygens, Johan de Witt. By 1688 Hudde had improved the waterworks of Amsterdam, introduced fire-hoses, was the leading director of the VOC, and, thereby, one the most powerful politician in Holland—as one of the Mayors of Amsterdam, he basically arranged the means for Stadtholder William III of Orange to invade England. (Amsterdam remembers him with a small street near the Amstel-hotel.) He also maintained a secretive correspondence with Spinoza over God’s nature and existence.[i]
Hudde was thus in an excellent position to support and evaluate Huygens’s efforts to build a working pendulum clock that could find longitude at sea. In my original paper with Smith, we note that in his 1688 report Huygens’s recommends to the Directors of the Dutch East India Company that major efforts be undertaken to determine longitudes for numerous locations, using eclipses of the innermost satellite of Jupiter:
And although these errors will be improved upon before long through the use of the [pendulum] clocks, it would still be very helpful if one investigated the true longitude at some important places with regard to the Meridian of Texel or Amsterdam, by observing the satellites of Jupiter... [Translated by G.E. Smith & Eric Schliesser][ii]
The Dutch East India Company never followed up on this big-science-grant proposal. By contrast, the French were already engaged in such a project. It is noteworthy that after Huygens died in 1695, the Hudde-led VOC basically dropped further research into using clocks to find longitude. This despite the fact that Huygens had built up a twenty year technological lead over any competition. While his clocks had not been vindicated in sea trials, the results were at least promising enough to continue research and trials. While Leiden University maintained its position as an important educational center in mathematics and natural philosophy through the middle of the eighteenth century, it did not develop a critical mass in research.
Even to this day, some Dutch politicians extol the "VOC mentality." Given the many immoral activities of the Company, including non trivial participation in slave trade (in the East Indies not the transatlantic one) and its monopolistic rent-seeking this is shocking enough. But Dutch decline set in, in part, because of Hudde’s failure to develop and maintain a strategic, scientific infrastructure that would engage in technologically significant foundational research. Perhaps, British demographic advantage would have made Dutch relative decline inevitable anyway, but it is also possible that a more dynamic approach to 'science policy' could have staved it off for quite some time.
[i] Klever, W. N. A. (1997). Mannen rond Spinoza, 1650-1700: presentatie van een emanciperende generatie. Uitgeverij Verloren.
Comments