1660 - Modern Mindset

Christiaan Huygens, natural philosopher, 31 years old, expressing scholars’ debt to René Descartes (†1650), figurehead of Rationalism

Twelve outstanding natural philosophers, as we call the ones who study nature, a team of men bound by scholarly debates for years, held a landmark meeting in London. They initiated a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning. They also decided to gather every week for this great and plain purpose. King Charles II, 30 years old and especially keen on science, has conveyed his agreement to the new body.

¤ Fourteen years ago, Robert Boyle, a polymath, chiefly a chemist, 19 years old then, started with gathering young scholars around him within an invisible college of natural philosophers. He also promoted experiments as necessary pieces of evidence which base knowledge. Hence the motto chosen by his followers : 'Nullius in Verba', that is 'Nobody on their Word' .

¤ Noticeable members of the college : Robert Boyle, a chemist, aged 33 ; William Brouncker, a mathematician and a civil servant in the Royal Navy, aged 40 ; Christopher Wren, a polymath, chiefly an astronomer for the time being, aged 28 ; Lawrence Rooke, an astronomer aged 38 ; Robert Hooke, a polymath aged 25 ; John Wallis a mathematician aged 44 ; John Evelyn, a gardener and a courtier aged 40 ; William Petty, a mathematician aged 37.

Three years ago, in Paris, a salon of scholars formally became the Académie Montmor under Henri Louis Habert de Montmor’s patronage. Montmor, 60, is an erudite of Rationalism trend, Descartes' follower of course, great friend of Mathematician Marin Mersenne (†1648) and of Astronomer Pierre Gassendi (†1655).

¤ Mersenne founded the Academia Parisiensis in 1635. It was a science hub, a gazette of sorts, thanks to Mersenne's prolific pen in French and Latin directed to his abundant high-profile correspondents : Descartes, Gassendi, Evangelista Torricelli (†1647), Astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (†1637), Mathematician Pierre de Fermat, Astronomer Gottfried Wendelin...

¤ Noticeable members of the academy Montmor : Christiaan Huygens, a polymath aged 31 by now ; Adrien Auzout, an astronomer aged 38 ; Bernard Frenicle de Bessy, a mathematician aged 54 ; Gilles Personne de Roberval, a mathematician aged 58 ; Melchisedech Thévenot, a diplomat and cartographer aged 40 ; Pierre Daniel Huet, a philosopher aged 40.

Astronomy, geodesy, geography, botany, zoology, chemistry, mechanics, physics, geometry and calculus are master issues for the members of both societies. It is nevertheless commonplace to consider that our 17th century is a feeble continuation of the Renaissance, especially about art and technique. Indeed a few geniuses of the Quattrocento as Francesco di Giorgio Martini (†1501) or Leonardo da Vinci (†1519) excelled jointly in art and technique, combining drawing, painting, architecture and engineering at their peak, stemming from a unique source of ingenuity, ‘disegno’ – that is design.

¤ Leonardo may be interested in science too. He wrote in his notes that the sun does not move around the earth. It was years before Mikolaj Kopernik (†1543). We do not know what pattern led him to that result. Is there a sketch which supports this view ?

¤ What about shipbuilding within the range of arts and techniques ?

When they come to admire a naval shipwright, experts and connoisseurs speak of the sharpness of his eye, bringing to the fore either a gift of God or the outstanding fruit of experience, anyway some exceptional talent - a combination of skills which escapes precise definition and cannot result from any syllabus. This is a craft or, at its peak, an art form.

For ages, its practitioners have largely relied on tradition, which means imitation and repetition, and on empiricism for quite limited changes. But, during the last century, trade expansion has put some pressure on them : shipowners have been demanding more tonnage so shipwrights have been responding as they could. Industry has become their horizon of thought : on the most advanced dockyards, that are the Dutch and the English ones, ships have been adapted to specific cargo and to particular sea routes. Serial building has also developed. Warships have split off from merchant vessels to acquire specific features.

As for design, it is worth noting that, in traditional shipbuilding, there is no phase of study on a drawing board. It is performed at full scale : the successive frames are deduced from the main one through graphical tools. Hull ends require the sharp eye mentioned above for the profile of waterlines. They are guesstimated - let us say that they are envisioned by the happy few endowed with a sharp eye - and carved accordingly. Draught, hull trim and smoothness of the waterlines rest on respect of proportions in the light of sound tradition and of decent extrapolation. They are expected rather than genuinely deliberated.

Let us come back to design. One must confess that the sort of genius mastering art, technique and some science, as Vinci, went extinct. The art studio is no longer the place where thoughts take form. Laboratory and observatory have surfaced as the new work benches for thinkers. Science instruments have multiplied after books. Swiftly perceiving the matter gist is no longer the goal, but reaching in-depth insight instead.

Henceforth our intellectual figureheads are still polymaths but their wits ride over a wide scope of scholarly issues. Descartes sunk in philosophy, mathematics and physics at the deepest level. Blaise Pascal, 37 years old, follows on the same tracks and has even added hard technique to his bow by inventing and building in 1642 – he was 19 then – a mechanical calculator, the first device of this sort which effectively worked. Galileo Galilei (†1642), led the way : he built in 1609 his own telescope which permitted him to discover three satellites of Jupiter the following year. For this purpose, he improved the refracting telescope invented a year earlier by Hans Lipperhey (†1619) by introducing negative lens for the eyepiece.

¤ Galilei offered Gassendi a telescope of his own, that Gassendi passed to Montmor. Was it the prototype that went to Montmor ?

In general, there is no disdain to practical tasks amongst modern scholars. A mathematician like Simon Stevin (†1620) intervened to free the Polish port of Gdansk from sand in 1591, which may appear as rather remote from intellectual speculation. He was a recidivist. Beforehand he had improved efficiency of the windmills pumping water from the Dutch polders and had been appointed to manage the waterways.

Besides the scholar who gets a hands-on experience on concrete questions, we can also notice the appearance of the one who intends to expose the craftsman the secrets of one’s trade from an informed standpoint. Georges Fournier (†1652) was emblematic for the nautical domain. A priest and a mathematician, the chaplain of the French fleet, he wrote in 1642 a key work, Hydrographie, the first treatise on naval matters from the viewpoint of a scholarly observer.

This is the essence of our modern mindset to look into every question to offer it a scholarly perspective, a methodic and somewhat fastidious unravelling of hidden issues to disentangle a tiny secret. Science & technique go on that way henceforth.

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IN RETROSPECT FROM TODAY

NOTE A - On the College of Natural Philosophers.

Having been granted a charter by King Charles in 1662, it becomes the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, better known in short as the Royal Society. Its first President is Brouncker, its first Secretary Heinrich Oldenburg (†1677), a diplomat of German origin linked with Boyle, and his first Curator of Experiments, Hooke. It is still existing as everybody knows.

NOTE B - On the Académie Montmor.

It collapses in 1664. At once, Auzout reports to King Louis XIV that there is a college of scholars used to working together, able and ready to pilot such topics as the necessary establishment of an observatory in Paris. Matching the Royal Society and its concurrent project of observatory supplies the ultimate argument. Thus Jean- Baptiste Colbert, 47 years old then, kingpin in finances questions, convinced of the key role of science to improve industry, trade and navigation which all depend on his ministry, establishes in 1666 the Académie Royale des Sciences under the patronage of the king, aged 28 then.

NOTE C - About Descartes & Spinoza.

As everybody knows, Descartes gave an important contribution to theoretical optics. It happens that his continuator in rationalism, Baruch Spinoza (†1677), proves to be a renowned practical optician to the point of establishing in 1661 a workshop to build lenses for science instruments, then after a few years to assemble telescopes and microscopes. Huygens was a professional acquaintance for lens grinding.

NOTE D - About Pascal.

Often depicted as a mystical ascetic focused on faith and salvation, Pascal is actually very busy during the last year of his life, in 1661-62, with establishing and running a company of public transport by coaches riding at fixed schedule along five defined lines within Paris, known by the fare as the carrosses à cinq sols. This is a premiere worldwide. A typical mastermind of his era, he shares his time between running the company and writing his theological-philosophical reflections for an Apologie de la Religion Chrétienne which will be assembled with other notes to form the Pensées, published posthumously in 1670. The company will fail some time later, before 1677, owing to the restrictions imposed by the Parliament of Paris to prevent the humble folk from taking the coach – a betrayal of Pascal’s views and of public interest.

NOTE E - On the stead of nautical questions.

In England, a tie between the Navy and the Royal Society exists from the beginning in the persons of its patron, King Charles, and of its first president, Brouncker. Samuel Pepys, another key civil servant in the navy, will join the Royal Society in 1665 and will call on prominent scholars as John Wallis, William Petty, Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton on nautical questions. They will prove to be highly interested in these topics, especially Halley. In France, Colbert then his son and successor Seignelay also try to give the nautical questions a learned turn. They do not live to see the results but it will lead to achievements during the following century.

This is in France, where shipbuilding legacy is still thin, that most effort is made to collate proportions which happen to work properly and to standardise ship types. Craft must be adapted to unprecedented ships in terms of sizes and of hull shapes. Construction of a hundred ships in the 1660s and 1670s supplies a wide field of experience, which is collated within a succession of regulations to direct naval construction in 1670, 1671, 1673 and 1689. In England, the same concern surfaces in the king's initiative of standardisation at the opportunity of the shipbuilding programme of 1677, then in some Navy Board's attempt for the programme of 1691.

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SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Georges Fournier – Hydrographie, contenant la théorie et la practique de toutes les parties de la Navigation – Paris, 1643 - available on the Internet

Roland Mousnier – Les XVIe et XVIIe siècles in Histoire Générale des Civilisations, tome IV – Paris, 1953

Bertrand Gille – Les Ingénieurs de la Renaissance – Paris, 1960

Eric Rieth – De la Fabrica di Galere (XVe siècle) au traité de C. Dassié (1677) : rupture ou tradition? in minutes of lectures given in 1992 and gathered in the volume L'Invention du Vaisseau de Ligne 1450-1700 - Nantes, 1997

John Roberts & Odd Westad – The Penguin History of the World – London, 2013

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CREDITS

Frans Hals - René Descartes - oil on canvas, 1649 - © Musée du Louvre

Johann Kerseboom (Kirschbaum) - Robert Boyle - oil on canvas, after 1680 - © National Portrait Gallery