Abstract
Mainly known as an astronomer and author of accurate lunar tables, Tobias Mayer (1723–62) was also one of the most notable cartographers of the eighteenth century and he also contributed to mathematics and architecture.
The present volume presents revised versions of papers from a 2012 conference held in Mayer’s birthplace, Marbach/Neckar, on the 250th anniversary his death. As indicated in the title, the authors of the sixteen papers offer new insights about Mayer’s life and science in its historical context. Two papers (Wepster and Batten) are in English, the others are in German with English abstracts. The book opens with two articles about Mayer’s biography: a short survey of Mayer’s life and scientific career by Erhard Anthes, followed by Albrecht Gühring on Mayer’s ancestors, his family and their property in Marbach. The remaining papers are devoted to Mayer as a scientist.
Steven A. Wepster outlines Mayer’s career as a mathematician. Klaus Jordan describes Mayer’s contributions to military architecture and fortification. Five papers focus on issues related to astronomy: Axel Wittmann on Mayer’s Catalogue of zodiacal stars; Helmut Knopp on the importance of Mayer’s work for astronomical navigation and his method of predicting the position of the Moon with a precision sufficient to calculate geographical longitude; Günther Oestmann on the instrument maker Gemma Frisius (1508–55) who was the first to describe a method of determining longitude at sea by transporting the time of a departure meridian to the location of observation; Gerhard Betsch, Siegfried Erb and Werner Quehl on an early method for determining longitude that was suggested in 1629 by Wilhelm Schickard (1592–1635) and published by Johann Jacob Zimmermann in 1699; and Gudrun Wolfschmidt on Mayer’s work on lunar topography, his Moon charts and invention of the repetition circle, a precision instrument for measuring angles.
Mayer’s achievements in cartography are emphasized in six papers: Joachim Neumann on figures and cartographic projections in Mayer’s Mathematical atlas; Eberhard Baumann on Mayer’s first map drawn when he was only sixteen years old; Manfred Spata on Mayer’s contributions to the Atlas Silesia, a set of twenty maps of the duchy of Silesia; Peter Mesenburg on Mayer’s Mappa critica and his considerations about map precision; Armin Hüttermann on the strip map Iter Mayerianum ad Musas Goettingenses, the first sheet of a planned, but unfinished travel atlas; and Kit Batten on John Ogilby (1600–76) as a forerunner of Mayer in the art of drawing travel maps.
All articles are the result of recent research, partly based on newly unearthed sources such as the documents on Mayer and his ancestors preserved in the city and church archives of Marbach, Schorndorf and Esslingen. A particularly remarkable contribution is Wittmann’s recalculation and statistical analysis of the data in Mayer’s Catalogue of zodiacal stars with respect to their positional accuracy. In comparison with modern stellar data from the SIMBAD astronomical database in Strasbourg and by using the planetarium software Redshift 7, Wittmann shows that Mayer’s positional accuracy (about ±6″) places his catalogue among the best catalogues of his time. A similar approach surfaces in Mesenburg’s verification of the positional accuracy of 81 selected towns in the Mappa critica by using MapAnalyst, a software application for assessing the accuracy analysis of old maps.
This collection of papers gives an outline of the state of the art of current research on Tobias Mayer and cannot be ignored by anyone interested in this figure. The book is also sumptuously illustrated with more than 140 colour or grayscale figures. The only major flaw of the book is the absence of a name index.