Abstract
The history of Glasgow’s astronomy is long and fairly complex; various strands, social, political, economic, need to be teased out, the interesting characters explored, and all set into the wider contexts of other histories. There is much to be uncovered here: personalities, the science and its dissemination, instruments and the buildings. Yet this volume, which does not pretend to be a ‘history’, leaves much to be desired. It is so narrowly focused that references have shelf marks for the Glasgow University Library (why? Surely many readers will come from further afield), and a number of qualities claimed as ‘unique’ to Glasgow were applied elsewhere (e.g., the claim that only Glasgow had a popular astronomical observatory in the early nineteenth century). It is not entirely clear for whom this book was written.
After an introduction to “Glasgow astronomy”, the book follows a chronological journey, arriving fairly rapidly at the eighteenth century and the famous name of James Watt, presented not as an astronomer but as a renovator of instruments. Although Clarke has managed to find some of the literature about historic instruments, his knowledge here, as with so many other areas, is patchy. I did find it very peculiar that the author never got in touch to ask about some of the items that my own institution has in its collection that relate to the astronomy of Glasgow but instead illustrated others, for instance, a set of Alexander Wilson’s specific gravity beads made by James Brown of Glasgow and not one of the sets actually made by Wilson himself (especially as there is also a set of these mentioned by him on p. 22 in the Hunterian Museum’s collection).
Much of the material cited in the references betray Clarke’s unfamiliarity with current history of science literature; the recent vast (and burgeoning) literature concerning James Watt is untouched. Muirhead is cited, but the Oxford dictionary of national biography not mentioned until we reach the chapter about J. P. Nichol; was the author not tempted to see what recent scholarship might be concerning Wilson, George Martine, or Robert Dick? He has, however, consulted David Gavine’s (sadly still unpublished) 1981 Ph.D. thesis “Astronomy in Scotland 1745–1900”, and some of Roger Emerson’s works about the political background and structure to Enlightenment science in Scotland. Readers wishing to follow a contextualised history of Glasgow’s astronomy would do well to read the relevant sections in Roger Hutchins’s British university observatories 1772–1939 (Ashgate, 2008).
There is a fascinating story struggling to be told here: the peripatetic nature of the beginnings of astronomical observation in western Scotland; the Macfarlane bequest and the resulting Macfarlane Observatory, demolished in 1856; the ‘popular’ Garnethill Observatory, founded in 1808, but with a short life-span thanks to light pollution from the ever-growing city; the Horselethill Observatory, lasting from 1841 until 1939; work at University Gardens between 1939 and 1969, and then subsequent activities at the Garscube Observatory. There are colourful personalities, and extraordinary events. The touching tale of the German professor of astronomy, Ludwig W. E. E. Becker, struggling with inadequate instrumentation and anti-German feeling at the time of the First World War, is only one of a number of episodes that make this an account worthy of retelling.
This book could have done with a strong-minded editor who might have pruned some of the ‘green alleys’ and resisted the leanings towards antiquarianism and internalism. In places — especially the chapter about the local time service — the reader is confronted with long columns from the Glasgow Herald of the mid-nineteenth century. It is always good to get a flavour of the period, but too much detail and insufficient analysis loses even the most interested reader.
The history of Glasgow’s astronomy remains to be told; this book does what it says on its cover.