Internationalism, Kapteyn and the Dutch Pipeline

Abstract

Internationalism in science, particularly in astronomy and the geophysical sciences, has taken on many forms, reflecting the need to record synoptically as well as over both spatially and temporally large landscapes. By the late eightteenth century Alexander von Humboldt was teaming up with Biot, Gay-Lussac and others to create international geomagnetic campaigns called “World Magnetic Surveys” and these efforts were continued by the Magnetic Crusades at mid-century. Cooperative programs in astronomy were at first geodetic in nature, determining the figure of the earth from ever-larger “arc of the meridian” surveys. Possibly the first truly international cooperative effort was the observation of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 to determine the solar parallax. This sort of cooperation required simultaneous observations from widely spaced points. Also in this category were observations of asteroids, first organized by David Gill in the 1880s, culminating in the world-wide Eros Campaign of 1900–1901, and again in 1930–1931. A somewhat different form of cooperation appeared as the International Latitude Service in 1898 centered in Turin, with standardized observatories across the globe.