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Science in the Age of Baroque pp 239–255Cite as

The Hive and the Pendulum: Universal Metrology and Baroque Science

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Abstract

Early modern scholars and statesmen were acutely aware of the need for improved standards of measurement, albeit for differing reasons. The variety of man-made units across territories and histories was, by the seventeenth century, already a sceptical commonplace, and was understood in terms of the mutability of human institutions. The late seventeenth century saw many scholars advance possible candidates for a universal standard. The most promising of these was the use of a seconds pendulum as a standard for length, a project which was actively pursued by the French Académie Royale des Sciences in the 1670s and 1680s, and remained a goal cherished by savants through the eighteenth century. This paper’s first section places the Académie’s early metrological projects in the context of the scholarly community’s ideal of a universal measurement standard, which was often expressed in ways combining political, theological, and humanistic concerns. Melchisédech Thévenot’s ludic proposal that honeycombs might be a length standard is explored as one example. The second section examines the Académie’s attempts to test the seconds pendulum as a universal length standard, by taking the missions to Uraniborg (1671) and to London (1679) as case studies in the practice of metrological work.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank all the participants at the Baroque Science workshop at the University of Sydney for their help with this essay, and especially Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris.

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  1. Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Nicholas Dew

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Correspondence to Nicholas Dew .

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  1. , Unit for History & Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, 2006, New South Wales, Australia

    Ofer Gal

  2. , Unit for Interdisciplinary Studies, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel

    Raz Chen-Morris

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Dew, N. (2012). The Hive and the Pendulum: Universal Metrology and Baroque Science. In: Gal, O., Chen-Morris, R. (eds) Science in the Age of Baroque. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 208. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4807-1_10

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