In the days before accurate timekeeping, determining your longitude was an extremely difficult task, requiring extremely accurate timekeeping. The British Admiralty expended enormous resources and considerable sums of money on the problem until it was solved by John Harrison in 1761. These days, we just turn on electronic devices and communicate with satellites.
This is particularly useful when, as this afternoon, one is in a place where one couldn’t possibly discover the longitude any other way.
The Royal Greenwich Observatory no longer exists as an institution, having been abolished in 1998 (after moving its last astronomical faclities away from Greenwich in 1957), and the observatory buildings are today part of the National Maritime Museum, which has its main facilities in the former Greenwich Hospital buildings at the bottom of the hill below the observatory. I provide a picture merely because the view is nice.
Alas, the statue at the top of the hill does not seem right. The statue is of General James Wolfe, who captured Quebec City for the British in 1754. Whilst I do not begrudge Gen. Wolfe his statue, it seems wrong, for two reasons. Firstly, why is the statue in pride of place in Greenwich, a place of great maritime heritage, a General rather than an Admiral. Secondly, given the history of the place, there is another figure who to me should be the man standing there. What would be better than a statue of Edmond Halley, Astronomer Royal, mathematician, one of the grestest men of the great Brtitish scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, one of the inventors of modern science, and the man who made the Greenwich observatory what it was, standing on top of the hill and staring down at the modern world he and is cohorts did so much to create?
But history did not give us that. It gave us the statue of General Wolfe.
As it happens, there is quite a bit of construction and renovation going on at the Greenwich observatory buildings at the moment. Apparently the museum they now form is going to be more modern and visitor friendly.
I will confess I become terribly worried when I see important museums being upgraded and ‘modernised’ these days, particularly when the money either comes from the state or (in Britain) that horrendous slush fund of the politically correct enemy class, the National Lottery fund. ‘Modern’ museums are so often dumbed down atrocities full of flashing lights and little intellectual weight that at times seem to resemble overgrown primary schools (as James Delingpole put it in this essay earlier this year that I recommend you all go and read). Like Jonathan Pearce I love the Science Museum, but its relatively recently built, flashing light intensive ‘Wellcome Wing’ at the back is pretty seriously awful. Unfortunately, the recently built National Museum of Australia consists pretty much entirely of this sort of stuff, too.
Walking into the relatively small amount of present exhibition space, the signs appear quite bad. I cannot imagine Margaret Thatcher would have tolerated this.
But, in truth, I was not quite as worried as I might have indicated. Having the observatory ruled by a Maritime Museum is a good thing. Maritime people are concerned with detail and accuracy, and the strong military angle is good too. (While I would not recommend the National Museum of Australia to anybody, people who visit Canberra should definitely visit the museum accompanying the Australian War Memorial, which is absolutely terrific). When I looked at the plans, one thing at least was extremely good. A new planetarium is under construction. It is described as a planetarium in which “Uniquely, every show will be different”. What I suspect this means is that the planetarium’s computers will have enough computational power to do their calculations in real time, so that the person controlling the show will be able to zoom in and out on the stars, the planets, the galaxies and the universe in response to astronomical issues of the day, or questions from the audience, or the mood the operator is in. I have expressed before the thought that it would be a wonderful thing to turn a planetarium into a sort of interactive Google Universe, and this might be what we are about to see in London. (If we do, it certainly will not be ‘unique’ for long).
The other thing I hope that occurs from the renovation is that a suitable space be created for the display of John Harrison’s original timepieces. I recall seeing them in the observatory about a decade ago, but I believe they have for the moment been moved down the hill to the Maritime Museum proper. (I did not see them today). It would be nice if they were back next to the prime meridian. (Obviously though, their presence in a Maritime Museum is not exactly wrong).
And as for the Prime Meridian, if you are using a GPS, there is a little secret that one discovers. I spent a few minutes walking backwards and forwards, taking photograph after photograph of my phone, attempting a small, ridiculous achievement. A policeman and a rather proper looking English lady gave me slightly odd looks. I would have posted the photograph at the top of the post, but the clarity was not as good as many of the other photos.
That is to six decimal places, although the zeros are not all shown on the display. (That is not the way I would have designed it. Trailing zeros do sometimes matter). As it happens, the prime meridian as shown by my GPS is about 100 metres from the line in the observatory supposedly showing its location.
What is the reason for this? Well, as it happens the meridian used for measurements today no longer uses an astronomical calculation, but instead models the earth as an oblate spheroid based on the actual locations of the surfaces of the oceans. The adoption of this model changed the location of the prime meridian through Greenwich slightly, and it no longer goes through the observatory.
Kind of sad, really.
Two questions, Michael.
One, was that change that moved the prime meridian correspond to when it switched from Greenwich Mean Time to Coordinated Universal Time?
And, can that cell phone track and relay your position without your knowledge?
Wolfe lived in Greenwich and his memorial is at St Alfege’s Church there, in addition to the one in Westminster Abbey.
Is the GPS the internal model on the SDA or an external one? I presume external since you have Bluetooth switched on. You might be interested to know that Microsoft are apparently developing a GPS system using Autoroute that will use the phone’s own positioning, from the cellular network, rather than from GPS – its already being tested now by O2 UK I hear.
I have two questions for you Michael:
1.) Was the statue of General Wolfe built with tax money?
2.) If so, do you support British confiscatory taxes paying for your memorials, museums, and a statue of Edmond Halley?
By the way, my dated laptop computer has more than enough computing power to play space simulator games like Orbiter 2006 (Link) which includes a planetarium as a bonus feature.
I have to second your call for a statue or other appropriate recognition of Edmund Halley. Military and political leaders have certainly been benefactors of their countries in many cases, but surely it is those who advance science and technology who have contributed the most to human achievement and happiness.
I think Britain has already made one unique acknowledgement of this role, however. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the one-pound note bear a picture of Isaac Newton? To the best of my knowledge, no other country has honored a scientist in this manner.
Japanese money has pictures of teachers and novelists on it. Not a scientist, but certainly better than the typical politician.
Why on earth does Edmund Halley need a statue? Isn’t that gurtbig snowball going around the sun monument enough?
How many schoolchildren nowadays do you think know of the existence of Halley’s Comet? The only time I ever heard it mentioned was on Blue Peter and then it was only the last time it was visible. It was never mentioned at school. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was only known for having a comet named after him rather than his achievements in the advancement of human knowledge and understanding. He needs a statue.
A few other examples – New Zealand has Rutherford on the $100 note, Serbia has Tesla on the 100 Dinar, and Britain also has Darwin on the 10 Pound.
The Harrison clocks were on display at the observatory in August 2004. Maybe they were moved to prevent damage during the renovation?
Satellite positioning is a convenience to the average individual. For the work I do it is absolutely essential. I do performance testing and optimization of cellular networks, which basicly means I am driven around while a system consisting of laptop, cell phones, multichannel scanner and GPS collect data. I can spot some problems in realtime, but most analysis is done by playback and manipulation of the data, which would be meaningless without location information.
While it isn’t a factor for GSM, the CDMA standard depends on time synchonisation which is provided by GPS. If it were necessary to provide that synchonisation via the wireside connection between cellsites much calibration expense would be entailed.
As for Midwesterner’s question, I notice that my mobile, which is not GPS equipped, offers a menu option for limiting the positioning data generated by triangulation (which I have found, when tested in good coverage, to be almost as accurate as GPS) only to the E911 emergency service. Big Brother and the black helicopter crews can no doubt override that opt-out.
triticale answered my concern exactly. I was afraid of that. Hhmmm… Privacy for progress, I guess. And now Cingular is canceling my (analog) brickphone service.
Just a small correction; General Wolfe conquered Quebec city in 1759 and NOT 1754.
Neither he nor his French adversary, Generale Montcalme, ever lived to see the victory; both, according to observers at the time, were murdered by their respective second-in commands.
Seems the forces of each side were composed largely of celtophone soldiers who couldn ‘t even understand routine commands ( in either French or English), and who had a bone to pick with their “germanic” masters owing to the massive and systematic mistreatment of celts that was occuring in both France and England at the time.
Your device shows Elevation 110m. Now I’m not very good with the metric system but isn’t that about 350 ft. I’ve just looked on Google Earth and cannot see anything resembling Niagara Falls between Greenwich and the North Sea. Please explain.
Back in the pre-Euro days, Greece had a picture of Democritos on the 100-drachma bill. He proposed that all matter consisted of tiny bits he called “atoms”. The obverse of the note had a picture of Greece’s first atomic power station . Carl Sagan mentioned it in his famous series Cosmos some years ago.
Re comments by Midwesterner and Rob:
Some phones (esp. CDMA) have GPS chipsets, in part to comply with US FCC ‘phone-911’ position reporting rules. Trimble.com offer software for certain models of phones and Blackberries which turns the phone into a full GPS unit. (Software listed under Outdoor Adventure or some such at trimble).
Regarding the altitude of 110m, that is probably the altitude computed from the reference spheroid, and not adjusted to a local chart datum. Most GPS units allow/require that you enter a chart system or datum standard, in order to get output which matches the local chart’s datum system, since physical ‘sea level’ and the reference spheroid surface bear no relationship to each other (which is weird but true..)
I realise this is an old post, but just in case anyone is still reading: Regarding planetaria and “Google Universe”, for a nice 3D simulation of the universe, see Celestia.