Discovery, Disaster, and the Dipping Needle

• Main Author: Gillin, Edward J.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2023
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198890959.003.0007; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/58157241/oso-9780198890959-chapter-7.pdf

Abstract By the mid-1840s, the British Magnetic Scheme was in full sway. Edward Sabine and Robert Were Fox were becoming highly adept at equipping expeditions of increasing ambition and examining the magnetic data they returned. This chapter examines the evolving system of the British state in the surveying of the Earth’s magnetic phenomena between 1843 and 1850 through the series of expeditions that sustained this enterprise. The voyages of HMS Samarang and HMS Rattlesnake to the Far East, Japan, and around the world, examined regions previously uncharted by European travellers and represented an escalation from the BMS’s initial ambitions in 1839. Yet this chapter also explores the disastrous Franklin Expedition that the Admiralty had charged with magnetically surveying the Arctic regions in 1845. Throughout this chapter, both the fulfilment and the failure of Britain’s imperial, scientific ambitions are analysed. And the place of Fox’s dipping needles is evaluated throughout. Questions of managing instruments and their fallibilities were inseparable from projects of imperial ambition that proclaimed the pursuit of science as their ultimate aim.