SYMHC Classics: Thomas Harriot

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Since Thomas Harriet got a quick name drop in this week's episode on evangelista Tori Kelly, we thought we would share our episode on him as Today's Saturday Classic. Yep, if you recalled on the show, I mentioned that I might have been inspired to get a tattoo by that whole research process, and I did get it. I have a map of the moon as drawn by Thomas Harriet Circus six twelve on my leg. Now, uh, if you ever meet me in public and I'm wearing clothing that allows me to flash you my calf without any problem, I will do so, and then you will know I love it so much. Many things to my tattoo artist Brandy. This episode originally came out on July, so enjoy Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson. So hey everybody. On July this year. That was just a few days ago. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo eleven moon landing, and last December, the Museum of Flight had reached out to us to see if we wanted to participate in the pod crawl that they have been doing as part of the celebration, And of course we said yes, because space history area in which I think it is safe to say I have some rabies in the good sense. True, true, I am a rabbit fan of space history. But since some of the other shows on their list, we're probably going to hit some of the great history of the space program that's a little more recent, we thought that it might be fun if we reached farther back, way back, so far back yeah, to the sixteenth century, uh and into the seventeenth century and talk about Thomas Harriet, who was a mathematician and astronomer who made some very significant telescopic observations, some of which related to the moon. But his story is also tied to so many other notable historic things, including a lot of business with Sir Walter Rawleigh. Uh. And he is really not a household name like a lot of his contemporaries are, even though he was neck and neck with them in terms of discoveries. And we're going to talk a little bit about why that's the case at the end of the episode, and we'll give you more information on that podcrawl at the end of the episode in case you want to check out the other work that people have been doing to celebrate this fiftieth the anniversary. A lot of cool podcasts right about now. So Harriet was born in Oxford, England, probably in fifteen sixty during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, but we don't know much at all about the first twenty years of his life. This is the case a lot of people from that long ago. His parents probably were commoners, and then he kind of pops up in the historical record when he entered school at the University of Oxford at the age of seventeen. He graduated with his degree in eight in fifteen eighty and with an education in math, maddics and astronomy, he jumped right into working life. And the job that he found right out of school was working for none other than Sir Walter Raleigh as a math tutor and in various other tasks as needed. And one of his first projects under Raleigh was the composition of a book which was titled Arcticon, which was apparently a navigational text. And I have to say apparently, because no copy of that writing survives, so we don't really know entirely what was included there. At this point in history, soldier and explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who was Raleigh's half brother, was seen as something of an expert on the so called New World of North America. Although most of his expeditions had failed, they had slowly drained off his coffers. By the time Gilbert died in three Thomas Harriet had convinced Raleigh to continue England's exploration of North America. Harriet was instrumental in helping Raleigh to prepare for his colonizing expedition in We're gonna talk about this a little bit more, but there's also more information about these things in the previous Sir Walter Raleigh episode. People want that, yeah, uh yeah, that's ah. It's not as though Raleigh had no interest. And then Thomas Harriet was like, we could do that. He was definitely interested, but Harriet was like, yes, dude, we can do this for real. I will help you. When Raleigh's Virginia expedition of that year set out from Plymouth that was on April nine, Harriet was aboard as the ship's scientific advisor, which included some working cartography as well as giving navigational advice, and he was also there as Raleigh's representative, as Raleigh himself could not make the trip, so in addition to his advisory role on route, once the ship arrived in North America, Harriet was to take stock of the land's economic potential, and Raleigh also asked Harriet to similarly assess the indigenous peoples that the expedition encountered. Harriet, along with another man named John White, carried out all these tasks. White mapped and sketched the land that they traveled, and Harriet made notes on all of it. White also made drawings of the native population, and Harriet gathered plants along the way as part of his sport. He tried to note which ones could be monetized, and we'll talk a little bit more about conclusions he came to in just a moment. Harriet, for his part, seems to have had some pretty good relations with the indigenous populations. He was really adept at learning languages. Some of the like brief like blurbs about him will also say that he was like a linguist or language scholar, because that was something that served him throughout his life. He kind of came to it because it made things easier, as he could then consult various texts in whatever his subject of interest was without needing to seek out translations. And he had picked up some Algonquin language from two Native Americans who had traveled to England before Harriet made his trip across the Atlantic, and then once he was in North America, he continued to improve his knowledge, specifically of Carolina Algonquin that was spoken along the eastern coast in the areas they were exploring. By the time assistance arrived at the Virginia Colony in the form of Sir Francis Drake's eighties six expedition, things with that five group had come really tenuous, and Harriet and White were really eager to get back home, which they did in a hurry as soon as Dray could arrange it. While Raleigh arranged additional expeditions to the colonies, he moved Harriet onto other projects instead of sending him across the Atlantic again. Yeah, that colonization effort was considered a failure. Uh An account of Harriet's experiences in Raleigh's expedition, A Brief and True Report of the Newfoundland of Virginia, was printed in. As we all know, I love the crazy, long, nutty titles history, and this one is a doozy. So the full name of that book is a brief and true report of the Newfoundland of Virginia, of the commodities and of the nature and manners of the natural inhabitants discovered by the English Colony. They're seated by Sir Richard Grenville Knight in the year fifty five, which remained under the government of twelve months, at the special charge and direction of the Honorable Sir Walter Raleigh Knight, Lord Warden of the standardis who they're in hath been favored and authorized by Her Majesty and her letters patents, and then it had the after attribution. This four book is made in English by Thomas Harriet, servant to the above named Sir Walter, a member of the Colony, and they're employed in discovering. I'm tired after getting through that whole name. It's really um. It tickles me to look at the title page for that book because it is just the busiest thing you can imagine. Despite the fact that Thomas Harriet, who I feel like we should point out, you'll see his name spelled a variety of ways if you go looking for it. Um. But despite his many writings and accomplishments that he made throughout his years, that was the only book of his that was published during his lifetime. So White illustrated this book and it details the basics of their journey and includes discussion of what caused that colony effort to fail. Most of that boils down to the people involved really not being ready for just how difficult it was going to be, which we've had a lot of that story. While for many this failure was really damning to Raleigh's colonization efforts, Harriet makes the case that future efforts could address the problems from voyage and that future attempts should be allowed to continue. And the book also delivers on the promise to report on the financial potential of colonizing in North America. The first part of the book is called of Merchantable Commodities, and in it Harriet breaks down the properties of a variety of resources that were observed on the journey, and he includes entries on grass, silk worm, silk, flax, and hemp alum, red clay, pitch, tar, resonant, turpentine, sassafras, cedar, wine, oil, and furs, and in the wine entry he mentioned specifically two types of grapes that grow naturally in Virginia that could be used to make wine, and under the fur entry he specifically mentions otters, which is a little sad uh. He continues on with deer skins, iron copper pearls, sweet gums, dyes of diverse kinds, and sugarcanes. The section concludes with the possibility of importing other commodities that could be planted in Virginia and thrive, and the high likelihood that there are also other potential resources native to the area which surely had not yet been discovered. The second section of the book is titled of such commodities as Virginia is known to yield for vittle and sustenance of man's life, usually fed upon by the natural inhabitants, as also by us during the time of our abroad, and first of such as are sewed and husbanded. The section is not about goods to be exported or traded, but the resources that could be counted on to sustain a colony, and these included beans, peas, gourds, and various herbs, as well as root vegetables and fruits. Strawberries, mulberries, chestnuts, walnuts, and acorns are all mentioned. Harriet also described the planting practices he observed is carried out by the indigenous population and ways that those could be replicated on a larger scale. Later on in this section is a discussion of the wild game that could be caught in the area, including deer coneys, which some debate on whether that just meant like slightly different rabbits, squirrels, and bears. And there's a second part of the beasts section that is just about birds, including turkeys, doves, partridges, cranes, swans, and geese. He also mentions parrots, falcons, and hawks, of which he writes quote although with us they be not used for meat, yet for other causes, I thought good to mention. And then uh, there are seafood options that he mentions, including areas, fish, crustaceans, and mollusks. Uh. I know that there are lots of people who call rabbits coney's, so yeah, but then sometimes if you look it up, people will say, no, it's like a related rodent, but not exactly around it. Really, it was just a word that got used a lot and as a consequence that has brewed some debate. We'll talk about the final section of the book, as well as its impact on both North America and Europe after we first pause for a quick sponsor break. The third section of Harriet's book is called of such other things as behooful for those which shall plant and inhabit, to know of with a description of the nature and manners of the people of the country, And that is exactly what you might expect. It's a guide of sorts for anyone trying to make a go of it in the colonies. It offers, for example, insights into what trees might be good for lumber, and also what to expect from the native population, and on and on. Harriet's characterization of the indigenous people's is important because though he absolutely makes it clear that he finds them to quote show excellence of wit, he also mentions a lot of ideas that really telegraph the future for relations between the European colonists and North America's indigenous population. Here is the passage that really illustrates this quote. If their fall out any wars between us and them, what their fight is likely to be We having advantages against them So any manner of ways is by our discipline are strange weapons and devices, else, especially by ordinance great and small. It might be easily imagined by the experience we have had in some places the turning up of their heels against us in running away was their best defense. Yeah. He states pretty plainly that although he can recognize that the Native Americans exhibit their own ingenuity, they also seemed to be in awe of the Europeans mechanical achievements, and that that is something that could be used to advantage by white settlers. One of the reasons we're talking in such detail about Harriet's book and in particular these characterizations, is because this writing was hugely influential. It was published in multiple languages, and it became the informational text about North America for Europeans. So does some degree really laid the groundwork for the ways in which indigenous populations were viewed and subsequently treated by the colonists, republished in so many different places, included in larger volumes of work about colonization and world exploration. Like it would be plopped in as a chapter. It really really was read by anyone interested in any kind of exploration from Europe into North America, and after Harriet returned from North America, he settled for a while in Ireland in an abbey on Land that was owned by Sir Walter Raleigh, and that is where he worked on the manuscript of a brief entry report. He also surveyed Raleigh's Irish property claims. At this point, England was also colonizing Ireland after a particularly brutal land grab. Sir Humphrey Gilbert that we mentioned earlier in particular, had been really incredibly ruthless when it came to killing non combatants during the campaigns there as a means to victory and in order to seize more Land. While working for Raleigh during this time, Harriet also expanded his efforts in map making. He worked alongside famed English globemaker Emray Molanneu and with a Belgian map maker, gerardis Mercat, to assist in refining their efforts to be more through it. In the fifteen nineties, after more than fifteen years in Sir Walter Raleigh's employee, Harriet moved to work instead for Henry Percy, ninth, Earl of Northumberland, who was a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and this was due to the fact that Sir Walter Raleigh was mired in his own issues. His colony projects, both in Ireland in North America had not really gone terribly well, and his secret marriage to best rock Morton led Raleigh to fall out of favor with the Queen. We talked about all of this in our Beheading of Walter Raleigh episode if you want to get the whole scoop on that um. And though Sir Walter Raleigh was able to regain his position at court eventually it kind of get his favor back. The instability of his fortunes just led Harriet to seek work elsewhere. But the two men did not seem to have any ill will between them over this change and employment. They stayed close friends for the rest of their lives. Harriet moved once again to land and a home that was granted to him by his patron. Percy gave Thomas Harriet an estate in Durham, England, as well as a home just west of London. He used the house that was conferred upon him as his workplace home and he set up a lab there for his research. He continued to study mathematics and astronomy. Many of the areas in which he researched and experimented where things he had started while he was in Raleigh's employ But in this new lab, with a regular annual pension that was granted him by Percy, he was able to explore these ideas more fully. This is really the point at which he becomes a set man, like he doesn't have to worry about money, he doesn't have to worry about taking care of things. He can just focus on his work. And one thing that really starts to emerge when you look at Harriet's work is how one thing that he was interested tended to lead to another as his curiosity became his guide. So, for example, he had done some work studying ballistics in part of his work for Sir Walter Raleigh, where they were planning for potential military engagements, and that led him to then consider the physics of falling in the laws of motion, and these particular efforts actually paralleled the work that was being done by Galileo in Italy at the same time. This is the case with a lot of Harriet's work. He and Galileo were kind of like onto a lot of the same concepts, and the story goes that it was his work figuring out the best way to stack cannonballs on a ship's deck, which was an assignment that Raleigh had given to him, that led him to think about the structure of matter. He was onto the idea that matter was made up of smaller component parts, and that led him to be regarded with suspicion in certain circles as early as the fifteen nineties. Being associated with Sir Walter Raleigh caused Raleigh's critics to seek out any possible scandal that they could regarding Harriet, and the best that they could clamp onto was the fact that he was an atomist. This idea that all things could be analyzed to their distinct elementary components. Atomism was seen by many at this time as an affront to Christianity, and soon a rumor began that Harriet was a conjuror and an atheist. Harriet himself never seemed to make any conclusive statement or include any notes in his known writing that he was anti Christian pro atheism, but it was kind of the decision of the rumor. Millah, It's like the rumors that maybe people were secretly Catholic right. In sixty three, after Queen Elizabeth the First died, Sir Walter Raley was imprisoned in the Tower of London under orders from King James the First after being found guilty of conspiring to overthrow the new monarch, and Henry Percy also found himself in the Tower under King James the First rule Percy was implicated in a tertiary way in the Gunpowder plot, which was a failed effort to assassinate James the First. Henry Percy's cousin, Thomas Percy, was an active conspirator in that plot, and it had been Henry who had appointed Thomas as a gentleman pensioner without express permission to do so from the King, and that had given Thomas traction in London to move forward with his plot. And for that misstep, Henry Percy stayed in the Tower of London for sixteen years and paid a hefty fine. Naturally, with his two primary benefactors and hot water, Thomas Harriet was also looked on with a lot of suspicion. He was detained briefly under the charge of having cast the King's horoscope, but he was released after being only briefly imprisoned. After he regained his freedom, he served as a connection from Raleigh and Percy to the outside world. He also continued to live at Science House, in the home that Percy had given him outside of London. While Raleigh was imprisoned, Harriet helped him with his massive History of the World writing project, and he looked after the education of Algernon Percy, Sir Henry Percy's firstborn son. He was the tenth Earl of Northumberland. I think it was his third child, but first son. Uh And while his name is not as commonly known as many of his contemporaries to today's years, Harriet was very well known and respected in his own lifetime, in part because of that book he wrote about North America, but also in the scientific community. He and Johannes Kepler corresponded about lenses and optics beginning in sixteen o six as the two of them worked concurrently on unlocking the under standing of light refraction, and during this time Harriet developed the formula that would eventually come to be known as Snell's law or the Snell Descarte law, which is defined as a relationship between the path taken by a ray of light in crossing the boundary or surface of separation between two contacting substances and the refractive index of each. Although it wasn't Harriet's version of that equation that became famous uh That law is attributed to the Dutchman will Abroord Snell for discovering it in se Harriet was completely onto it a decade earlier, although he was not the first either. Persian mathematician Ibbin Salt described the universal relationship for refraction using ratios and the sign law all the way back in beating both of the Europeans by a very wide six year margin. On September six oh seven, Harriet used a cross staff instrument to observe the passing of what would later come to be known as Halley's comment. Though Sir Edmund Halley wasn't born yet and would see the commet himself and it's next pass in two, this further stoked his interest in optics. We're going to talk in just a moment about Harriet's unpublicized astronomical discoveries, but first we're going to hear from one of the sponsors that keeps his show going. Unsurprisingly, all of that interest in light refraction and optics that we talked about before the break was part of an increased interest in telescopes. By sixteen o nine, Harriet had started working in earnest with telescopes, both acquiring them and making his own, and for the next four years in particular, he made a great number of significant astronomical observations with them. One of the most important things that Harriet did and wasn't fully accredited until recently, was to observe the Moon through a telescope and then make drawings of the lunar surface while he was working to try to make sense of it. His earliest known drawing of the Moon is from July sixteen o nine on the Julian calendar. That date is significant because it puts Harriet's work on the moon's observation a few months ahead of Galileo's. Although Galileo is usually credited with being the first, to be fair, Harriet's lunar drawings are incredibly rudimentary. If you just looked at them and you did not have the context of someone saying that is the Moon, it might be something you couldn't figure out. They all just kind of look like circles with mystery squiggles scrawled on them, But by six thirteen he had produced two much more detailed moon maps, which may be the first instances of astronomical cartography. I will also tell you that I decided while researching this that I'm getting one of those as a tattoo. Awesome, Yeah, if you uh. They are much more recognizably the Moon than the earlier drawings. Yeah, and even so, I mean he those are criticized as not really getting the topography exactly right, but it's still like the first time someone tried to capture it in map form. Yeah. In December sixteen ten, Harriet was the first person to observe sun spots through a telescope, and this too happened at about the same time that Galileo was making similar observations. Harriet's drawings of these are similar to his moon sketches. They're almost inscrutable in terms of what they are supposed to be. If you don't know that these are sun spots, they just sort of look like blourpy dots in a circle. You would think somebody's built something on that there. Really there's no detail. Well, and sometimes sun spots do just look like somebody, right, So without any context. Yeah, if somebody just held it up to you with no, you'd be like, I don't did somebody? I don't know what that is? Do you find it somewhere? Um. It is unclear exactly why Harriet didn't publicize his work, particularly these various pieces of potentially history making astronomy. One common theory is that because he was in pretty good financial standing, he just did not have the compulsion or the need to seek attention for his work, which would have come with financial benefit. Galilee, on the other hand, kind of needed the cash. Uh and the fact that his two high profile friends and benefactors were both in prison at the time may have also been a factor as well. He might have wished to minimize public attention for fear that it would just stir up problems, either that he would be seen as suspicious again, or that it would cause problems for the two of them. In sixteen thirteen, Thomas Harriet developed an ulcer on his left nostril, and then the problem progressed over the next two years, with ulcers developing on his lips and nose. The King's physician, Sir Theodore Turquette Demyerne, saw Harriet to examine the problem on sixteen fifteen and diagnosed it as cancer. The doctor noted that the patient seemed melancholy and made mention in his write up that Harriet was the person who first brought tobacco from Virginia. This is possibly the first time somebody made the connection between tobacco use and cancer, at least in writing. Yeah, it was notable that he kind of was discussing this particular problem and then brought up the tobacco thing. It's uh, it's an interesting connection that I think. I don't know if he was particularly insightful or other doctors were thinking similar things, but this is one of the first evidences we have of someone actually writing it down. In sixteen eighteen, Harriet watched as his friend and supporter, Sir Walter Raleigh, was executed by beheading. Harriet's health had continued to worsen so that by that year the only things that he really noted in his personal papers, and this was a man that kept a lot of notes throughout his life, where the death of Raleigh and the observation of a comet in one Harriet succumbed to skin cancer. He died on July two in the home of Thomas Buckner and never married or had any children, and he was buried in the Church of St Christopher le Stocks on thread Needle Street, near Buckner's London residence. The Great Fire of sixteen sixty six destroyed this grave site and today it's the Bank of England's headquarters. That always cracks me up. It shows up in almost anything you read where they're like, he was buried here. Now it's the Bank of England. Uh. Harriet bequeathed his telescopes to his executors and his scientific papers to Henry Percy, with a note that they should be edited and prepared for publication by a long time acquaintance, Nathaniel Torpoli. He wanted most of his non scientific personal notes related to Raleigh and other deceased persons to be buried. While Harriet asked to have his work published after he died, he unfortunately hadn't really prepared his research to that end. This is just a really big ask and it did not really happen. With one exception. This is really a pity because he not only had a four decade long career, but the mathematicians and scientists who survived him weren't able to then build on his work without having access to his notes, he had assembled a manuscript for a book titled Application of the Analytical Art to Solving Algebraic Equations. That book was published ten years after his death and introduced the greater than and less than symbols, as well as that long horizontal brace that covers terms that are affected by a radical sign. The histories attribute these symbols to Harriet, although others say that these elements were inclusions from the editor that prepared the manuscript for publication rather than things that Harriet himself developed. Yeah, he sometimes that that book will also be credited with inventing like the dot between two things as a multiplication symbol. But there's that also may just be a different way that numbers were separated for clarity. Um, so maybe maybe not. When the Royal Society of London was founded in sixteen sixty, one of its first initiatives was an effort to recover the lost work of Harriet, because, again, he was known in his lifetime, so people were cognizant of the fact that when he had died forty years before that they had lost some important research. For seven years from the time that Society received its Royal charter from Charles the Second in sixteen sixty two. Up until sixteen sixty nine, the whereabouts of Harriet's notes were investigated. There were a lot of inquiries made, but it was a fruitless effort and eventually that project was abandoned. At that point it was believed that Harriet's work was gone, and that remained the belief of the scientific community for more than a century. In seventeen eighty four, though, there was a surprise breakthrough of sorts. Hungarian born astronomer Franz Xaver Baron von Zack had traveled to England to work for the Saxon ambassador in London. That was John Maurice, Count of Brule, and that happened in sevent three and while he was at Pentworth Castle in Sussex, von Zach's found a number of Thomas Harriet's manuscripts at the bottom of a trash pile and a stable. Yeah that property was still owned by Henry Percy's descendants. Uh, so presumably those papers had just been shuffled around for a while and someone who didn't know what they were just tossed him aside. And this find was of course significant because von Zack saw that Harriet's work had put him ahead of other astronomers of his time, including Kepler and Galileo, and the Baron parlayed his discovery into a tour of Europe where he talked about Harriet, but he never really took the work to the next level to do an in depth analysis of what he had found, like he never published a paper on it, and the excitement over finding these these papers in manuscripts died down with no new revelations or write ups, and von Zack took a new job working for the Royals of Sex Gotha in seventy six, and at that point he seems to have moved on from his Harriet interest. So while other interested parties made some efforts at really studying Harriet's work, it was not until the twentieth century that the insights he had and the observations he made really came into their own. It became the focus of study, so much so that there have been numerous Thomas Harriet symposia going on since the late nineteen sixties. In July two thousand nine, Harriet's lunar drawings were part of an exhibit at the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester, and the lunar maps are cared for by the West Sussex Record Office. They keep them pretty much full time, although they are the property of one of Henry Percy's descendants, so we mentioned up at the top of the podcast. This episode is part of the Apollo pod Crawl that was organized by the Museum of Flight in Seattle as part of their celebration of the first Crude moon landings fiftieth anniversary. You can check out our show notes for links to the other participating podcasts, including the museum's own Flight Deck podcast. I think we're probably the last episode of this pod crawl coming out, so all the others should be available by the time we get to this point. I think so and hope so um, I mean, I hope that's accurate. So, but that is as the of the moment we record it. We're still waiting on a couple of groups to report in, so uh yeah, but those are all going to be super fun to check out if you are into space history, which I know many of our listeners are because we always get great responses to our space episodes and our discussions of NASA and space exploration in astronomy, then you will probably want to check those out. Yeah, I might make for a fun day of just having spacetime. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.