The primary agenda of scientific institutions is the production of knowledge. The details vary – some specialize in observation, some in experimentation, some in dissemination –and the uses of that knowledge can vary, but in all cases, producing knowledge is paramount. Yet most scientific institutions also share a secondary unspoken agenda – a practical one, required in pursuit of the first – and that is self-preservation. Stability is the bedrock of institutional science. Threats to that stability come in various guises, including environmental factors, funding cuts, and attacks on their social and political standing. The curators of such institutions must carefully manage these threats, and their conduct in this task can fundamentally transform the social and physical structures of their institutions. As such, threat management is an important facet of scientific life, which historians of science must grapple with in their examination of such places. This article presents a case study of threat management at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by three successive Astronomers Royal: George Airy (1835–81), William Christie (1881–1910), and Frank Dyson (1910–33). It argues that while the observatory's primary purpose was its output of astronomical data, its physical, domestic and social organization was designed in defence of its stability.
The article is organized spatially, starting with a wide focus and moving concentrically inward. It begins with (1) the management of the observatory's outer boundaries and relationships with its neighbours, demonstrating how Greenwich, despite its walls, was never entirely cut off from its local community, but rather had to navigate both human and environmental intrusions from the wider world. It then moves on to (2) the management of the house, examining how Greenwich's domestic spaces provided stability to its scientific spaces, while also complicating observatory life via the lived reality of domestic servitude. Finally, the article zeroes in on (3) the management of the scientific spaces at the observatory, with an emphasis on the work and play of the observatory's boy computers. This final section comprises the largest portion of the article, as it has the most to offer with regard to understanding how threats to the observatory's reputation were warded off via the management of order and the maintenance of discipline amongst the junior staff. It demonstrates how Greenwich operated in a factory-like manner, employing an adolescent workforce in precarious positions reminiscent of working-class conditions elsewhere in Britain. The young employees challenged the factory order through labour actions on one hand, but also by merely playing out their roles as children on the other. Taken together, these three parts demonstrate that the stability of the observatory was by no means secure. Despite being perpetuated via powerful physical and social boundaries, Greenwich's stability was precarious, had to be continually maintained, and was regularly challenged by the observatory's occupants, visitors and neighbours alike.
The three themes discussed here – physical boundaries, domestic management and worker discipline – each have a strong foundation in historical literature. Historians have long noted that scientific spaces like laboratories and observatories often present themselves as private, exclusive spaces in order to protect and secure their prestige.Footnote 1 Physical enclosure walls and strict rules of professional membership both act in similar ways, granting authority and exclusivity to those within.Footnote 2 Scientific institutions rely, to varying degrees, on these illusions of separateness and elitism – professional or gentlemanly – to construct a stable foundation on which their authority rests. But the ‘separateness’ of these scientific spaces is never complete. They still exist within the complicated social ecosystems of human behaviour and are not immune to lived experiences and social contexts. Similarly, embedded in geographic space as they are, scientific institutions are equally subject to environmental challenges. At Greenwich, pollution threatened to force the observatory to close or move, while human interactions, including violent bomb threats, provoked increasing levels of security and the protection of the observatory's boundaries. These intrusions burdened Greenwich with an ongoing underlying tension: between the messy reality of permeable walls and neighbourly interactions on one hand, and the projection of an image of order, refined confidentiality and authority on the other. Graeme Gooday has pointed out – using the example of laboratories, but the point holds true for observatories as well – that ‘despite their apparently esoteric character and physical inaccessibility to all but a few, laboratories are … by no means just private spaces: there is indeed a public dimension to the laboratory’.Footnote 3 By this he meant that laboratories have always had an audience, consisting of members of the public as well as experts, and often a board who decides on the laboratory's funding. This audience is the judge of the laboratory's results and usefulness.Footnote 4 Scientific spaces like these are never therefore entirely private spaces separate from the public, but rather are reliant on the public for their very existence. Gooday concludes that by placing such spaces in their wider context, ‘we can find necessary limits … to idealizing tendencies to represent the laboratory as a placeless place’.Footnote 5 This can also be said of observatories like Greenwich, which operated in constant dialogue with their local population and environment. The types of social and environmental relationships which existed beyond the observatory walls were also embedded within them. They could not be erased in a perfectly orderly ‘placeless place’ where science was conducted.Footnote 6
This was especially true with respect to the domestic sphere. Scientific work at Greenwich was closely connected to domestic life – a more common phenomenon in institutional science than is readily apparent. As Donald Opitz, Staffan Bergwik and Brigitte van Tiggelen have suggested, ‘despite the common historiographical assumption that “public” institutional venues displaced “private” homes as the primary sites of research … the domestic sphere has in fact remained critically important for the production of scientific knowledge, even amid dramatic shifts in the mapping of research space’.Footnote 7 Indeed, domestic sites ‘function as hubs in scientific networks, connecting dispersed places, materials, and actors’.Footnote 8 The same is true of Greenwich, where the Astronomers Royal made use of their domestic space to entertain guests and colleagues within their networks. Greenwich provided the Astronomers Royal with a home in close proximity to London's astronomical community and professional societies, helping to cement the stability of the observatory's continued presence there, despite increasing pressure to move it away to a more scientifically advantageous site far from London's noise and pollution. But Greenwich's domestic life also provided a challenge. Elite domesticity came with the task of managing a household, including domestic servants, who, with their ability to bypass the walls, could interrupt the supposed sanctity of the observatory grounds in a way that the general public could not. This added an extra layer to the task of maintaining order at Greenwich.
The behaviour of the scientific staff employed at Greenwich, especially that of the boy computers, was monitored even more carefully than that of the domestic staff. Under the initiative of George Airy, the work of these computers was gradually deskilled and closely supervised. Their behaviour was monitored and their mistakes subject to disciplinary action.Footnote 9 David Aubin has suggested that these measures turned the computers into ‘mathematical labourers’, an idea supported by Allan Chapman, who has examined the process by which Airy turned the observatory into a sort of astronomical ‘factory’ with rote work and constant supervision.Footnote 10 This did not, however, mean that the boys became automatons. This article demonstrates how the computers’ lives were vibrant, and sometimes disruptive to observatory work, despite careful measures in place to maintain order and discipline.
Why were order and discipline important to the Royal Observatory? In large part, it has to do with how scientific ideas are transported from place to place. As Steven Shapin has argued, science is ‘local, situated, and embedded’ in specific places, and for ideas created in one place to be used elsewhere, that knowledge has to be transported.Footnote 11 Trust, Shapin suggests, is key to enabling this transportation, and can be established in a variety of ways – performative rules of gentlemanliness are one method of demonstrating trustworthiness; institutional expertise is another.Footnote 12 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar have made a similar argument using the term ‘creditability’, in which scientists need to take steps to ensure the quality of their instruments, but also the processes by which their employees carry out the work.Footnote 13 Orderliness and discipline, in other words, established the trustworthy reputation of institutions like Greenwich amongst the astronomical community, within government and funding bodies, and also with end users. Without trust, Greenwich's authoritative production of knowledge (such as the time signal) could be called into question. The local discipline of the observatory's workers could therefore have global impacts on the value of its products. Ships sailing the globe needed to know they could rely on their Greenwich-rated chronometers, even if the calculations were carried out by rowdy adolescent youths. Order and discipline within the observatory were essential to establishing that trust. The maintenance of order secured the institution's reputation, which enabled them to maintain their authority as producers and circulators of reputable knowledge.
To summarize, life at Greenwich was hierarchically arranged to stave off disorder and to maintain a specific appearance of respectability which was essential to the observatory's reputation, output and, ultimately, survival. Order was maintained through physical boundaries, such as the observatory walls, while stability was buttressed by the observatory's domestic functions, and through intangible structures, including systems of rote work and employee discipline. The maintenance of order and stability, however, was not easily achieved. The observatory's boundaries, both physical and social, were permeable and inconsistent, posing a threat to stability, and rendering it precarious. Efforts to overcome these challenges measurably influenced the lives of those who lived and worked there.
The observatory's permeable walls
In the late nineteenth century, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich was one of the most important sites in the British astronomical community. Under the guidance of Astronomer Royal George Airy for much of the century, the observatory specialized in positional astronomy for timekeeping and longitudinal measurements, but it also carried out spectroscopy, solar photography and magnetic and meteorological observations. The observatory underwent rapid growth under Airy's successor, William Christie, who installed several new instruments in the 1880s and 1890s, but the observatory's usefulness began to decline in the twentieth century, leaving Frank Dyson to deal with increasing urban growth and pollution.Footnote 14 Throughout these changes, one thing remained consistent: the observatory complex was permanently shut off from the public and the outside world, enclosed behind a high wall and locked gates. In theory, the observatory was a restricted space with careful controls in place to deny public access. But in reality, the physical separation of the observatory from the outside world was less complete than it might seem at first glance. Environmental nuisances like pollution threatened (and eventually succeeded) to uproot the observatory from its location, while human interactions disrupted the observatory's work in various ways.
Standing in the way of these disruptions were the observatory's walls, an imposing physical barrier used to maintain order at Greenwich by secluding it from public interference. But the walls were far from impenetrable. The public park next door shaped the observatory's activities in surprising ways – some trivial and others more serious. For example, in 1878, a livestock farmer was granted leave to graze sheep in the park. The herd unintentionally made life unbearable for the residents and staff of the observatory, including George Airy, who complained that ‘the stench which they produce is very offensive, worse than I have ever known before. It is perceived all through the Park, but is perhaps worst near the observatory; where the sheep seem to collect at night’.Footnote 15 The superintendent of parks admitted that ‘the nuisance exists to the full as you represent … I really am at a loss to know what to do’.Footnote 16 He suggested that perhaps a night shepherd might be hired to prevent the sheep from gathering so close to the observatory walls. This was not a singular olfactory event. Similar complaints about smells from the park were made again in 1896, this time because gardeners were working to improve the land in the park, in order to promote the growth of grass and shrubs. To do so required the use of large quantities of manure, causing a particularly unpleasant smell which the observatory staff had to suffer. To remedy the problem, gardeners were instructed to cover the manure with dry earth whenever their work was finished.Footnote 17
Not all relationships with the park were so offensive. It provided a welcome space for observatory staff to engage in recreation and practice personal discipline through exercise. It also provided extra space for observational work when required, such as in preparation for special events like the transit of Venus, when photoheliographic huts were tested on reserved ground in the park in 1872.Footnote 18 But the park could also occasionally hinder the observatory's ability to carry out its observations. For example, when trees grew so large that they interfered with the lines of sight of the transit instruments (as occurred in 1907), gardeners became as important to the astronomical process as the astronomers themselves.Footnote 19 Similarly, some of the time signal wires exiting the observatory were buried beneath the park grounds, meaning that park landscaping was directly relevant to the observatory staff. Repairs to the wires meant disturbance in the park, and any digging in the park had to take account of the placement of the observatory's wires.Footnote 20
Greenwich's local surroundings also offered more serious threats to the observatory's astronomical work. Proposals for railway expansions in the 1860s threatened to force the observatory to move from its site, narrowly avoided by persistent lobbying on Airy's part.Footnote 21 Outside pressures continued to grow throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, especially as environmental factors began to degrade Greenwich's suitability for the performance of its astronomical observations. In the 1870s, Airy became concerned about the air quality in the observatory's vicinity, and began recording the resulting deterioration of visibility in his journal. During this period, urban growth in the surrounding region began to create more light pollution and vibrations, both of which threatened visual observations and instruments at Greenwich. Things only got worse for Airy's successors. A new power station began construction nearby in 1902, causing Christie to have to deal with smoke obscuring the sky over the meridian. By the 1920s under Dyson, new electric trains began to interfere with magnetic observations, and the observatory's magnetic department had to be moved to Abinger as a result.Footnote 22
In addition to these environmental threats, or rather because of them, Greenwich began to find itself on the defensive amongst its peers. The astronomical community's preferences regarding observation sites were changing, and urban astronomy was undergoing a crisis of credibility. As Maria Lane argues, from the 1880s onwards ‘a metropolitan-versus-mountain dichotomy provided the critical means of differentiating among the credibility of observatories, astronomers, and hypotheses. The higher, the more remote, the more rugged, and the more sublime, the better’.Footnote 23 Greenwich was on the wrong side of this trend towards remote observatories.Footnote 24 But suggestions to move the entire observatory met with resistance from the observatory's leadership, who were unwilling to dismantle their professional, domestic and social lives. Greenwich's reorganization by Airy, and its rapid expansion under Christie, supplemented by the gift of three new major instruments to the observatory, made the option of moving seem unadvisable. Furthermore, as Lee Macdonald has recently argued, the observatory's authority, both scientific and political, was attached to its location, with its ‘political prestige … increasing over exactly the same decades in which the observing conditions there were deteriorating’.Footnote 25 Moving the observatory would exact a heavy cost in political clout and prestige especially post-1884, when the site had been recommended as the world's prime meridian.Footnote 26 As such, it was not until 1948 that Greenwich finally succumbed to pollution, when it was forced to move to Herstmonceux. Until then, the observatory remained where it was, and its staff had to manage, rather than ignore, its relation to its environment.
As well as pollution, the observatory also had to manage its key human relationships, both cooperative and combative. Some of the more hostile incidents include the attempted bombing of the observatory by French anarchist Martial Bourdin in 1894. Bourdin's bomb exploded prematurely, and he succeeded only in killing himself. But Bourdin's attack demonstrates that the Astronomers Royal were succeeding in establishing the observatory's reputation as a first-rate source of scientific knowledge.Footnote 27 As the centre of the British Empire's timekeeping service, Greenwich had earned a real and symbolic place at the heart of British imperial power – its timekeeping apparatus enabled empire by providing British ships with the tools required to confidently navigate the globe. It was that symbol of power, order and authority which Bourdin hoped to reduce to ashes in his attack on Greenwich. Bourdin was not the only one to violently challenge the observatory's symbolic authority. In 1913, concerns that suffragettes might attempt to carry out a similar attack caused the Astronomer Royal to ask for, and receive, an increased police presence in the park.Footnote 28
More ordinary interactions between the observatory and the public were common, but even they were often frowned upon as potential disturbances to the observatory's work. The park was ‘generally quiet and unfrequented’ aside from a few picnickers, but ‘what a different scene is presented on certain yearly festivals!’ wrote one mid-nineteenth-century observer. ‘On some of these days the number of pleasure-takers flowing in from all parts of London has been estimated at 100,000 … The bursts of noisy pleasure are kept up until night’.Footnote 29 Such crowds only became more common once Greenwich was generally viewed as the world's prime meridian, when the observatory became something of a tourist attraction. Although they were barred entry to the observatory grounds, crowds came to see the Shepherd Gate Clock, which had been mounted on the exterior of the observatory in 1852.Footnote 30
Alice Everett, one of the first women to work at the Royal Observatory in the nineteenth century, was interviewed about her experience regarding the observatory boundaries, the park and the occasional crowds in 1893:
Interviewer: ‘Then you do not live in the Observatory, nor sleep there when there is night work to be done?’
Everett: ‘No I live just beyond the gates. These are shut every evening, and all strangers excluded, so that the place is very quiet. The Astronomer Royal makes it a rule that two ladies must always be on duty the same night, that they may leave together.’
Interviewer: ‘Are you not nervous all alone in the park?’
Everett: ‘Oh, dear, no. If I were nervous I should be more frightened outside, for Greenwich is sometimes very rough. You should see it on Bank Holidays.’Footnote 31
These ‘rough’ crowds were strictly forbidden from entering the observatory, but park-goers sometimes took offense at such strict exclusionary rules. On one occasion in 1888, a father wrote complaining that during a visit to the park, his ten-year-old daughter had fallen and broken a bone.
Being a stranger in that neighbourhood, I carried her to the lodge of the observatory and asked the porter whether he would lend me a seat and give me a drop of water, as she was partially stunned and bleeding. Much to my surprise and also of those who were onlookers, the porter refused … since then, I have been informed that accidents are of frequent occurrence near that spot and I am sure such a convenience could be always acceptable at such a time, and could very readily be kept at hand.Footnote 32
In response, the observatory staff indicated their
great regret at the unfortunate misunderstanding which appears to have arisen on the occasions of which you speak. In interrogating the Porter's deputy, who was attending at that time to the gate, we gather that he promptly went for a chair and some water, which he had most at hand readily, and on his return with them found that you had departed. The mistake he seems to have made was shutting the door without asking you to step inside: no doubt you took his closing the door as an ungracious refusal, but it was rather the mistaken action of a deputy only occasionally entrusted with the care of the gate, to literally carry out his instructions against the admission of the public; for which we are here reluctantly compelled for various reasons to make stringent rules.Footnote 33
Those stringent rules, misapplied in this instance, at other times had more merit. Intruders within the observatory walls were occasionally spotted, including the maids’ beaus, and also boys who climbed over the walls to raid apples from the Astronomer Royal's garden.Footnote 34 Regardless of its gates and walls and strict rules for the porters and staff, intrusions into the observatory from the outside world were more common than one might expect. Greenwich and its local community, especially the park and its users, had regular interactions with each other, despite all attempts at making it otherwise. The observatory's senior staff could not completely separate the private scientific spaces within the observatory from the outside world: they had to find strategies to manage the boundaries.
The house: Greenwich Observatory as a domestic space
Within the walls, Greenwich's scientific work was its primary raison d’être; its basis for its existence and its justification for public funding. After all, work at the observatory, carried out round the clock, serviced the nation's navy and government with accurate chronometers and time signals – allowing for the navigation of the globe and for the establishment of early telecommunication systems. Greenwich observatory was a powerhouse of science, and an enabler of empire.Footnote 35 But it was also a house. At Greenwich, domestic life mingled with scientific work, and its role as a home offered a powerful counterweight to the pressure to move away from London's pollution. The attraction of living near London's social offerings helped anchor Greenwich firmly in place. The Astronomer Royal's home was therefore a source of stability, but it was also another domain requiring careful management, from implementing physical renovations for entertaining guests, to supervising the work and transgressions of domestic servants. Just as life at Greenwich was affected by the observatory's relationship with its neighbourhood and local environment, it was equally moulded by the influence of the observatory's domestic spaces.
Domestic spaces have long been connected to scientific spaces. Work on the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has shown that scientific practitioners often performed their studies in domestic spaces. Early chemists, for example, used home kitchens to practise chemistry, turning kitchens into domestic laboratories that offered them a space to experiment.Footnote 36 As Simon Werrett has recently argued, scientists often ‘relied fundamentally on the households in which they lived … the physical house, its contents, and the techniques used to manage them enabled and were mobilized to create an enormous variety of apparatus and instruments for investigating nature’.Footnote 37 Indeed, at Greenwich itself under the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, family life and astronomy were not altogether distinct realms. Flamsteed's wife Margaret ‘studied the mathematics relevant to astronomy in much the same way as the more competent of Flamsteed's paid assistants did’.Footnote 38 Similarly, late eighteenth-century astronomer Caroline Herschel worked together with her brother William, and she ‘arguably saw her role in their [astronomical] work as part of her household duties’. At the start of the nineteenth century, these family partnerships continued with Margaret Maskelyne helping her father Nevil.Footnote 39
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the legitimacy of domestic science was being challenged. Men of science began ‘to assert independence and authority and develop a form of material and social management alternative to the traditional household oeconomy’.Footnote 40 Still, the long-standing ties between science and the household did not disappear entirely. As Simon Schaffer suggests, new physics laboratories sometimes occupied ‘the location of one of the salient Victorian sites of apparently effortless privilege, the country houses, and the culture which made them meaningful places of knowledge, organisation and technology’.Footnote 41 In other words, scientific spaces could adopt the traditional authority of long-established country houses to help the new institutions ‘seem effortlessly authoritative’.Footnote 42
At Greenwich, the house and observatory had been established at the same time. The two halves were inseparable, and the fortunes of one matched the fortunes of the other. This remained true well into the twentieth century. Family life and work life commingled, and the house provided a space for both professional networking and social gatherings. The domestic activities of the observatory contributed to the site's scientific and political stability. Ongoing pressure to move the observatory from its site at Greenwich met with resistance from the Astronomers Royal, motivated in part by a desire for political prestige, but it can also be attributed to domestic attachment. Greenwich lay close to London's scientific societies like the Royal Astronomical Society, in which Airy, Christie and Dyson all took part. Their families became equally attached to the site. Dyson's wife Caroline, for example, expected to remain in the house until her husband's retirement, while their children, like Margaret Wilson, developed fond childhood memories of the place.Footnote 43
The physical house itself was upgraded and fitted out so that it could provide an effective space for social networking. George Airy, together with his wife Richarda, took advantage of Greenwich's domestic spaces to host guests of various backgrounds throughout his career. One guest, Maria Mitchell, recorded a conversation with the Airys in 1857 about the new guest rooms:
Mrs. Airy says, ‘Mr. Airy got permission of the Board of Visitors to fit up some of the rooms as lodging-rooms.’ Mr. Airy said, ‘My dear love, I did as I always do: I fitted them up first, and then I reported to the Board that I had done it.’Footnote 44
Such renovations for domestic purposes were not a one-time occurrence. William Christie upgraded the porch during his tenure, although he otherwise made few changes.Footnote 45 But when Frank Dyson became Astronomer Royal (1910–33), his large family moved into the observatory, and immediate began altering it to fit their needs. Dyson's daughter, Margaret Wilson, wrote that the house was comfortable ‘for a small family, but the Dyson family was not small’, so renovations were made to create additional rooms.Footnote 46 Dyson's children grew up within the observatory grounds, and their presence was hard to ignore. The family kept a servant, Martha Fox, who acted as nurse, cook and housemaid in succession over twenty years of service, and who was in charge of the younger children's well-being. According to Wilson, a policeman stationed outside the observatory gates – presumably the same policemen charged with warding off the suffragette threat –liked to tease Fox when the babies cried, as the noise echoed loudly across the grounds.Footnote 47
For the rest of the astronomical staff, Greenwich did not offer the same domestic comforts, as they did not live within the grounds. Prior to Airy's tenure, this had not been the case. Some of the assistant astronomers had been housed there, loosely appendaged to the Astronomer Royal's household, with access to the library and the privilege of having their shoes cleaned and meals provided by servants.Footnote 48 But by early in Airy's period, the assistants had moved off site. That is not to say that they did not partake at all in Greenwich's domestic experiences. Under Dyson, for example, the assistants often dined with the Astronomer Royal and his family as guests.Footnote 49
While the assistant astronomers moved off site, the servants remained, including maids, porters, footmen and labourers, representing yet another sphere of observatory life that required careful management.Footnote 50 Observatory archives and records do not often make note of the servants’ activities, but on rare occasions hints of their presence at Greenwich offer glimpses into their personal lives and work – and of the disruptions they caused. In one instance, there survives a letter from one of the porters written to Airy in 1877. The letter described how the porter, guarding the observatory gates, was approached on several occasions by a ‘strange young man’ from inside the observatory grounds, asking to be let out. The same stranger had also been spotted walking about the adjoining park with one of the servants after the gates had been closed for the evening.Footnote 51 Airy had not given his servants permission for such night-time jaunts with strange men, and the maids were thereafter instructed ‘that in future their young men are not to come into the Park at all after the gates are closed. They may escort them home as far as the park gate and then leave them there to come through the park alone. That is to be the rule’.Footnote 52 Airy's role as Astronomer Royal made him responsible not only for the study of the stars, but also for the conduct of his maids. Under Christie, the servants seem to have successfully continued some of their unsanctioned liaisons regardless of his protests, as on several other occasions between 1886 and 1890, the park gates were found unlocked and unknown men were caught inside the grounds. Whether all these instances are attributable to servant romances is impossible to tell, but clearly Greenwich was a lively place, lived in as much as worked in.
Observatory life, then, mingled the routines of domesticity, work and leisure. No matter how arcane the science, astronomy at Greenwich was never far from the realm of the domestic. Moreover, domestic attachments contributed to the stability of the observatory site, staving off a move to a new location with more favourable observing conditions. Meanwhile, workers within the observatory, domestic and astronomical alike, were expected to obey strict class hierarchies, the same hierarchies visible elsewhere in Britain. But, like elsewhere, the rules of that hierarchy were occasionally challenged, even if just for the opportunity to visit a sweetheart.
Boy computers and the science factory
While the social hierarchy and routines of domesticity permeated the observatory, this was not the only social framework at work within the compound. Astronomy at Greenwich also mimicked the social order of a factory. Adolescent workers, hired to do rote computational work, found employment at Greenwich, making their experience of childhood at the observatory very different to that experienced by the children of the Astronomers Royal. Under Airy, Christie and Dyson, these teenage boys carried out the unglamorous but vital computational work of astronomy. While the management styles of each successive Astronomer Royal differed, the key relationships and experiences of the computers (precarity, orderly rote work and rules of behaviour) remained largely consistent across the tenures of all three Astronomers Royal. This continuity tells an interesting story which speaks to how deeply engrained the computer system became at Greenwich, and how central it was to the continued maintenance of the observatory. Instilling order and discipline amongst the computers was a central pillar of Greenwich's management priorities, necessary as it was to ensure their quality of work and to inspire continued trust in the observatory's output.
Usually hired around age thirteen, the computers came from varied backgrounds, though they were often recruited from local schools. The Astronomer Royal wrote to school headmasters announcing available opportunities, and boys wishing to become a computer had to pass an entrance exam testing their mathematical prowess.Footnote 53 Letters of reference might also help a boy earn employment. In one instance, Christabel Airy, daughter of George Airy, who was known for her charitable work, supplied a letter of reference for the son of the master of a local boys’ orphanage, Montague House. In the letter, she hinted that several of the orphans housed there had previously worked at the observatory, stating, ‘I think you have had some of those Boys occasionally?’Footnote 54 This evidence hints that there might have been some degree of class disparity among the youth, which may have aggravated boyhood rivalries and disturbed cohesion. On the other hand, the boys were united in their experience of drudgery and low pay at the observatory. They were expected to carry out simple, repetitive calculations in support of the observatory's scientific activities, and the work could often be dull, tedious and unrewarding.Footnote 55 In some cases, computers could be called upon for more interesting duties, including performing observations with the observatory's instruments, but not every computer was qualified for observation. Most performed computational work only.
The first boy computers, hired under the auspices of George Airy, opted to be paid hourly, allowing them to work longer hours for more pay. Eventually, however, Airy convinced them to accept monthly payments for more regular hours – an eight-hour day, initially without a lunch break.Footnote 56 When Christie took over, he altered the work schedule somewhat. Computers now worked from 9.00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekdays (with one hour for lunch), and 9.00 a.m. to 2.00 p.m. on Saturdays (with no lunch). Boys with qualifications for observation might find their hours differing from these standard hours, working overnight instead. Christie's regulations granted the boys twenty-four vacation days in the year.Footnote 57 Christie also changed the rules regarding the upper age limit of the computers. Under Airy, there had been no upper age limit, though the low pay caused most of the boys to move on before too long. That situation became exacerbated after 1872 with the implementation of a new civil service exam. Now, in order to be promoted to a permanent position at the observatory, one had to pass the civil service test, which could only be taken between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.Footnote 58 Computers older than this were therefore effectively ineligible for promotion, and with new permanent positions at Greenwich few and far between, many missed their chance. Christie streamlined this situation somewhat when he announced in early 1883 that ‘commencing with 1884 Jan 1, every Computer will be liable to be discharged at the age of 23, unless special circumstances should make it desirable to retain his services’.Footnote 59 Under Christie, the boys’ positions at the observatory were intended to be a sort of internship – a stepping stone towards future careers in the civil service, although that did not always pan out as intended.Footnote 60
One computer who managed to stay in his position under Christie despite the age limit was John Power. Power had been hired by Airy in 1875 at age fifteen, and stayed until he was thirty-one, in 1891. Power later found work at the Cape Observatory under David Gill, and the Admiralty wrote to Christie in 1894 for references regarding Power's work at Greenwich. Christie provided an assessment of Power's skill, and forwarded the opinion of Airy as well. Both reports were positive, noting that Power was trusted with ‘special computations such as those for the transit of Venus’. But no matter how skilled Power was, his future at Greenwich was limited, as he had missed the age range for the civil service exam. As Christie wrote, ‘I regret that as the appointments on the permanent staff are made under the conditions of the Civil Service, Mr. Power has not adequate prospects for the future if he remains at the Observatory’.Footnote 61 Computing was clearly not a safe path into astronomical work, even for the best of the computers.
While employed at Greenwich, the boy computers did not live within the observatory walls. There was a limit to the extent of the observatory's domesticity, and it did not apply to these temporary workers. Nonetheless, their physical presence required some accommodation during working hours. Under Airy, the old calculating room in the Meridian Building was renovated and expanded to accommodate his growing cohort of temporary staff. When they outgrew that workspace, a secondary computing room was added to the upper floor. Christie carried out further renovations in the late 1880s, expanding the main computer room and adding a third computer room on the upper level. The square footage appropriated for use by the computers reflects their increasing importance to the observatory's output, putting pressure on the spaces reserved for observational instruments nearby. But it also reflected the need to contain and cordon off their activities, to prevent disruption to other areas of the observatory.
Meanwhile, the computers’ off-duty lives were managed by their workplace as well. They were required to live within one mile of the observatory, a measure enforced to ensure punctuality.Footnote 62 There were occasional exceptions to the one-mile rule. In 1890, for example, one computer, C.M., requested permission to move to Battersea, and explained that there was a regular train service between Battersea and Greenwich. ‘I am desirous of making this change’, he said, ‘because I find that nearly all of my present salary is taken up by board and lodging’.Footnote 63 On this occasion, Christie agreed to the exception, so long as C.M. did not have an observing certificate. Such a certificate might mean duties which would require the computer to be present at the observatory during irregular overnight hours – hours in which the train might not be as frequent or available.
C.M.'s complaint that rent and board took up nearly all his income was not an exaggeration. The pay for computers was feeble. When George Airy retired in 1881, he had instructed his successor, William Christie, that the total yearly budget for computers was seven hundred pounds, which paid wages for about a dozen boys.Footnote 64 In 1889, that budget increased to 1,080 pounds per year. Christie used that amount to hire more computers rather than to raise wages, increasing the number of computers from fourteen to twenty-two over the next two years.Footnote 65 For each individual boy, this meant a starting wage of three pounds per month. Each individual computer could eventually have their pay increase incrementally up to five pounds, and slightly more if they had earned a certificate to operate the observatory's instruments – which would also increase their responsibilities.Footnote 66 This pay scale stayed almost exactly the same for over thirty years, from about 1880 to about 1910.
The origins of the boy computer system at Greenwich must be attributed largely to George Airy (computers were present earlier, but not on the same scale). Some historians, including Robert Smith and Allen Chapman, have argued convincingly that Airy turned the observatory into a sort of ‘factory’, copying factory innovations, including a strict hierarchy and system of oversight, prioritizing efficient output and deskilling the workforce.Footnote 67 Life as a computer was not glamorous, and working under George Airy's direction could be challenging. With clerical and administrative experience behind him, Airy played a managerial role, working to churn out publications of the observatory's results efficiently, and his authority over the computers was absolute. One visitor to Greenwich in 1866, Alphonse Esquiros, observed that while other staff served under the auspices of the Admiralty, the computers were ‘almost entirely at the disposal of one single individual … the Astronomer Royal’.Footnote 68 Subject to his whims, the position of computer underwent significant changes, particularly in relation to skill level. Airy's philosophy was that it would be most effective to improve the accuracy of ‘the instruments, not the men’, and so he instituted policies and procedures that minimized human error.Footnote 69 His most significant action in this direction was to prepare ‘skeleton forms for the reduction of observations and other business … By turning the principal tasks of observation and calculation into a string of specialized rote exercises, the skills demanded of many staff members could be lowered’.Footnote 70 This enabled the hiring of temporary, inexperienced boys who could do the work without requiring specialized training. As Esquiros wrote in 1868, ‘the greater part of [the computers] are altogether ignorant of astronomy; they calculate blindly, without discriminately knowing what they are trying to prove; “and these do the best”, added Mr. Airy, smiling’.Footnote 71 The computers were part of a machine. Accuracy, not understanding, was their measure of quality. Under these conditions, as Schaffer argues, management became ever more vigilant in supervising the computers’ work.Footnote 72 Airy's factory reforms were designed to remove the personal aspect of the work and mechanize it – or at least standardize it – as much as possible. By carefully controlling the computers’ work, Airy was building a reputation for accuracy and excellence at Greenwich.
Not all of these reforms were dehumanizing. As David Aubin has shown, Airy was concerned with ensuring that the observatory's low-skilled, low-paid employees would be able to avoid errors during long hours of repetitive, tedious work.Footnote 73 The solution was to shorten their working day to eight hours, as Airy did in 1839 (further reduced by Christie to six and a half hours). Even so, the computers were still placed firmly at the bottom of the observatory hierarchy. Computers were ‘the mathematical artisans of the observatory … they used mathematics as a tool, and not as an instrument. They used mathematics like apprentices in optical workshops handled the basic unspoken tools such as drills and bores, and not like astronomers manipulated telescopes in observatories.’Footnote 74 These ‘mathematical labourers’ were supervised by the assistants, although, in rare cases, senior computers could check the work of their junior peers as well. Power, the computer who had been allowed to surpass the age limit of twenty-three, for example, ‘showed that he could be trusted with the supervision of junior Computers and with the examination of their work’.Footnote 75 A similar supervisory relationship was established in the early 1890s, when Christie hired five adult women as ‘lady computers’ to support the expanding observatory's labour needs. Just as Power acted in a supervisory capacity over younger boys, the eldest of the women, Isabelle Clemes, was set up as supervisor over younger ladies. While older and more educated than the boy computers, and trusted with more complex roles, the lady computers experienced many of the same challenges as the boys, including low pay and precarity. Some talented amateur astronomers, including Agnes Clerke, turned down positions at Greenwich because of the low salary. But the lady computers also experienced their own unique challenges and limitations. Married women, for example, were not allowed to work in the civil service, and as such, one of the lady computers, Annie Russell, had to retire from her post when she married another observatory staff member, Walter Maunder.Footnote 76
Careful management of all the computers, regardless of their age or gender, was considered essential to maintaining the integrity of the observatory's work. As Schaffer has argued with reference to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, the standardization of practices and maintenance of order amongst workers was necessary for the knowledge produced in the lab to be trusted worldwide. Schaffer writes that ‘in seventeenth-century laboratories, gentlemanly codes of honour and trust governed the capacity of natural philosophers to render experience and testimony as reliable reports of natural order … Similarly, in Victorian observatories workers were regulated within factory discipline to guarantee their scrutiny of the stars’.Footnote 77 At Greenwich, therefore, maintaining discipline amongst the computers was vital. It ensured accuracy, removed human error and instilled trust in the authority of Greenwich's output. Airy's factory-like reforms to perfect and simplify the computation process were necessary to overcome any complaint that the Greenwich time signal, for example, was computed by mere children.
While this factory-style astronomy produced excellent results for the observatory's reputation and output, it also led the observatory to experience the same problems that plagued factory work elsewhere – it created a precarious, underpaid and unskilled workforce. Boy computers had little recourse to complain of their working conditions or pay, and they had no job security. Boys were sometime let go through no fault of their own, and even seniority did not protect them. As Rebekah Higgitt notes, ‘the Astronomers Royal were not all-powerful dictators. They were answerable to the Admiralty and, importantly, to the scientific advisors that constituted the Board of Visitors. They were also, sometimes more or sometimes less, answerable to scientific and general public opinion’.Footnote 78 As such, the Astronomer Royal never had complete control of the budget. When the Admiralty instituted cuts, he had little recourse other than to let some of the computers go, regardless of their age. ‘In parting with computers’, Airy wrote in 1881, ‘the rule of seniority is not acknowledged with reference to them. Keep your best men’.Footnote 79 His assistant William Ellis followed instructions, and fired a computer who had been around longer than some of the others, because Ellis considered the newer computers more ‘valuable’.Footnote 80 Airy also made it clear that giving a month's notice for being let go was a courtesy, not a right. ‘It is to be made known that the month's notice is only in courtesy: I refuse all claims for it … On the other hand, I never require any notice to myself, for intention of quitting’.Footnote 81
In 1881, the dozen or so boys employed as computers petitioned the Astronomer Royal for a pay raise, citing a rise in the cost of living.Footnote 82 Airy rejected their demands, telling them that the experience they were accumulating was the job's main reward, not the salary. As he put it, the education which they were receiving ‘in regular and practical habits was the principal remuneration that could be offered for work’ at the observatory.Footnote 83 In other words, the position was designed to grant them training, not wealth – the temporary position would set them up for a much higher-paying career in the future. With a good letter of reference from the Astronomer Royal, Airy claimed, they might someday find a much higher-paying job – he cited to them a previous computer who had found a job in which he now made almost one thousand pounds per year.Footnote 84 Airy's argument may have been true for some of the boys, but not all were so successful, and their prospects seem to have diminished as time went on. His successors would continue to receive similar complaints from the computers about the lack of opportunities available to them.
Under Christie, computer positions continued to be precarious, even as the observatory underwent massive growth. The number of computers gradually expanded, reaching its peak in 1906, with thirty-one temporary and nine established computers (with one vacancy), but the temporary positions were never secure.Footnote 85 Sickness and disability were ever-present threats to their livelihood. In 1895, for example, one computer, H.T., became indisposed, and lost his job as a result. When he became well again, he wrote to the observatory to ask for his place back, but was told there were no longer any vacancies. Fortunately for H.T., the turnover rate of computers was high, and he was eventually rehired at a later date.Footnote 86 On the other hand, Christie did support his computers who were injured on the job through no fault of their own. Work at the observatory was usually safe, but accidents did happen. In 1901, one of the ovens used to test chronometers (temperature affected the accuracy of naval clocks) exploded. The explosion severely burnt a computer's right hand, and ruined his clothes. The Astronomer Royal wrote to the Admiralty on his behalf to request compensation: there is no record of whether the Admiralty honoured the claim.Footnote 87 Regardless of the Astronomer Royal's compassion, the system did not allow for any flexibility or leniency with regard to mistakes. Boys who earned certificates to use the instruments were expected to carry out their duties carefully. Mishandling the instruments made more work for the adult employees, and resulted in stern reprimands for the boys.Footnote 88 Just like the management of personnel, the maintenance of scientific instruments and preventing physical states of disrepair were vital to maintaining the reputation of scientific institutions like Greenwich.Footnote 89 As such, damaging equipment at Greenwich was not easily tolerated, and any replacements were made at the boy's own expense.Footnote 90
By the end of Christie's tenure in 1910, the computers were once again fed up with their low salaries and the dwindling opportunities open to them upon leaving. Christie's attitude towards computers had not been forgiving in the matter of pay, reprimanding those who spoke up about their wages. In 1882, when several computers complained of being overworked, Christie told them that they had handled the situation improperly, and threatened to cut their pay rather than increase it if such complaints were raised again.Footnote 91 To be fair, he was not altogether insensitive to the problems of his temporary boy workers. Higgitt has demonstrated that Christie worked hard, albeit with only partial success, to convince the Admiralty to allow him to employ more permanent staff, in place of the temporary computer positions which he was forced to offer.Footnote 92 In any case, his retirement presented the computers with an opportunity to convince his successor that a change was needed.
The computers submitted a joint complaint to Christie's replacement, Frank Dyson, about the unfavourable conditions under which they were working in 1910. They wrote,
Our prospects are practically nil … [and there does not] appear to be any hope of vacancies occurring on the Staff in the near future. During the last few years there has been a marked decrease in the number of Computers who have gone to other observatories, to Banks or to other appointments for which we are eligible. These berths now appear closed to us, and our astronomical training is of little or no value in commercial life. We are also handicapped in another direction. Boy Clerks are on a similar footing to us, their appointments being temporary, but they have the advantage which we are denied, of an allowance of Service Marks … in civil service examinations.Footnote 93
In addition, the computers complained that their salary did not reflect their worth, and that their automatic dismissal at age twenty-three was a cruel introduction to a world where their training offered few prospects.
The new Astronomer Royal was sympathetic but unhelpful. He told the boys not to expect an increase to the maximum salary, nor in the maximum age of twenty-three. He also emphasized that the temporary nature of the positions was intentional, echoing the words of George Airy thirty years earlier, stating that these positions ‘are useful as providing a small income for boys who leave school at the age of 15 or 16, till they are old enough to obtain positions in the Second Division of the Civil Service, Banks, or City offices’.Footnote 94 Dyson did promise to inquire about their earning service marks for the civil service entrance exam, but was not hopeful of success. In the end, he encouraged the boys to improve themselves by taking classes to better their chances at employment, and offered to forward their names for open positions as he became aware of them.Footnote 95
A few months later, in early 1911, the computers’ complaints reached the press. A newspaper article appeared in John Bull titled ‘The Greenwich Observatory: a plea for the supernumerary computers’. The article complained of the low pay and hard work of the computers, but, more importantly, of the unfairness that these computers, despite their expertise and years of training, were summarily dismissed at the age of twenty-three, at which time they found that their mathematical experience was useless on the job market without any business experience to accompany it. The article continued,
The rotten system seems to be maintained by the Government solely to save money. They seem to think that when they force these men to retire, and fill their places with inexperienced youths, by the decrease in wage money is inevitably saved. But astronomy is not learnt in a day, and until the youthful astronomer become conversant with the most important branches of the art, mistakes innumerable are continually made, and therefore corresponding time wasted.Footnote 96
Such a story undermined the reputation of Greewich's time signal by implying that it was produced by inexperienced boys.
Instances like these were slowly making the institution of temporary computers unsustainable. By the end of Dyson's tenure in 1933, it was becoming clear that it had become untenable. At that time, Dyson attempted to convince the Admiralty to turn the computer positions into permanent civil service positions. He pointed to three difficulties with the temporary positions. First, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find positions for the boys after they were let go. The fact that he was recruiting boys into what was for most of them a dead-end job weighed on the Astronomer Royal's conscience, and he felt responsible for finding them work after they left – something that had become more challenging as the years went on. Second, the programme no longer brought in the best and brightest students, as headmasters now realized it was not in the boys’ best interests. And third, of the boys who were recruited, the best of them were the ones who did succeed in finding employment on their own and left. Given these problems, and the fact that the work of the computers was necessary for running the observatory, the Astronomer Royal made a case for the computer positions to be made permanent. This was finally accomplished in 1937.Footnote 97
Greenwich's factory system was intended to remove human error from its output and ensure its status as a reputable institution. But it was impossible to perfectly impose order on its young workers. While the Astronomers Royal and their supervisory staff took pains to instil discipline amongst the computers, the boys inevitably found ways around it. Computers at Greenwich managed to engage in a complex social life at the observatory alongside the drudgery of rote astronomical calculations. Amidst their ongoing responsibilities, the boys took part in a full range of adolescent experiences, and found ways to amuse themselves. Some of the activities were sanctioned. Social clubs, both formal and informal, were a staple of life at Greenwich throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During Christie's tenure, many of these organized leisure activities took the form of outdoor exercise, and required special permission to use the nearby park. Christie obtained such permission to play tennis in 1883, provided observatory staff worked around the schedules of other tennis clubs, and in 1886 received a petition to allow cycling in the park during early morning hours when the park was usually empty.Footnote 98 But the most successful of these outdoor social activities was a hockey club, which was first organized in 1893, composed of both boy computers and adult staff. By the winter of 1905, the club had grown substantially, and team members requested permission from the Astronomer Royal to use a section of the park adjoining the observatory to play their games.Footnote 99 The Astronomer Royal made the request to park officials on their behalf, as he considered ‘the hockey club an excellent institution and very useful in promoting “esprit de corps” amongst the younger members of the Staff and affording a healthy open-air exercise after their somewhat trying duties with the instruments at night’.Footnote 100
For Christie, the value of the hockey club came not merely from sociality in a general sense, but rather from athleticism and exercise, both of which were considered essential to maintaining well-being and personal discipline amongst the computers. As Warwick has argued in the context of Cambridge mathematicians, exercise helped ‘to regulate the working day’, and competitive sport ‘was employed to improve discipline, health, and appetite while keeping students away from illicit activities when not in the classroom’.Footnote 101 The same logic was employed at Greenwich via the hockey club. The park authorities approved their request, granting the observatory staff permission to play in the requested area, but not exclusively (it was a public space after all). Outside working hours, the observatory offered its staff not just a workspace, but also an active outlet for exercise and personal well-being.
The Astronomers Royal may have tolerated exercise clubs for their employees in the name of personal discipline, but when the social activities of the computers affected their on-the-clock work, they were less than pleased. Life as a young computer could be complex, exciting and challenging, replete with the staples of childhood such as friendships, bullies, pranks and other mischief. But this meant that some of the misadventures of the boys threatened order and discipline in the observatory, and such occasions were bound to draw the attention of the Astronomer Royal; Airy, Christie and Dyson all discovered this, to their displeasure. In early 1881, for example, one of the boys, J.T., found himself becoming decidedly outcast from the rest. The unfortunate youth complained to Airy that he was being teased and tormented by the other computers, who hid his hat in out-of-the-way parts of the observatory (including atop the transit circle), and filled his coat pockets with snow.Footnote 102 In writing to the Astronomer Royal, J.T. sadly noted that it had reached an ‘unbearable pitch – I should not mention the matter, but the continued repetition of such paltry annoyances appears to arise less from feelings of fun than from those of malice’.Footnote 103 Obviously not comfortable in the role of schoolteacher or mentor, Airy's response was terse and unempathetic, noting that he could not do anything to stop these annoyances, especially since J.T. was unable to name a culprit. It would not do to take action against the whole cohort – though Airy did promise to mete out appropriate reprimands if the boy could discover and name which of his co-workers was responsible.Footnote 104 There is no record whether J.T. was able to identify and report his tormentor(s), but if he did, they found a way to retaliate. Another boy, H.P., raised a reciprocal complaint against him to the Astronomer Royal: ‘Sir, I have been requested by the Computers of the Astronomical Department to bring to your notice the following disgusting habits, among others, of [J.T.] – expectorating on mats, stairs, etc, blowing his nose in fern box under ladder’, and in and around various observatory instruments.Footnote 105 ‘The computers’, H.P. concluded, ‘would esteem it a great favour if you will request [the accused] to desist from these practices’.Footnote 106 Airy, faced with accusations from two boys, turned to Edwin Dunkin for an adult opinion on the situation. Dunkin suggested Airy admonish the boy in writing that should such behaviour continue, he would be instantly dismissed. Airy did just that. J.T. apologized, and there ended the correspondence.Footnote 107
Relationships between computers were clearly not always friendly, and adult support was sorely lacklustre, except to step in and insist on orderly behaviour. It is clear from these incidents that there was a significant spatial element to the computers’ behavioural transgressions. J.T.'s tormentors wandered beyond the computing rooms to hide their victim's clothing in the transit circle room, while complaints regarding J.T.'s hygiene were recounted with reference to his nose blowing in proximity to various astronomical instruments. These transgressions, then, posed a threat to the instruments’ state of repair, making it all the more important to the well-being of the Royal Observatory that these childish behaviours be kept under control. In some cases, the solutions involved placing spatial constraints on the computers’ movements, by making access to certain rooms time-dependent, and subject to locks and keys. This was true during Christie's era, as is evident from an incident in 1906, when an adult employee complained that ‘some of the computers have been carrying on mischievous pranks in the South Room out of office hours – gumming papers together … putting coal or other dirty objects into inkbottles and drawers, filling keyholes with rubbish to prevent drawers being opened, etc. The nuisance is so intolerable that it seems to call for energetic measures’.Footnote 108 Christie, rather than attempting to find and punish a culprit, decided to lock the South Room after hours and leave the key with the porter.Footnote 109 Out-of-office-hours pranks were one thing, but disruptions during the workday or working night were particularly annoying to the adult astronomers. On one occasion early in Dyson's tenure, disturbances had become so disruptive that Dyson had to take action. He posted a warning to the boys, instructing them that he had noticed that
on occasional afternoons when no assistant is present in a room, the computers neglect their work and make a great deal of noise. This disgraceful behaviour must cease, and computers are warned that serious notice will be taken in the case of anyone found acting in the manner referred to in future.Footnote 110
The experience of the boy computers demonstrates the ways in which life at Greenwich was organized to enforce discipline and create order at the observatory, but also the ways in which that order was fragile and precarious. Factory-like structures and practices were intended to shore up the reliability of the observatory's output, but also created a high turnover of youth workers in deskilled positions. These youth eventually went to the press to advocate for improvements to their working conditions, threatening the observatory's reputation in doing so. Meanwhile, the boys’ social relations meant that the observatory was anything but a sterile and orderly place – unsurprising where a large portion of the staff were adolescents. Greenwich's astronomical and timekeeping work, which supported both the civil government and naval navigation across the empire, relied in large part on the whims of children. Or at least it would have, without the careful system of oversight implemented to maintain discipline and to ensure the accuracy of the boys’ work.
Conclusion: order, discipline and the observatory
The observatory could be a disorderly place. Its walls, it is clear, were highly permeable. They could not keep out unpleasant smells or apple-raiding boys, nor could they construct within their confines a ‘placeless place’ devoid of social relations. While successive Astronomers Royal attempted to maintain order and instil discipline amongst their employees, they found that order was precarious and easily undermined. Domestic servants challenged rules and regulations. Boyhood behaviours interrupted the factory-like rhythms of computational work, and underpaid temporary youth workers publicly questioned the quality of the observatory's output under such conditions. Meanwhile, the observatory could not ignore its local neighbourhood, as nearby trees, city lights and pollution combined to impinge on astronomical observations. Threats to order came from every direction.
These threats had to be managed in order to secure the observatory's reputation and ensure its long-term stability. Greenwich's domesticity offered stability by providing spaces for networking and through familial attachment. But Greenwich's knowledge production system also had to be made reliable. It had to be carefully monitored in such a way that its users worldwide would continue to trust in its accuracy. Discipline and order therefore became paramount to all of its activities. The preservation of order on a small scale within the observatory became vital to propping up British imperial order on a grand scale across the globe by way of the time service. This state of affairs meant that life and work at Greenwich were underpinned by the ever-present tension between the need to project an image of order and continual threats to that order, large or small. The ability of the Astronomers Royal and their staffs to manage and navigate these threats charted the observatory's fortunes, and provided one of the fundamental organizing principles of the observatory's social structure – the preservation of order – throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In considering the implications of this case study for the broader history of scientific institutions, the spatial dimensions stand out as deserving careful attention. It is clear that boundary walls between the outside world and the enclosure acted less like barriers and more like sites of interaction, and should be considered as such. Meanwhile domestic spaces mingled science, work and leisure, producing both unpredictable relationships and familial stability in equal measure. And finally, while the management of the computers involved control over their workspaces with lock and key and supervision, it is perhaps more significant that the computers were able to undermine and transgress the spatial limitations imposed on them. In examining the ‘factory-like’ management of the observatory and similar spaces of institutional science, we must be careful not obscure the agency of the staff, like the Greenwich computers whose lives and actions did not always conform to the strict mandates of their superiors. Institutional science may depend on rigidity and discipline and controlled access to space, but it is a human activity, and is therefore always subject to individual agency and unexpected movements across boundaries, both tangible and intangible.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Trish Hatton and Amanda Rees at BJHS, and the two anonymous reviewers for their guidance and support, as well as Chelsea Barranger for her constructive comments on early drafts of this text.
