Of physical reminders of Hutton’s life we have, too, surprisingly little. The house in Newcastle where he was born succumbed to rebuilding in the nineteenth century; aptly enough, part of Newcastle University stands on the site today. The pit he worked in is covered by new housing, the location barely discernible. Woolwich Arsenal has been redeveloped again and again, although you can still see the Academy building where Hutton taught for so long. His own houses on Woolwich Common were pulled down during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; his grave at Charlton was obliterated by new building. But the street, and the house, where he spent his last years and died are still standing, externally much as he knew them: Bedford Row, north of Holborn. Rows of smart Georgian town houses. A few trees. It was a fine winter day when I visited: Charles Hutton’s front door; Charles Hutton’s door scraper.
And Hutton’s reputation, his popularity that ‘promises to be as permanent as it is extensive’ and his achievements that would always be remembered? What, indeed, had he achieved? On the military side, thirty-odd years of pressing the importance of mathematics in officer training had left a permanent mark on the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers, which were now, by several contemporary accounts, a versatile and supremely valuable body of men: ‘Military tactics have been much benefited by his important labours, for it is by him that our artillery, and system of engineering have been brought to that perfection which they are universally admitted to possess.’
Through the example of what he did at Woolwich and its export to other institutions including the Royal Military College, through the appointment of personnel at Hutton’s nod or at least sympathetic to his aims, and through the use of his textbooks, Hutton imparted at least a mathematical tone to the whole of British Army officer training, a tone that would not be wholly silenced during the Victorian period.
Davy reckoned Hutton had ‘eminently contributed to awaken and keep alive that spirit of improvement among the military students which has so much exalted the character of the British officer, and which has been attended with such beneficial results to the country’. Hutton had indeed, with his colleagues at Woolwich, established a tradition of military improvement through scientific experiment that would cumulatively contribute much to British military success: indeed, had already done so. Woolwich, by the time of his retirement, had a well-established reputation as an experimental site of the ‘utmost importance to the British nation’, semi-public and at the public service, producing such innovations as shrapnel shells and artillery rockets.
On the scientific side, too, Hutton had pressed for the importance of mathematics and mathematical practice through forty years of exclusion from the Royal Society, and his voice had not in the end gone unheard. Admittedly Davy’s reforms at the Society stalled, the active members feeling he was doing too little and others that he was doing too much, and history has judged him not to have made a success of the role of president. And by the time of William Whewell and Mary Somerville the British scientific community was (still) experiencing real anxiety about its lack of cohesion and – possibly consequent – lack of status. The term ‘scientist’, indeed, was coined in that context as part of a rallying cry for unity and common identity. As late as 1851 Charles Babbage could write that ‘science in England is not a profession; its cultivators are scarcely recognised even as a class’.
But a process had been set in motion that could not now be stopped, and it would never again be possible for the Royal Society to sideline mathematics to quite the degree that had been countenanced under Joseph Banks. British culture in general was taking mathematics more and more seriously, both as a tool of industry and engineering and as part of the education of a gentleman; in 1799 the Cambridge Senate House announced that in order to obtain a degree you would henceforth need a ‘competent knowledge of the first book of Euclid, Arithmetic, Vulgar and Decimal Fractions, Simple and Quadratic Equations’, as well as other material.
Furthermore, around Hutton and under his patronage the mathematicians, mathematics teachers and mathematical practitioners of London and its surroundings had acquired a self-conscious identity that issued forth in such tangible projects as the founding of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1818 and of the Astronomical Society of London – later the Royal Astronomical Society – in 1820, and that beyond a doubt contributed much to British science and engineering during the crucial years of the industrial revolution. (Hutton became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society less than a year before his death; he donated a few books and a copy of his portrait of Newton to the Society, but played no active part in its affairs.) Hutton’s colleague Thomas Leybourn produced a periodical called The Mathematical Repository from 1799 to 1833, partly fulfilling the old promise of a rival to the Philosophical Transactions on behalf of the mathematical party. Meanwhile, mathematical papers appeared in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society from 1821 and in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal from 1837. Hutton’s position as a sort of father figure in this group was emphasised from time to time by that most public declaration of intellectual allegiance, the dedication of a book to him: textbooks, translations and even poems were over the years placed under his notional ‘protection’. The mathematical community would remain self-conscious, poorly organised, and sometimes rather at odds with the different values of the Royal Society right up to the 1860s, when at last the London Mathematical Society was formed.
At the same time, the mathematical culture to which Hutton had devoted his life had begun in his lifetime a process of change, moving it towards professionalisation and towards the adoption of French notation and conceptual vocabulary. The genial amateurism of The Ladies’ Diary and its sisters, for so long a prominent feature of British mathematical culture, did not last. The Diary merged with The Gentleman’s Diary in 1841 and closed in 1871, not before adopting French notation in place of British. Hutton himself was the author of a number of small mathematical novelties – tiny geometrical theorems and algebraic proofs, computational tricks and ways of calculating trigonometrical ratios – that were typical of that world, but did not entitle him to fame or commemoration in the new world of professional mathematics where conceptual innovation was prized above all. Equally, as editor of the Diary he had overseen the publication of a mass of tiny mathematical discoveries that in the long run were scarcely remembered. His perhaps more significant innovation in the theory of bridges, what he called the ‘arch of equilibration’, passed into the common stock of knowledge without his name remaining attached to it.
Meanwhile Hutton’s two key scientific pieces of work – those commemorated on the medal: weighing the world and the force of fired gunpowder – went the way of all scientific ideas: eventually they were ousted by better ones. In the long run the torsion balance experiments of Cavendish were repeated with increasing success, and it came to be accepted that mountain-based measurements of the earth’s density such as those Hutton had worked on could not be made similarly satisfactory, due to the difficulty of surveying enough territory and of guessing at the rock strata that it was impossible to see. It also came to be accepted that Hutton’s own laborious calculations were marred by the coarseness of the grid of points he had used close to the observation stations, leading to a substantial error in the final result. Fine science in its day, in other words, but like all fine science destined to be superseded by finer.
As to Hutton’s work on ballistics – on the force of gunpowder and the nature of air resistance. It was persistently asserted, including by Hutton himself, that the work had led to tangible changes in artillery design and practice: reduced windage, smaller charges, and the introduction of shorter cannon under the name of carronades. But such claims proved hard to substantiate in detail, and Hutton’s name did not come to be decisively associated with any particular change in artillery. Perhaps rightly.
On the other hand, Hutton’s experimentally derived formula for air resistance did come into wide use, and in the early twentieth century it
was still possible for an informed observer to state that it was used ‘perhaps more than all others combined’; it was still found in many up-to-date textbooks. But it had come to be called ‘Unwin’s formula’, for reasons already obscure by that date: Professor Unwin it seems had done no more than quote Hutton, adding his approval.
Thus, even by the time of Hutton’s death well-meaning admirers could write that his work was mainly in ‘improving and simplifying’, that he lacked originality, that he was as remarkable for his industry as for the intellectual content of his writings. It wasn’t true, but it was how he would come to be remembered. Friends, colleagues and disciples would try in vain to correct the picture. Gregory and others insisted that two at least of his scientific papers – on gunpowder and the density of the earth – were ‘the most useful and important that, perhaps, had been communicated since the chair of that learned Institution was filled by Sir Isaac Newton’. His was the minority view.
More direct attempts to tell Hutton’s story also came to nothing. There were obituaries in national and provincial newspapers, many copied from one another; perhaps amounting to ten substantially distinct accounts of Hutton’s life. Brief biographies appeared in at least four volumes of local Newcastle history later in the nineteenth century, alongside two short ‘lives’ that had appeared during his lifetime. Both Knight’s Cyclopedia in 1867 and in 1891 the Dictionary of National Biography included entries about Hutton. Together with the ‘tribute of respect’ associated with the bust presentation this gives us quite a lot of Hutton biographising from the period when he was within – or close to – living memory; there are also a few reminiscences in manuscript, collected by Newcastle historians probably at the behest of his correspondent John Bruce. But all this added up to a chaotic, not a coherent account of his life. London-based writers doubted Hutton had ever been in the coal pits; Newcastle-based ones garbled the events of 1784. No one said what had happened to the first Mrs Hutton, nor was any very clear account printed of how Charles Blacker Vignoles fitted in to Hutton’s life.
At the time of writing his obituary, Gregory intended to compose a longer account of Hutton’s life, perhaps even a book-length biography, based on his own diary. That’s the last we hear of either Hutton’s diary or the life by Gregory. Gregory’s illness and death may be to blame: maybe material was suppressed by Vignoles; a later story said Henry quashed the biography because he didn’t want it known his father had worked in the coal pits. No version is certain. In Gateshead, the antiquarian John Bell got as far as printing a title page for ‘Collections relative to Charles Hutton’; but he printed nothing more.
It wasn’t all failure, though. Hutton’s colleagues did most effectively succeed in keeping his name before the public through republication of his books. The Guide received American and Scottish editions; for a period there were not two but three rival versions of the book on the market in Britain, and the very last went on sale in 1867. The Measurer and the Recreations were reissued, the latter by Edward Riddle, a protégé and disciple who also wrote a short life of Hutton as a preface. Editors of these posthumous versions differed in their attitudes, some prizing fidelity to Hutton’s thought more than others. The Course in particular came to reflect the transformation in British mathematics, with French-style notation adopted in its later editions.
The Course also went to America, and Robert Adrain both taught from it and edited an American edition in New York, printed five times over the next decade and a half. There were British editions up to 1860; it was used at West Point until at least 1825 and at the Royal Military College into the 1830s. The Course was a particular hit, it seems, in British India, where the Bengal Artillery and the Bombay Engineers included men who had personal connections with Hutton. Translations were arranged into Gujarati, Arabic, Sanskrit and Marat’ha at Bombay and Calcutta during the 1830s. Together with an Urdu version of the Conics printed in Delhi in 1848 and a Japanese version of his work on bookkeeping, this gave Hutton an international reach probably exceeded only by Euclid among mathematical writers at the time. There was a period in the 1830s when the sun scarcely set on his textbooks. A list of authors owing debts to them would be a conspectus of virtually everyone who published on mathematics in the Victorian world, and many more besides. John Henry Newman owned a copy of the Compendious Measurer; Karl Marx cited Hutton’s Course.
Finally the Tables, a work that went out of date less easily and was less affected by changes in mathematical style, went through half a dozen editions during the nineteenth century after Hutton’s death; a writer in the 1891 Dictionary of National Biography reckoned the introduction still valuable as ‘an interesting and learned history of logarithmic work’. The last edition of the tables was issued in 1894. When after a few years it fell out of print, the voice of Charles Hutton – pit boy, professor and unequalled spokesman for mathematics – at last fell silent.
Notes
1 Out of the Pit
Tyne river, running rough or smooth: Ken and Jean Smith, The Great Northern Miners (Newcastle, 2008), 3. See also Eneas Mackenzie, A Descriptive and Historical Account of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Newcastle, 1827); P.M. Horsley, Eighteenth-Century Newcastle (Newcastle, 1971); C.M. Fraser and Kenneth Emsley, Tyneside (Newton Abbot, 1973); and Alistair Moffat and George Rosie, Tyneside: a history of Newcastle and Gateshead from earliest times (Edinburgh, 2005).
Charles Hutton’s parents: Genealogical information is collated from familysearch.org, freereg.org.uk, ancestry.com, and findmypast.com, as well as from the inscription from Hutton’s gravestone (now destroyed) transcribed in Leonard Morgan May, Charlton: Near Woolwich, Kent. Full and complete copies of all the inscriptions in the old parish church and churchyard (London, 1908), 69.
a ‘viewer’ in the collieries: On the work of coal viewers see The Compleat Collier (Newcastle, 1730), 18–19; also A Pitman’s Notebook … the diary of Edward Smith, transcribed, edited and annotated by T. Robertson (Newcastle, 1970); and The Hatchett Diary, ed. A. Raistrick (Truro, 1967).
High-end viewers: See John Hatcher et al., The History of the British Coal Industry (5 vols, Oxford, 1984–1993), vol. 2, 58–62; and J.R. Harris, ‘Skills, Coal and British Industry in the Eighteenth Century’, The Journal of the Historical Association 61 (1976), 170.
a land steward for Lord Ravenscroft: Olinthus Gregory, ‘Brief Memoir of the Life and Writings of Charles Hutton’, Imperial Magazine 5 (March 1823 [obituary dated 1 February]), 201–27 at 201. Gregory was probably relying on Hutton’s own reminiscences, and although John Bruce ridiculed the claim in A Memoir of Charles Hutton (Newcastle, 1823), 3, he provided no evidence that it was false.
this ‘low’ dwelling: Mackenzie, Historical Account of Newcastle, 557.
compared with the cottages of the miners: Edward Smith, A Pitman’s Notebook, 6; Peter Crookston, The Pitmen’s Requiem (Newcastle, 2010), 22.
Ladies liked little Charles: ‘Charles Hutton’ in Public Characters (10 vols, London, 1799–1809), vol. 2, 97–123, at 98.
actual hangings were a rarity: Moffat and Rosie, Tyneside, 207.
an old Scots woman: Bruce, Memoir, 4.
an ‘overman’ in one of the collieries: Bruce, Memoir, 3; also Woodhorn, SANT/BEQ/26/1/7/77 (notes of Thomas Wilson, 28 March 1822).
Hundreds of thousands of tons: The History of the British Coal Industry vol. 2, 26.
The so-called Grand Alliance: The History of the British Coal Industry vol. 2, 41, 61, 157.
The members of the Grand Alliance were technophiles: The History of the British Coal Industry vol. 2, plate 7 and pp. 101, 122; also William Fordyce, A History of Coal … (London, 1860), 82; Robert Edington, A Treatise on the Coal Trade (London, 1813), 115; and A Pitman’s Notebook, 35.
housing for the underground workers: The History of the British Coal Industry vol. 2, 434–40.
massive revelry at weddings: See Edward Chicken, The Collier’s Wedding (Newcastle, 1764); compare The Colliers’ Rant (Newcastle, 1740) and Thomas Wilson, The Pitman�
��s Pay (Gateshead, 1843).
Middle-class visitors: History of the British Coal Industry, 434–40; The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Nehemiah Curnock and John Telford (8 vols, London, 1909–1916), vol. 3, 13 (arrival in Newcastle on Thursday 27 May 1742).
operating a trapdoor in the pits: Obituary of Hutton in the Newcastle Chronicle, 31 January 1823. On the conditions of work see The Pitmen’s Requiem, 146–7; Smith, Great Northern Miners, 19; Barbara Freese, Coal: a human history (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 77; and Wilson, Pitman’s Pay, x.
Firedamp and chokedamp: The Hatchett Diary, 81; The Pitmen’s Requiem, 30; see also The Compleat Collier, 9 and History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 2, 420.
asking the newspapers not to print reports of pit explosions: Freese, Coal, 51–2, citing the Newcastle Journal for 1767.
You just clung on: History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 2, 103; James Everett, The Wall’s End Miner (London, 1835), 48.
Eventually that would happen to Francis Frame: ‘A Memoir of Charles Hutton’, Newcastle Magazine (June 1823), 298–311 at p. 299.
your chance of dying in an accident: History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 2, 419.
the exploitation of children in the pits: Commission for Inquiring into the Employment and Condition of Children in Mines and Manufactories, First Report of the Commissioners (London, 1842); also Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, ‘Old Questions, New Data, and Alternative Perspectives: the standard of living of families in the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History 52 (1992), 849–80 and Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, ‘“The Exploitation of Little Children”: children’s work and the family economy in the British industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History 32 (1995), 485–516.
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