The critical "Master Witt" annotation copied by John Craig into the margin of his De revolutionibus, folio 82 verso, now in the University of Edinburgh Library.
But who was the mysterious Paul Wittich? Because he had never published anything, his reputation had nearly perished. Yet, as we gradually discovered, astronomical correspondence in the sixteenth century was full of him. He was obviously very clever, mathematically gifted, and rich enough to afford at least four copies of Copernicus' book. He never settled down for long in any one place, and though he handed over some of his observations to be published by the royal physician to Emperor Rudolf II, he somehow couldn't bring himself to send any of his mathematical inventions to the printers.
One of his mathematical schemes was particularly ingenious: Wittich found how to replace multiplication and division with addition and subtraction. At first glance this sounds a lot like the invention of logarithms, a discovery attributed to John Napier of Edinburgh around 1614. In fact, Anthony a Wood, one of the great English gossips of the seventeenth century, wrote that Napier had got the idea for logarithms from a method brought back from the Continent by John Craig. In one of his copies of De revolutionibus, Wittich used some empty space at the end of a chapter to pen in a prototype example. He had discovered how to use the rules for sines and cosines of the sums and differences of angles to reduce multiplication of angles to addition. The prototype was rather like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, but at least it showed the procedure. And this was precisely one of the pages that John Craig had transcribed into his copy of De revolutionibus when he was being tutored by Wittich in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1576. In turn he took his annotated copy with him when he returned to Edinburgh, and he surely must have shown it to Napier, who was living in a castle in the area. Here was the paper trail to fill in Anthony a Wood's tale.
Early in the twentieth century another astronomer-sleuth, J. L. E. Dreyer, who was then producing the monumental Opera omnia of Tycho Brahe, had become suspicious that his protagonist had appropriated from his visitors these mathematical techniques, which go under the jaw-breaking name of "the prosthaphaeresis method."* He knew that Tycho had boasted of a handy procedure that made it easier to convert his altitude and azimuth measurements into the celestial coordinate system of latitude and longitude. Tycho had only a partial set of techniques until 1598, when he met Melchior Jostel, a mathematics professor in Wittenberg. Dreyer, in his sleuthing through the manuscript repositories in Europe, found that, despite Tycho's claim to have worked out the method with Jostel, the Wittenberg professor actually had the technique himself well before Tycho had arrived.
Owen Gingerich and Robert Westman signing presentation copies of The Wittich Connection in the Westmans' La Jolla living room, 1988.
Dreyer, who did not know about Wittich's mathematical examples in his De revolutionibus, nonetheless asked, "Is not the conclusion irresistible, that similarly the invention of the method in 1580 was due to Wittich alone?" Strong evidence exists in Tycho's correspondence that Wittich had carried the De revolutionibus containing his mathematical methods along to Hven on his 1580 visit. A decade later, when Tycho learned that Wittich had returned to his hometown of Wroclaw and had died there, he began a campaign to buy Wittich's library. In one letter he specifically asked for the three copies of De revolutionibus (apparently the number Wittich had brought along with him) containing the cosmological diagrams and the mathematical notes. And eventually he succeeded in buying them. So when a Jesuit librarian wrote in the Prague copy, "known to be Tycho's," he was indeed correct; the notes themselves, however, belonged to Wittich, the previous owner.
As Westman and I pored over Tycho's correspondence (published in the Dreyer Opera omnia), the details of the Wittich story gradually emerged. Further information on Wittich's peregrinations turned up in the correspondence of Andrew Dudith, a sixteenth-century Hungarian churchman, statesman, and devoted amateur astronomer; his original letters had disappeared during World War II, but a Czech scholar had photographed them before the war, and we managed to get a set of prints from an astronomical historian in Prague.
We made no secret of our new identification of the Prague/Vatican/ Liege annotations. Since we were bound by our agreement to publish the fruits of our researches jointly, nothing yet appeared in print, and the project was clearly too intricate for us to complete while we were still together in England. Nevertheless, I lectured rather widely on "The Mystery of Master Witt," which included the curious prehistory of logarithms. Therefore it was quite a surprise, shortly after my return to the United States, to be asked by Sky and Telescope magazine for an illustration from the Vatican copy of De revolutionibus to be used by Edward Rosen in an article entitled "Render Not unto Tycho That Which Is Not Brahe's."
For many years Rosen had had the field of Copernican studies virtually to himself, but with the Quinquecentennial he faced increasing competition. While he could be a delightful social companion, he was at heart a very scrappy New Yorker. He was also highly secretive, being plagued with fear that his researches would be plagiarized; as a consequence, he seldom shared what he was currently investigating, nor did he communicate with his colleagues to find out what they were doing. So he was in the dark about our new attribution of the pseudo-Tychonic materials. He had independently noticed that the handwriting in the Vatican Copernicus could not possibly have been Tycho's, but he had no idea who the actual annotator was.
I immediately wrote to Ed, explaining that we had known for some time that Tycho hadn't annotated the Vatican Copernicus, and that in fact, we knew the annotator was Paul Wittich, though I didn't mention our specific evidence. Rosen was outraged, as we found out afterward, because, not knowing the correct identity of the Vatican annotator, he had put into print a mistaken attribution. A stickler for accuracy, he had erred in a dozen notes in the edition of his translation of De revolutionibus, which had meanwhile appeared in the Polish Complete Works series—endnotes that attributed various readings to Brahe instead of Wittich.
Aware that Rosen was on the same trail, Westman and I rushed a note to the Journal for the History of Astronomy outlining the evidence for the change in attribution. But Rosen marched on as if he had been the first to assemble the evidence about Wittich and, ignoring our note, published a long article in which, among other things, he analyzed in some detail how previous biographers of Paul Wittich had gotten his death date wrong. Since we had already been onto the relevant manuscript material, we saw at once, to our amazement, that he had misread the writing. He had corrected the year appropriately but had mistaken the day, reading an abbreviation of the "5th of the Ides of January" for the "5th day of January." It was of course totally inconsequential whether Wittich had died on 5 January 1586 or on 9 January 1586, but we knew that Rosen took such minutiae very seriously indeed. We ultimately scored a trivial point in our minor game of one-upsmanship, and Ed Rosen silently corrected his error in one of his later publications.
Of more substantial importance than finding the day on which Wittich died was deducing the year in which he was born. Tycho had always implied that it was "young Wittich" who had visited him, but that could simply have resulted from his highborn arrogance. With his snobbish manners, nearly everyone seemed in some way inferior. The key to calibrating Wittich's age fell into my hands entirely serendipitously several years later, fortunately before we published our definitive account of the Wittich connection.
The library of Duke August in Wolfenbiittel was considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest in seventeenth-century Europe. Today Wolfenbiittel is just a small town east of Hannover, but it is still renowned for hosting one of the premier research libraries in Germany. Isaac Newton's rival, the polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was for some years its librarian. Among its many impressive treasures are two first editions of De revolutionibus, which I had examined in 1973 and again in 1978, but it was not just Copernicus' book that I was looking at in the spring of 1986.1 was systematically examining a
ll of their astronomy books, thinking about the possibility of a special exhibition. Among the curious volumes I opened was a printed astrology text with a set of extra pages on which the owner had constructed birth horoscopes for his classmates at Wittenberg. I quickly realized that the book had an interesting research potential. With all those birthdays I could find out how old the students at Wittenberg were. In the late Middle Ages young teenagers went to the university, but were thirteen-year-olds typically at Wittenberg in the age of Copernicus? Miriam joined me in the library and set to work with the printed matriculation list for Wittenberg University, matching names with the manuscript horoscopes. The average age of entry turned out to be seventeen, much the same as in today's universities.
Our result, published in the journal History of Universities, intrigued the editors so much that they included an editorial that was even longer than our article. They considered our findings to be a breakthrough in understanding the nature of the European undergraduate population in the 1500s. And our result provided the basis for deducing when Wittich was born, since we knew he enrolled at Leipzig in the summer of 1563. If he was seventeen, then his birth year was around 1546, making him the same age as Tycho. But Tycho, precocious lad that he was, had turned up at Leipzig at age fifteen. He later recalled having been at Wittenberg the same time that Wittich was there, but that he scarcely remembered him. Tycho may not have recalled that meeting very well, but his memories of Wittich's visit to Uraniborg and its aftermath were all too clear.
Paul Wittich was a cut above most of the helpers who had arrived on the island of Hven. He was more akin to Tycho both intellectually and socially. The imperious Tycho needed appreciation, and Wittich could offer it as he admired the instruments on the balconies of the Uraniborg castle. So Tycho held nothing back as he explained the novel star-sights and scales on his quadrants, sextants, and armillary spheres. They toured the library with its thousands of books and its giant celestial globe, and they swapped notes on their ingenious trigonometrical methods. And the guest showed his host the technical underpinnings of his cosmological speculations, elegantly drafted into the copies of De revolutionibus that accompanied his wanderings. The idea of preserving some of the Copernican details, but with the Earth at the fixed center, must have greatly intrigued Tycho. He may have already been thinking along those lines, but seeing the specific arrangement of the planetary mechanisms within a geocentric framework must surely have spurred his own imagination. Clearly, Wittich's copies of De revolutionibus impressed Tycho, for he spent a decade pursuing those books, specifically mentioning their number and their contents, before he finally got them.
Despite his brilliance, Wittich seems to have been much more laid-back than Tycho. I have known a number of scientists, more than competent, wonderfully helpful and full of ideas, who could scarcely ever bring themselves to turn their researches into a publishable paper. Wittich must have been one of this type, for there is a not a single published book or paper with his name on it. No doubt on Hven he became increasingly wary of the arrogant, high-intensity Tycho, and when an inheritance came his way in Wroclaw, he used it as an excuse to escape the snare. He obviously accepted the huge Apianus volume, and he promised to come back, but he never did.
The next Tycho heard of Wittich was that the Wratislavian was holding forth at the observatory of his chief astronomical rival, Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse in Kassel, revealing the secrets of Tycho's star-sights and scale graduations and much else. Tycho was infuriated and felt badly burned. Never again would he be so open about his inventions. He became a changed man, secretive to the point of paranoia. And he soon had occasion to be truly paranoid. This time it was not the upper-class Wittich, but a lowborn autodidact, once a swineherd, who became the thorn in his side.
* Copies today sell in the vicinity of half a million dollars.
* Coming from the Greek, prosthaphaeresis literally means "addito-subtractive."
Chapter 8
BIGGER BOOKS LINGER LONGER
TYCHO WAS suspicious of Nicolaus Raimerus Ursus just as soon as he turned up at Uraniborg in September 1584 in the entourage of the nobleman Eric Lange. He suspected Ursus, known colloquially as "the Bear," of snooping around in his library, sniffing private papers. Determined to quench this industrial espionage, Tycho organized affairs so that the Bear got thoroughly drunk, and while he was dozing in an alcoholic stupor, Tycho had him searched. While this turned up no evidence, the lord of Uraniborg castle was still convinced that his closely guarded results were being stolen by an unwelcome guest.
And he had good reasons to worry about what Ursus had been up to, for just as Tycho was printing his own geoheliocentric cosmological system, in 1588, Ursus illustrated a very similar planetary model in a publication of his own. In both systems the Earth was at the center of the cosmos, and in both the Moon and Sun revolved about the fixed Earth, with the Sun carrying the retinue of other planets in orbit about it. However, there was a critical difference. In the Tychonic system, the circle of Mars sliced through the circle of the Sun's annual movement. This is required for Mars to come closer to the Earth than the Sun, as it correctly does in the Copernican system. In Ursus' system this was not the case, and because it always kept Mars farther than the Sun, it failed geometrically. While this error vitiated the Bear's system, it was so similar to Tycho's own proposal that the Dane was thoroughly outraged.
There was another curious feature of Ursus' Fundamentum astronomicum that must have galled Tycho: Ursus dedicated the many geometric diagrams in his book to a veritable who's who of European astronomers. Paul Wittich got a generous two-thirds-page diagram, as did Caspar Peucer and Kepler's teacher, Michael Maestlin. Christopher Clavius, the leading Italian astronomer, had an even larger one. The biggest of all was the large folding diagram of Ursus' system, dedicated to Tycho's chief rival, Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse. Conspicuous by his absence was Tycho Brahe. Tycho loftily declared that he was grateful not to be dragged into such a miserable book, but it still must have aggravated him to be so obviously snubbed.
The diagram dedicated to Paul Wittich in Nicolaus Raiments Vrsus' Fundamentum astronomicum (Strasbourg, 1588), folio 16 verso, author's collection.
Tycho wreaked his revenge on both Wittich and Ursus when he finally got around to publishing the first volume of his correspondence, where he vigorously defended his own cosmological priority. He attacked Wittich with innuendo, scarcely mentioning the name of his then-deceased onetime visitor. But Ursus, who had meanwhile become imperial mathematician at the court of Rudolf II in Prague, was depicted as a blackguard and plagiarist.
Ursus (who may well have been innocent of plagiarism) was not about to take this character assassination lying down, and he promptly prepared a scurrilous counterattack on the Danish nobleman, drawing attention to Tycho's morganatic marriage* and insinuating that his wife was a whore. As for Tycho's nose, which had been disfigured in a youthful drunken duel, Ursus slyly reported that, although he would never say so himself, one of his merry and witty dinner guests had uproariously reported that Tycho didn't actually need any instruments. He could just tilt his head up and look through his exposed nostril. "Why did he go to the senseless expense of one tool after another? He should be content with his natural nose that Mother Nature had so generously provided him with." And as for the plagiarism charge, Ursus conceded, "Let it be a theft, but a philosophical one." It was a standard rhetorical device: Concede your opponent's charge in order to demonstrate that it wouldn't have made any difference. Ursus claimed that the Tychonic system was so obvious that it was already implied in the ancient Greek work of Apollonius.
Tycho's fury was thus compounded. He brought a lawsuit against the Bear, with the consequence that the great majority of copies of Ursus' tract, De astronomicis hypothesibus, was destroyed. The work is now so rare that when J. L. E. Dreyer was preparing his classic biography of Tycho, he hadn't been able to see a copy (and thus didn't know that it was the bridge of Tycho's nose that had been
sliced off in the duel).
As Westman and I were digging out the story of Tycho, Wittich, and Ursus, I had an incredible piece of luck: In the spring of 1986 I accidentally purchased a copy of De astronomicis hypothesibus. For many years I had been systematically collecting old ephemerides, the volumes that tabulated planetary positions on a daily basis. By analyzing the accuracy of those predictions, I could track the general lack of improvement made when the Copernican system replaced the old Ptolemaic system, for example. That was unsurprising, considering that Copernicus' achievement was not something forced by fresh observations, but rather was a triumph of the mind in envisioning what was essentially a more beautiful arrangement of the planets.
For a lover of numbers, these old volumes with their columns of digits have a compelling beauty, but this is essentially an eccentric's view— fortunately for me, because there wasn't much competition in acquiring them. And dealers knew I was the most likely buyer. Thus, when a copy of Michael Maestlin's 1580 Ephemerides came up for sale at the Blooms-bury Auctions in London, Quaritches alerted me and asked if I wanted to bid. However, they warned me there was something risky about bidding because the book was completely unbound and the lot was to be sold not subject to return. In other words, caveat emptor—there was something wrong or irregular about the offering. What I know now is that if a sixteenth-century work was never bound, there is usually a reason, namely, that some part is missing.
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