A Roman TercentenaryAuthor(s): Alan CookSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Sep., 2002), p. 273Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3557733 .

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 56 (3), 273 (2002) doi 10.1098/rsnr.2002.0183

A ROMAN TERCENTENARY

Three hundred years ago, on 6 October 1702, the Pope, Clement XI, inaugurated a new meridian line in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome, a line that had been set out by a Fellow of The Royal Society, Francesco Bianchini. In my foreword to our January issue I wrote something of his career at the papal court in Rome, of his activities as an astronomer and his membership of the Accademia Fisica- mathematica associated with Queen Christina of Sweden (who then lived in Rome). I also mentioned his visit to Britain in January and February 1713 when he was elected to the Fellowship of The Royal Society, as he described in his manuscript, Iter in Britanniam (in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, MS T 46 B IV).

The Pope asked Bianchini to lay out the new meridian because the astronomical data that had been used in setting up the Gregorian calendar more than a century before were insufficiently precise. The new meridian line was used to improve them, and gave Roman noon time up to the middle of the nineteenth century. The church of Santa Maria degli Angeli was arranged by Michelangelo in one of the great halls of the baths of Diocletian, close to the present main railway station. The disposition is such that a long meridian line could be laid out unencumbered on the floor of the church, with the sunlight at noon shining through a small hole in the roof. The disposition, the stability and the precision are much better than those of the famous meridian that Gian Domenico Cassini, ER.S., laid out in San Petronio in Bologna.

In this issue of Notes and Records we carry two papers about people who were not Fellows of the Society, Sir George Cayley and Israel Lyons. (The first part of the Cayley paper was published in the May 2002 issue.) Sir George and Lyons were, however, both closely associated with Fellows, and Lyons taught Joseph Banks botany. Both papers raise by implication the question why their subjects were not elected to the Fellowship. Lyons's work, while valuable, seems not to have been particularly original, and Cayley's aeronautical studies were not perhaps well known.

Three papers deal with two notable Victorians, Michael Faraday and Charles Babbage, and the relations between them. Too often, well-known scientists are considered on their own, but of course they had colleagues and friends and acquaintances, and interactions between them led to new ideas. So it was with Faraday and Babbage and their friends, and so it is in collegial societies such as the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford. As Dr James has indicated, it is working at the laboratory bench, the doing of experiments, which so powerfully opens new ways of looking at the natural world. Dr James also emphasizes the range of Faraday's public services-may they not also have sparked new ideas in him? Free and intimate converse, the fertility of experiment, the potential of public service, the papers as a group bring them all out. As Dr James says, those are topics in which the history of science can instruct us.

Sir Alan Cook

273 ? 2002 The Royal Society

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