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Why did scholars in mid-nineteenth century Japan assume that the prime meridian should run through Kyoto – positioning the city not only as the center of Japan but also of the entire world?...

Resumo Não há uma visão clara na historiografia internacional sobre a participação do Brasil na Conferência de Washington de 1884. No Brasil há uma interpretação de que o voto brasileiro acompanhou a França, por razões de subordinação. Este texto pretende estabelecer um diálogo com essas produções, ao trazer fontes inéditas sobre o tema, como as cartas trocadas por Luiz Cruls, tanto com o imperador como com sua esposa, bem como notícias de periódicos, anais e relatórios. Neste artigo foi utilizada uma abordagem da história da ciência, preocupada com os processos de institucionalização da astronomia no Brasil em meio a um debate mundial sobre padronização e universalização da ciência. Abstract There is no clear picture in the international historiography of Brazil’s participation at the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington of 1884. In Brazil there exists the prevailing interpretation that the Brazilian vote accompanied France for reasons of subordination. This work seeks to analyze this interpretation, by scrutinizing unpublished sources on the subject, such as the letters exchanged by Luiz Cruls both with the emperor and with his wife, as well as news articles in journals, annals and reports. In this article, an approach to the history of science was adopted that was concerned with the processes of institutionalization of astronomy in Brazil in the midst of a worldwide debate on the standardization and universalization of science.

To clockmakers George Graham was and is well known, even revered, although in this modern age his name does not commonly get a mention in scientific conversations and technology debates. But he was more than just a maker of clocks and of geared models that later became known as orreries. He was a scientist, passionate about astronomy, a socialist, and worked with the best of the best. He was not just helpful to so many others, but his generosity of spirit and largesse was absolutely crucial to the later successful introduction of a timepiece invention that saved so many lives at sea. No wonder that he earned the kindly nickname of Honest George.

The Muslim world has been learning about Korea for a long time. Historical evidence shows that some of this knowledge predates the Islamic era; indeed, Iranian merchants have nurtured ties since the era of the Sillā dynasty (57 BCE–935 CE). For centuries after the house’s fall, the name stuck: References to Korea as Sillā, Shillā, and Basillā appear in Iranian historical and literary texts until the sixteenth century. By the thirteenth century, however, as Sino-Iranian connections grew, Muslims began to adopt a new name, Kao-li or Korea. Still, astronomers and geographers continued to use the name Sillā, as evidenced in astronomical texts written in the eleventh, thirteenth, and sixteenth centuries. In the fourteenth century, an interesting change in the evolution of the word Sillā occurred: Islamic ephemerides, diaries that chronicle astronomical positions, began to record the name Sillā in the same location along an eastern prime meridian as the toponym Kangdez. The origins of Kangdez—for example, whether it developed from an Iranian or Indian tradition—is unclear. Nonetheless, this widely used dual naming of a single geographical location persisted in Islamic astronomical texts into the sixteenth century. This article traces the transfer of geographical knowledge about Sillā and Kangdez into and throughout the Muslim world through the works of five generations of well-known Muslim astronomers, with a focus on their lesser-known works. It seeks to specify the manner in which astronomical knowledge about the location of Sillā and Kangdez circulated among Muslims from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.

The creation of the grid formed by latitude and longitude was an important moment in capitalism's conquest of the world, making space smooth, fungible, and comprehensible by imposing order on an ot...

Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian. Charles W.J. Withers. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2017. 321 pp., 30 b/w illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95 (HC). ISBN: 9780674088818.

Where does US literature situate itself in world literary space? How do writers in the US relate to literary institutions at home and in the world? In her study of transnational literary institutions, The World Republic of Letters (1999), Pascale Casanova conceives of world literary space as a hierarchical structure, or a landscape shaped by centers and peripheries, and she illustrates her thesis with an intriguing geographical metaphor: Just as the prime meridian that runs through Greenwich, England, functions as an internationally recognized standard for measuring global time, there is also a “Greenwich meridian of literature” that marks the site of greatest authority on a world literary map, a cultural topography that differs from economic or political landscapes (87). Casanova’s claim that until recently, this literary meridian ran through Paris has been regarded as Francophile “triumphalism” (Damrosch 27). But if we consider the relevant socio-institutional networks, her argument seems reasonable enough: between the 1700s and the 1960s, the writers and tastemakers connected with the Parisian literary establishment had the greatest weight, not within the world at large, but within specific transnational conversations about what might count as “modern” in literature and which “regions” within world literary space are most representative of literary modernity (“The Literary Greenwich Meridian” 7–8). Casanova’s account of the waning of Parisian authority since the 1960s, however, adds a redundant declension narrative that obscures some of her more valuable insights. She interprets the increasing irrelevance of Paris as a global breakdown of “autonomy,” which

The second chapter of Wilson Harris’s phantasmagorical novel Palace of the Peacock opens with an arresting passage that foregrounds the narrator’s sense of the tensions inherent in the way place has been inscribed on the space that is familiar to him. He writes, ‘The map of the savannahs was a dream. The names Brazil and Guiana were colonial conventions I had known from childhood’ (Harris 1968, p. 20) and he goes on to expand on the role played by colonial cartographies by saying

The 1884 Prime Meridian Conference was a signal moment in the history of modernity, establishing a seamless space-time map and rendering the Greenwich Royal Observatory an international symbol of British imperial power. In this essay, I consider the representation of Greenwich Time at key moments in three canonical modernist texts: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent , James Joyce’s Ulysses , and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway . Exposing the linkage of Greenwich Mean Time to regimes of power, knowledge, and commerce, these modernists sought to dislocate narrative temporality from its enlistment in the imperial project of world standard time.

This article questions the notion of European identity and shows how the concept of translation is the basic principle of Europe. As a mythological figure, Europe was — literally — `translated' from the Orient to the Occident by a divine bull. The author demonstrates how Europe is conceived of as a performative that produces intermedial transcriptions in three ways: mythographically, in the version of the Epyllion by Moschos; cartographically, with respect to the prime meridian; and graphically, based on the frescos by Tiepolo in the grand staircase of the Prince-Archbishop's palace in Würzburg, Germany.

In the late summer months of 1797, Tomas Mauricio Lopez, son of famous cartographer Tomas Lopez de Vargas y Machuca, published a beautiful map depicting the archipelago of the Marquesas as well as Easter Island. According to the geo-historical tradition inherited from his father, Lopez was to perform a careful historical study of existing charts in an effort to craft a map by utilizing the longitudinal readings from the Teide Mountain located on the Canary Island of Tenerife.2 Lopez’s map, however, deviated from this accepted geo-historical practice. Although the chart meant to highlight earlier Spanish encounters with the depicted islands in the Pacific, its longitudinal readings were unorthodox. The prime meridian guiding the map derived not from the volcano Teide, but from the Royal Observatory located in Greenwich. In short, Lopez had based his geo-historical analysis almost entirely on the readings of James Cook’s second circumnavigation (1772–1775).

A new fate map for mesodermal tissues in Xenopus laevis predicted that the prime meridian, which runs from the animal pole to the vegetal pole through the center of Spemann's organizer, is the embryo's anterior midline, not its dorsal midline (M. C. Lane and W. C. Smith, 1999, Development 126, 423–434). In this report, we demonstrate by lineage labeling that the column 1 blastomeres at st. 6, which populate the prime meridian, give rise to the anterior end of the embryo. In addition, we surgically isolate and culture tissue centered on this meridian from early gastrulae. This tissue forms a patterned head with morphologically distinct ventral and dorsal structures. In situ hybridization and immunostaining reveal that the cultured heads contain the anterior tissues of all three germ layers, correctly patterned. Regardless of how we dissect early gastrulae along meridians running from the animal to the vegetal pole, both the formation of head structures and the expression of anterior marker genes always segregate with the prime meridian passing through Spemann's organizer. The prime meridian also gives rise to dorsal, axial mesoderm, but not uniquely, as specification tests show that dorsal mesoderm arises in fragments of the embryo which exclude the prime meridian. These results support the hypothesis that the midline that bisects Spemann's organizer is the embryo's anterior midline.

This paper discusses the different techniques one can use to publish digital models of real globes on the web.

An unfinished manuscript by an Anglo-American merchant and politician, Benjamin Vaughan, provides a rare glimpse of the cartographic culture of the later Enlightenment. Vaughan reacted to William Lambert's nationalistic proposal (1809) for a prime meridian through Washington, DC, to symbolize both the Union's political coherence and its independence. Vaughan presented a more strictly nationalist and Enlightened viewpoint: there should be only one prime meridian (running through Palma, in the Canaries), chosen according to "natural" rather than political principles. Both viewpoints nonetheless rested upon a common appreciation of a map's "subliminal geometry" which equates the graphic space of the map with the geodesic space of the territory and the social and cultural spaces of human existence. This conception of the map has remained the basis for modern cartographic culture and its naturalization of the map, despite the rejection of Enlightenment philosophy. The prime meridian, as the defining and balancing line of space thus provides the avenue of mediation between the concrete state and the abstract nation. The debate over the choice of a prime meridian is inherently a discourse between competing political systems.

“Tout effort, quelque obscur qu’il soit, devient grand quand il a un mobile eleve et genereux”.

This paper covers a small section of the historical research on the Cartography and Geodesy of Brazil which is undertaken by GeoCart, the Laboratory of Cartography of the Department of Geography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The most detailed of six surviving Indian cosmographic globes is a goreless, painted, papier-maché construction at the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Varanasi. Believed to be of east Indian provenance and to date from the mid-eighteenth century, the globe combines two distinct cosmographic conceptions, one each for the northern and southern hemispheres. These derive from ancient texts known as Purānas. In addition to its primarily mythic content, the globe includes a geographic section for Bhāratavarsa (India), the portion of the northern hemisphere within an arc forty-five degrees from the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator. Iconographically, the globe belongs to the Vaishnavite tradition of Hinduism. Le plus détaillé de six globes cosmographiques indiens qui subsistent est une pièce sans godet, peinte et en papier maché, que l'on retrouve au Bharat Kala Bhavan, à Varanasi. Présumé venir de l'Inde de l'est et dater du milieu du dix-huitième siècle, le globe combine deux conceptions cosmographiques distinctes, l'une pour l'hémisphère nord et l'autre pour l'hémisphère sud. Celles-ci viennent de textes anciens, appelés 'Puranas'. En plus de son contenu principalement mythique, le globe comporte une section géographique pour l'Inde ('Bharatavarsa'), soit une portion de l'hémisphère nord comprise dans un arc de quarantecinq degrés à partir de l'intersection du méridien principal et de l'équateur. Du point de vue iconographique, le globe appartient à la tradition vishnouiste de l'hindouisme.

Contrary to what its title suggests, this book is not a history of clock design, manufacture, or marketing. It is instead about the rise and fall of commercial time signal distribution by astronomical observatories in the nineteenth-century United States—time-telling rather than timekeeping. It narrates complex interactions of scientific, business, and governmental establishments around the activity of telling any buyer of the service, and therefore also the public at large, what time it was, accurately and consistently. It also discusses the adoption, late in the century, of American standard time zones and the eventual international agreement to accept the location of Greenwich in England as 0°, the prime meridian from which other meridians were calibrated.

This inquiry began with some sentences in James A. Williamson's magnificent study Hawkins of Plymouth:‘In peace or war in Europe', says Williamson, ‘there was no peace beyond the line. The phrase is often quoted by people who do not explain what line they mean. The Tropic of Cancer will not by itself answer the question, neither will the lines of demarcation. “Line” is in fact a misquotation which should be “lines”. The “lines of amity” were verbally agreed upon by the French and Spanish negotiators of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. They were to be the Tropic of Cancer and the prime meridian passing through Ferro in the Canaries. On the European side of both lines the treaty was to be binding; west and south of them it was to be disregarded. The agreement was a belated recognition of what had long been the practice.’

1) In March, 1809, when Ino returned to Edo from the survey of Shikoku, he was requested by TAKAHASHI Kageyasu a 'young astronomer of the Astronomical Bureau, a son of the late TAKAHASHI Yoshitoki and the supervisor of the completion of Ino's Maps, to help him to compile a provisional map of Japan as one of the basic materials for the regional geographical survey of Japan, which was being undertaken by the Tokugawa Government. TAKAHASHI and INO compiled it in haste at the scale of 1 : 864, 000 and presented it in August to the Government with the Introduction of TAKAHASHI on its margin (Fig. 1).The provisional map included the main part of Japan on one sheet ; Hakodate and its vicinity on the north-east and Tanegashima and Yakushima on the south-west corner, with the prime meridian passing through Kyoto. The coastline and a few roads were drawn according to INO's survey, the courses of rivers and the boundaries of provinces were drawn with reference to various kinds of old provincial maps. The most difficult part of the work was making the map of Kyushu, because INO's actual survey was not yet extended to Kyushu. So they compiled the map of it from various materials, particularly referring to the map of Japan compiled by NAGAKUBO Sekisui (1717-1801), as was stated in the TAKAHASHI'S Introduction. But the result was seemingly far from being successful ; the shape of the main island of Kyushiu was narrower in the east-west and longer in the north-south distances than the actual.Many discussions have been made among modern cartographers concerning the reasons for the peculiar shape of the island of Kyushu. Some attributed it to the too much confidence of TAKAHASHI and INO on the description of one of astronomers in 1698, in which the latitudes of several towns of Japan were listed and Kagoshima was indicated as 31°N ; others made an effective argument against it because TAKAHASHI was informed of a fairly accurate latitude of Kagoshima and he was not a stickler for such an unreliable description. In consequence, the problem has remained unsolved until today.2) The author analysed to the map carefully and appreciated TAKAHASHI'S diplomatic ability and solicitude behind it to carry out In7ocirc;'s survey successfully and effectively.This appreciation was assumed, though definite documents which directly prove my appreciation were lost, from two points concerning the map which deserve special attention. Firstly, the map of Kyushu was greatly different in its character and content from that of other districts which were drawn according to INO's survey. The former was drawn in detail with many place names even in the interior part of the land as well as along the coast (Fig. 4). While in other districts, the names of important towns along INO's surveyed routes were almost neglected and the emphasis was laid upon the names of small islands, rivers, provinces, semi-provinces and boundaries of provinces ; on the whole, the map was drawn in outline (Fig. 2). This difference in characters between the map of Kyushu and that of other districts was reversal of the case in the ordinary sense of map. drawing.This attempt must have been born of TAKAHASHI'S resource to persuade the Government the importance of detailed survey of the inland part of the land, without ending INO's work by mere coast survey. It was successful and after the map was presented to the Government, INO's project was greatly expanded and many roads of the inland part of Kytisha and of ChOgoku districts were surveyed. The island roads survey was extended even to the districts of Kinki and of Central Japan.

The New Millennium Experience ‐ an exhibition on the theme of time sited in a fibre‐glass dome on the Greenwich Peninsula adjacent to the Prime Meridian ‐ was the centrepiece of Millennium celebrations in Britain. From its inception in the mid‐1990s ‘the Dome’ had been controversial for several reasons, not least of which was its financial viability were it not to prove very popular with the general public. Within weeks of opening, it emerged that the Dome was financially insecure to the point of possible bankruptcy. Largely funded by the National Lottery in the first place, four extra grants from that source were required in order to keep it open during the year 2000. The Dome was regarded widely as of dubious cultural value and a drain on public resources that might have been better spent elsewhere. This chapter of Cultural Trends does not, strictly speaking, set out to confirm or refute these common criticisms of the Dome. Instead, it aims to establish the facts and figures concerning various ...

THIS work is in fact a continuation and completion of Mr. Sewell's “Indian Calendar,” which was noticed in NATURE for July 9, 1896 (vol. liv. p. 219). The principal matter (besides some notes and additions to the Calendar), is a table of the times, durations, and magnitudes of all eclipses of the moon (whether visible or not in India) for the period of sixteen hundred years, from A.D. 300 to A.D. 1900. The times are reduced to the Hindu prime meridian, that of Lairka (Ujjain), the longitude of which is 75° 46′ east of Greenwich, and are reckoned from mean sunrise (taken as 6h. a.m.) at that place. The calculations are founded on Oppolzer's “Canon der Finster-nisse”; but another table gives the figures reduced from the Nautical Almanac from its commencement in 1767 (or rather 1768, as no eclipse of the moon occurred in the former year), though the figures in the “Canon” are probably more accurate than those in the Almanac before the year 1819 (not 1821), when Burckhardt's lunar tables were first brought into use in the latter. Mr. Sewell has not thought it necessary to mark the magnitude of an eclipse as greater than total, simply affixing to all such the letter “t.” He acknowledges the help in the calculations afforded by Saukara Balkrishna Dikshit, formerly Pandit of the Training College, Poona, whose co-operation was so valuable in his work on the “Indian Calendar,” and whose death took place early in the present year; and also expresses his thanks for kind advice and assistance given by Prof. Turner (of Oxford) and Mr. Crommelin (of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich). The precautions taken have probably secured that accuracy which is so particularly essential in matters of this kind; here we will merely point out two errors in p. 4 of the Introduction, where “fixtures” is printed instead of “figures,” and Burckhardt's name is spelt without a “k,” though Mr. Sewell is liberal of that letter in retaining the obsolete method of spelling “Almanac” with one. Eclipses of the Moon in India. By Robert Sewell, late of her Majesty's Indian Civil Service, Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, c tables lx. (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., Ltd., 1898.)

IN La Nature of November 22 (p. 399) appears what is represented as information obtained at the meeting of the Academy of Sciences at Paris on November 17. It is stated that the proposal made by Prof. Janssen at the Meridian Congress at Washington, relative to the application of the decimal system to the measurement of angles and time, obtained a majority of 24 votes against 21, notwithstanding the “opposition tres-vive” of the English and Americans. The vote to which reference is made was not on the merits of Prof. Janssen's proposal, but merely whether the opinion of the President that the Congress was not competent to entertain it, should be upheld or not. The decision being in favour of considering it, the proposal was accepted unanimously. On turning to the Comptes Rendus of the Academy I find it simply stated that M. Janssen observed that his proposition had been accepted almost unanimously, and without a vote in opposition.