Chapman: John Wilkins
Fly me
to the
Moon
Allan Chapman celebrates the
life of Bishop John Wilkins,
visionary of mechanical space
travel and pioneer of popular
astronomy – who was born 400
years ago.
T
he only reason, I am sure, why John
Wilkins (figure 1) never became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
is because he was born two centuries too early.
On the other hand, he was the driving force
and inspiration behind that Philosophical Club
which in 1660 would become the Royal Society.
Since his youth, he had been captivated by the
new astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler
and the telescope, and would come to play a
major role in the advancement of the astronomical Renaissance in the English-speaking world.
Of equal importance to Wilkins’s scientific
thinking were the writings of Sir Francis Bacon,
who had died in 1626. Bacon, perhaps as a legacy of his legal training and career, had argued
that the only way to advance science was to
attack preconceived assumptions in very much
the same manner as a cross-examining barrister would tear apart the fabrications of a shady
witness in order to reveal the truth. Bacon’s
Novum Organum (New Method) of 1620
set about just that, describing how a scientific
researcher should go about cross-examining
Nature and separating truth from falsehood to
create a firm foundation upon which to conduct
further and more advanced research. And as I
shall discuss below, I have often wondered how
far Bacon’s posthumous and visionary Englishlanguage science fiction classic, The New Atlantis (1628), came to colour the young Wilkins’s
ideas of other worlds.
Wilkins was born on 1 January 1614, probably at Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire. His
father Walter was a prosperous goldsmith, and
his mother Jane was descended from the Northamptonshire gentry and clerical Dod family.
1.26
1: John Wilkins, by Mary Beale, c.1670, wearing the lawn sleeves of the Bishop of Chester. (Courtesy of
the Warden and Fellows of Wadham College, Oxford)
Walter Wilkins died in 1625, however, and
Jane then married Francis Pope. Walter Pope,
born of that marriage, would himself go on to
become a clergyman natural philosopher and
FRS – the term “scientist” was only coined in
1840 – and would succeed (Sir) Christopher
Wren as Professor of Astronomy at Gresham
College, London. And Walter would always
remain on close terms with his half-brother
John. John was educated at Edward Sylvester’s
grammar school, Oxford, before going up to
Magdalen Hall, Oxford, a daughter foundation of Magdalen College which later became
Hertford College. In the early 17th century,
Magdalen Hall was famous for its production
of scientific men, and Hertford’s library is still
rich in the astronomical, geographical, physical
and medical books of the age.
After graduation, Wilkins was ordained priest
in the Church of England, and was presented
with the living of Fawsley, Northamptonshire,
within the Dod family patronage. His maternal
grandfather, the Revd John Dod, was to be a
major influence in his thinking, and seems to
have looked after Fawsley when vicar John
Wilkins returned to Oxford, London and elsewhere in pursuit of knowledge and useful connections. In 1644, Wilkins became chaplain to
Charles Louis, Prince Elector of the Palatine,
which led to his visiting Germany and meeting
scholars on the Continent (Wilkins 1802, iii;
Henry 2004).
We know that Wilkins was a telescopic
astronomer, and a great admirer of Galileo
and Kepler in particular, although he was not
himself significant as a telescopic discoverer.
Indeed, he was born just too late for that, for
the initial “golden age” of telescopic discovery,
which first revealed the Moon’s craters, Jupiter’s
moons, Venus’s phases, sunspots and shoals of
new stars in the Milky Way, fell between 1609
and 1615. By 1615, however, the first generation
of simple spectacle-lens refractors had revealed
everything within their optical capacity, and
there was little new to see – the first example in
scientific history of original discovery first being
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Chapman: John Wilkins
2: The frontispiece of Wilkins’s 1640 A Discourse
Concerning a New World. Copernicus and Galileo
stand before the Copernican universe. Note that
the stars are not fixed to a classical sphere, but
are scattered to infinity. (Wadham College)
facilitated, and then halted, by the available
technology. And by the 1650s, when the advancing glass-making and figuring technologies of
Italy and Holland had made possible a new
generation of larger-aperture and much more
powerful telescopes, Wilkins was probably too
involved in education, policy and wider public
life to have the time for regular observing.
On the other hand, Wilkins and his friends in
Oxford did possess one of the new long focus
telescopes: an instrument of 80 feet focal length
(we are not told the lens aperture) intended for
lunar work, as mentioned in Samuel Hartlib’s
Ephemerides of 1655 (Hartlib 1655, Birch
1772).
Indeed, the new astronomy had already been
received with much interest in Britain. A Welsh
physician, Dr Robert Recorde, had been the first
English-language author to give Copernicus a
favourable mention in 1555, while in 1573 and
1576 Thomas Digges had not only written most
favourably about Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, but had even argued, both in Latin and in
English, that the starry heavens receded to infinity (Mclean 1972). Thomas Harriot, who died
when Wilkins was eight years old, had beaten
Galileo by observing the Moon through his
new “Dutch Truncke” on 26 July 1609 (Galileo
first did so in November 1609), though never
publishing his results; while the Astronomy
and Geometry Professors of Gresham College,
London, and Oxford’s new Savilian Professors
A&G • February 2014 • Vol. 55 3: Wilkins and Robert Hooke fly to the Moon from Wadham College. Wilkins left no picture of his “Flying
Chariot”, so the author assembled components from written descriptions into this drawing. (Chapman)
had openly lectured on Copernicus, Galileo and
Kepler (Chapman 2009).
On the other hand, these men discussed
Copernicus’s theory as a hypothesis, as did
their Roman Catholic brethren in Italy: not
because of any Church restriction, but because
until James Bradley discovered the aberration of light in 1728, and Friedrich W Bessel
announced a definitive value for a stellar parallax in 1838, the moving Earth theory simply
lacked a physical, geometrical proof. And let
us remember that the scholars of 1620 were no
less rigorous regarding intellectual standards
of proof than we are today; they were all too
aware of the difference between an interesting
theory and a demonstrated fact.
John Wilkins’s significance, therefore, derived
not so much from his being an astronomical
discoverer as from his being an inspirer, an
educator, and a scientific visionary. And it is
not for nothing that I have described him as the
late Sir Patrick Moore’s intellectual ancestor
(Chapman 2013).
The Earth as only a planet
Wilkins first appeared on the astronomical stage
at the age of 24, in 1638, when he published
his highly influential The Discovery of a New
World. Then in 1640 he added a major new
supplement, A Discourse Concerning a New
Planet. True, his name did not appear on the
title page – a not uncommon practice at the time
– but his authorship was soon well known. The
argument running through the book is exemplified in the 1640 engraved pictorial title page
(figure 2). There stands Copernicus, holding up
a model of his heliocentric system, while facing
him is Galileo, with his telescope. Behind them,
however, is a depiction of a heliocentric universe, with the central Sun proclaiming himself
to be the source of Lucem, calorem [et] motum.
Then instead of depicting the solar system as
surrounded by the eighth sphere of the fixed
stars, as was the convention, Wilkins follows
Thomas Digges by showing the stars filling the
corners of the page, as they receded to infinity.
Of course, this was by no means a radical idea
by 1638, for as we saw above, early telescopes
had revealed numerous hitherto unimagined
stars in the Pleiades, the Hyades and the Milky
Way, as Galileo had even illustrated in his
Sidereus Nuncius (1610).
While none of the telescopes of Galileo’s or
even the young Wilkins’s time could produce
a worthwhile image that magnified more than
×30, it had been obvious right back in 1610 that
a telescope of ×30 revealed more stars than one
of ×10 or ×6, thereby establishing the principle
that the greater the optical power, the more stars
appeared, even in the same object, such as the
Pleiades cluster. And with this fact before you,
it did not need much imagination to conclude
that far from forming a shell around the solar
system, the starry realm did appear to recede
to infinity (Chapman 1991, Chapman 2009).
Central to Wilkins’s book, as was rendered
explicit in the title, was that the Earth was no
more than an ordinary member of the solar system. And once again, there was nothing new in
this idea in 1638, for even the first telescopes
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Chapman: John Wilkins
had shown that, far from being the classical
points of light that wandered among the stars,
Venus, Jupiter and Saturn in particular were
spherical objects, though with as yet no surface detail visible. (That would change after
1660, with the discovery of Jupiter’s belts, and
the “Syrtis Major” on Mars.) Wilkins’s significance, however, lies in his presenting these
ideas to a vernacular English-reading audience:
for Shakespeare’s groundlings unable to read
Galileo’s Italian, or Copernicus’s and Kepler’s
Latin. And Wilkins even used pictures.
But it would be incorrect to read anything ominous into the prior unavailability of these ideas
to a non-scholarly audience. It certainly was not
connected with any kind of ecclesiastical suppression, as is popularly assumed. English printing had been remarkably diverse long before
Wilkins was born, offering a range of publications extending from joke books to sermons.
And while the press was officially regulated, and
would remain so, on and off, until 1695, what
the censors were concerned with was politically
subversive literature, not talk of the Earth going
around the Sun. Indeed, there was a booming
market for astrological books and almanacs, as
well as for popular counter-publications ridiculing the claims of astrologers (Capp 1979).
Where I would suggest that Wilkins was both
original and enterprising, however, was in his
recognition of a burgeoning market for the new
astronomy among English readers. And as his
subsequent career would make clear, he had a
distinct genius for the art of persuasion! In particular, he laid stress on accurate mathematical
knowledge, as possessing a firmer foundation
than (as things stood in 1638) other experimental pursuits, such as chemistry.
Wilkins’s intention in the 1638 Discovery and
its amplification in the 1640 Discourse was to
argue for a new understanding of the universe.
He presented arguments against the prevailing
physics of Aristotle, which dated back 2000
years and which was in many ways a non-mathematical “vitalist” or “organic” philosophy. In
Aristotelian science, combustion, attraction and
repulsion happened from necessity. Quite simply, it was the nature of heavy objects to fall,
and of light ones, such as smoke, to rise.
But Wilkins saw this way of understanding
Nature to have been fundamentally undermined by a cascade of physical discoveries made
over the preceding couple of centuries. These
included the great oceanic voyages of discovery,
which had shown the existence of continents
and oceans unimagined by the ancient Greeks
(though the Greeks by 500 BC knew the globe to
be a sphere), together with the astronomical and
physical discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, William
Gilbert and many others. For the universe as
understood by Wilkins was not constituted of
the qualitative hierarchies, crystalline planetary
spheres and terrestrial fixity of the ancients, but
1.28
was a profoundly different place.
As a great educator and inspirer, Wilkins was
an instinctive synthesizer. Intimately acquainted
as he was with the findings of Copernicus,
Galileo, Kepler, Gilbert, Thomas Digges and
geographical writers such as Richard Hakluyt,
he was struck by how profoundly astronomy
and geography had changed in no more than
three or four generations. I would even suggest
that science was advancing more dramatically
in Wilkins’s day than it is in our own, for prodigious as the rate of advance has been since
1900, we have all grown up accustomed to the
idea of relentless progress. But to a person born
in 1614, let alone one born in 1560, things had
changed alarmingly and beyond recognition.
For how could landfalls made by unlettered men
in a ship, or things seen through two spectacle
lenses in a tube, or experiments conducted with
little Earth (terrella) spherical magnets fundamentally undermine the wisdom of the centuries? (And likewise in the medical sciences, how
could it be that Dr William Harvey, when he
announced his discovery of the circulation of
the blood under systolic cardiac force in 1628,
should inadvertently turn classical Greek physiology upon its head?)
A world in the Moon
Central to Wilkins’s whole argument about
the new astronomy was that the planets were
worlds just like our own. And particularly so
was the Moon, for it was astronomically very
close at hand, and displayed plenty of detail to
the early telescopes. Wilkins goes into some
detail in describing the telescopic Moon, with
its mountains, “seas”, “pits” and other formations, as had Galileo in Sidereus Nuncius in
1610 (Galileo/Drake 1957).
A modern-day reader, however, may not quite
appreciate the shock value of the appearance of
the lunar surface to the astronomers of 1610
and the years thereafter. But since antiquity,
the naked-eye Moon had appeared smooth, as
accorded precisely with the theory of its being
a “perfect” celestial body, uncontaminated
by the constantly warring four-element confusions which beset the Earth. For instead of
being made of this unstable elemental mixture,
the Moon, along with every other astronomical
body, was held to be formed of the quintessence:
the fifth, perfect element, eternally at peace with
itself. So said Aristotle and his followers.
It is true that even the naked-eye Moon had
light and dark areas, and displayed phases, but
these had long been explained in a number of
ways. The dark areas could, for example, be
seen as a sort of tarnishing of a perfectly smooth
silvery ball: tarnished, perhaps, because of the
light being reflected upon it by the corrupt
Earth. Other pagan classical thinkers had suggested that the Moon might have been made of
a translucent, even quartz-like substance which
did odd things to the light falling upon it, to
create the effect of light and dark regions. And
as for the phases, these were correctly explained
via the ancient knowledge of its spherical character, its rotation around the Earth, and the
reflection of sunlight upon it.
Yet to understand the contemporary power
of Wilkins’s arguments, like those of Galileo
before him, one must remember that the classical universe was not just a physical, but also
a moral place, seen most obviously in the juxtaposition between the corrupt, chaotic Earth
and the perfect heavens. And where Wilkins was
radical was in his rejection of this idea; for to
him, the Earth and heavens were part of one
natural divine creation, and had been the way
they are now since the beginning. Everything,
moreover, was amenable to physical, mathematical and experimental inquiry, particularly with
the new research tools, such as telescopes.
The lunar mountains were very important to
Wilkins, especially as he was well aware that we
could even measure their heights and dimensions.
Galileo had shown, for example, that geometry
was the key, for if we already knew the distance
and diameter of the Moon in miles – as they did
by the early 17th century – then we could use
the shadows cast by a mountain to compute its
height. All we needed was to calculate when in
the lunar cycle the Sun’s light would be striking
the mountain to be measured at exactly 45°, and
attempt to estimate the length of the resulting
shadow as a fraction of the total lunar diameter.
Galileo and other astronomers tried to devise
various types of micrometer to hopefully measure this fraction more precisely, although the
practical optical geometry would not be solved
until 1640, when William Gascoigne of Leeds
– unbeknown to Wilkins – invented his screw
filar micrometer to be used in conjunction with a
Keplerian eyepiece. Gascoigne’s invention would
remain unknown, however, until 1667, when
Richard Townley, Robert Hooke (figure 4) and
others drew it to the attention of the fledgling
Royal Society and published a description and
a detailed engraving of the instrument in Philosophical Transactions (Townley 1667).
Wilkins laid out all of these evidences in a
clear, concise and easily readable English, stressing in particular the fundamental importance
of the telescope and telescopic discovery. But
one of the key conclusions Wilkins drew was
that modern discovery had shown that ours was
not the only world. Instead, there was what the
17th-century philosopher-scientists called a plurality of worlds. And one conclusion one might
draw from this line of thinking was that the
myriad stars visible through the telescope could
well have planets rotating around them.
For while the proven reality of exoplanets is
very modern, and a direct product of advancing optical capacity in our own time, the possibility of planets going around stars was being
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Chapman: John Wilkins
1620s. Duracotus, for example,
ascended to the Moon up the
shadow of an eclipse so as not
to damage his eyesight by exposure to the solar glare in space.
And when on the Moon, he was
impressed by the strangeness of
the Levanians, before returning
safely home.
Then Francis Godwyn – who,
like Wilkins, ended his days as
a bishop – told the tale of shipwrecked Domingo Gonzales,
who tried to fly home to Spain
Selenites and an
by training an obliging breed of
inhabited universe?
powerful birds, Ganzas, to lift
This was a question that had
him up in a trapeze-like contrapoccupied many thinking people
tion. However, Gonzales finds
long before Wilkins set pen to
that instead of going to Spain,
paper, and was to continue to do
the birds are about to commence
so well after his death in 1672. Yet
their annual migration – to the
unlike modern discussions about
Moon! Fantasy fiction as it
is, Godwyn’s The Man in the
possible extraterrestrial life, those
Moone contains a description
of the 17th century included a
of an ascent into space which
major theological component. For
if God had made everything, then
would not be rivalled until Jules
surely He must have made SeleVerne, and which is astonishnites on the Moon, Jupiterians, or
ingly similar to that witnessed
even Sirians! The word “Selenite”
by modern astronauts (Freedman 1965). And, while not
(Wilkins 1802, Shapiro 1969) for
published until 1657, Cyrano
Moon-folk derived, of course,
de Bergerac’s Comic History
from the Greek moon-goddess
would tell how the hero flew
Selene, and by 1640 Wilkins 4: Robert Hooke, Wilkins’s protégé, preparing to observe with a long
knew, and cited, several other refracting telescope from Gresham College, London, 1666. Wilkins was
into space by attaching bottles
authors who had speculated about reputed to have had a similar instrument in Oxford. (Reconstruction by Rita
of dew to his coat, and ascending
Greer from detailed contemporary description, c.2010)
them over recent years, including
by evaporation power (Pizor and
none other than Johannes Kepler
Camp 1971).
himself, who had died in 1630.
discoveries of the Renaissance that fired the
With all this real and imaginary astronomy
Questions that coloured the extraterrestrial contemporary imagination, no less than mod- behind him, the 26-year-old Wilkins was ready
discussions of 1640 did not centre on the possi- ern cosmology fires that of today. I would sug- by 1640 to prepare an update and amplification
bility of water and oxygen being found on astro- gest that three books in particular, published of his Discovery, and add the new Chapter XIV,
nomical bodies, so much as the spiritual state between 1628 and 1638, were formative to proclaiming “That it is possible for some of our
of the inhabitants. Did they possess immortal Wilkins’s thinking, two of them in vernacular posterity to find out a conveyance to this other
souls? Were they saved or damned? Perfectly languages. The first was Bacon’s New Atlantis world; and if there be inhabitants there, to have
reasonable questions to ponder if one considered (itself influenced by Sir Thomas More’s Utopia commerce with them” (Wilkins 1802).
the descendants of Adam and Eve as God’s spe- of 1516), which told of the English discovery of
cial people. But as Selenites or Jupiterians would a fictional Pacific island, Bensalem, whose wise Wilkins’s ‘Flying Chariot’
obviously not be biologically descended from rulers were engaged in scientific and techno- But Wilkins broke new ground in considering
humans, could they be divinely created beings logical research aimed at making the world a two important issues. Firstly, what problems
although not mentioned in scripture? Yet one more peaceful, better-nourished, healthier and will we face in flying to the Moon? And disthing that did seem entirely reasonable to the better-educated place.
counting fictional agencies such as obliging
philosophers of four centuries ago is that beings
Then in the 1630s appeared two books in demons, dew bottles, or birds, how can we
could very well exist on these world-like globes. which the hero really did fly to the Moon, design a mechanical conveyance to get us into
In spite of contemporary speculations, however, meet the inhabitants, and return safely home. space: Wilkins’s “Flying Chariot”, no less? Here
Wilkins refused to say anything explicit about Johannes Kepler’s posthumous Latin Somnium he discussed problems of weight, escaping the
the characteristics of Selenites, although assum- (Dream) was in some ways autobiographical, Earth’s attraction (was the Earth’s gravitas
ing that they were probably intelligent.
telling of Duracotus, a young astronomer, who somehow connected with its magnetic field?)
had travelled widely, worked with Tycho Brahe, (Wilkins 1802), whether space would be bitRenaissance science fiction
and whose mother, an obliging “wise woman”, terly cold, and what the “sky voyagers” would
Although the Greek writer Lucian of Samo- secured for him a spirit-powered passage to eat during the long passage to the Moon and
sata had written a tale featuring a Moon voy- Levania (Hebrew for Moon). And being the beyond. Fully familiar as Wilkins was with
age in the second century AD, it was really the meticulous scientist that he was, Kepler tried to accounts of months-long voyages to China or
great geographical and telescopic astronomical get as many facts right as he could for the late the East Indies, easily available in the nautical
discussed soon after the first generation of simple “spectacle-lens”
refractors had been invented!
Indeed, it often amazes me how
far-sighted and imaginative in
their thinking the astronomers,
philosophers and theologians
of Wilkins’s time actually were.
And if there were spherical worlds
going around the Sun and perhaps the stars as well, could they
be inhabited? And if so, by what
sort of beings?
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Chapman: John Wilkins
literature of the time, he realized that the travellers would be in for a long haul across space
once they escaped terra firma: around 180 days,
he suggested.
Some of Wilkins’s ideas about logistics may
strike us as odd today, however. For while a
mountaineer experienced progressive cold the
higher he climbed, space, Wilkins suggested,
might not necessarily be cold, once we had
escaped the Original-Sin-stricken planet Earth.
And we would probably no longer feel hungry in
space, as the Earth’s pull on our digestive organs
would have ceased, rendering it unnecessary to
keep replenishing our stomachs!
It was in 1648, however, the year that he
became Warden of Wadham College, Oxford,
that Wilkins began to further explore the
mechanical design of his “Flying Chariot”. His
Mathematical Magick; or, The Wonders that
may be performed by Mechanical Geometry
(1648) was a visionary work, not only dealing with a possible flying machine, but seeing
flight in the wider context of the proliferation
of mechanical inventions going ahead in his
day; for Wilkins saw himself as living in an age
of wonders and – inspired by Archimedes and
Francis Bacon, no doubt – of life-transforming
new technologies. Living at a time when inertia
physics was scarcely understood, Wilkins was
captivated by labour-saving machines based
upon levers, pulleys, gear races and springs:
devices already commonplace in Western culture, in wind- and water-mills, cranes, clocks,
watches, organs, crossbows, guns and, most of
all, in large ocean-going ships.
Although several Continental writers (whom
Wilkins scrupulously cites), such as Agostino
Ramelli, had discussed wonderful machines,
Wilkins explicitly states on his title page that
they had been “Not before treated of in this
Language”, to make clear his perceived (though
not entirely accurate) pioneering role as an English technological writer. In modern parlance,
however, what fascinated Wilkins was the
nature of energy generation, transmission and
multiplication for useful purposes. For this was
all part of the wider Baconian remit of “relieving man’s estate” through applied science.
In Mathematical Magick Wilkins is talking
entirely about natural, mechanical force, and
is using the word “magic” in the 17th-century
sense of wonder – in no way implying anything
occult. The nature of spring and elasticity in
particular occupied much of his physical thinking, as it was to do also with his protégé, Robert
Hooke, in future decades. So too did the nature
of self-acting mechanism, that could respond to
and transmit force without human intervention.
It is clear that some of the devices he discusses,
and even had engraved, were visionary rather
than operational: such as his multi-arrow-firing
machine, or a step-up gear race whereby a single puff of human breath into a little windmill
1.30
could uproot an oak tree (figure 5), along with
an early “aeropile” or turbine in a kitchen
chimney whereby the heat ascending the flue
could be made, with gears and pulleys, to automatically turn the cooking spit at a rate that
perfectly matched the heat of the fire. Another
suggested use for a vertical “aeropile” was to
propel a road vehicle via a back-axle gear transmission (figure 6; Wilkins 1802).
These devices, along with accounts of Dutch
sail-powered wheeled ships speeding across
the flat polder, were all viewed as relevant to
his discussion of a Flying Chariot. One must
understand, however, that to Wilkins astronautical flight across space was seen as no more
than an extension of terrestrial aeronautical
flight. For what we needed to do was devise a
machine that could get us off the ground, and
then we would be all set to go to the Moon;
rather in the same way that a three-masted galleon that could convey one across the bay could
also take one to China.
Wilkins brings the best physical thinking
of the age to bear upon the problem of flight,
from Archimedean discussions of buoyancy in
water and air to whether the chariot should be
propelled by muscle or spring power. Rather
tantalizingly from our modern-day point of
view, however, Wilkins leaves us no clear and
explicit design or picture of his Flying Chariot.
But several features can be gleaned from his
various references to it: he seems to have envisaged a ship-like vehicle with wide, bird-like
wings, powered by springs and gears. And as he
believed that ascending the first 20 miles would
be the tough part of the lunar voyage, and finally
escaping the Earth’s pull, he reasoned that the
greater part of the interplanetary journey would
be little more than a 180-day leisurely glide
(Wilkins 1802). Crucial in his physical thinking, however, Wilkins, just like Kepler’s hero
in the Somnium, saw what we call the initial
escape velocity of the chariot as the make-orbreak part of an interplanetary journey. For
in the 1630s, gravitas had another 50 years to
wait before Newton laid down its precise mathematical formulation. Yet by the 1660s, it was
realized, from Kepler’s works, and most notably by Robert Hooke, that gravitational attraction operated through a proportionate law that
depended on the distance between objects: the
further apart they were, the weaker the force
became (Hooke 1674).
At 26, Wilkins was remarkably optimistic in
his hopes for terrestrial and celestial flight, for
in his age of wonders and discoveries, it all really
boiled down to ingenuity, experiment, hard
work and calculated risk. Yet new discoveries
would fly so thick and fast in the years ahead
that it became obvious by the time Wilkins
reached 50, soon after the founding of the Royal
Society, that space flight was physically impossible within science as they understood it.
5: The power of gears. Could not a step-up
arrangement by which a puff of breath might
uproot an oak tree also enable a spring motor
to power the wings of a “Flying Chariot”? From
Mathematical Magick (1648). (Wadham College)
The Oxford Philosophical Club
In August 1642, England descended into civil
war and an ensuing period of turmoil that
would see Wilkins’s Anglican Church abolished,
the monarch King Charles I and the Archbishop
of Canterbury beheaded, Parliament filled with
Puritan visionaries, and the emergence of Lord
Protector Oliver Cromwell as the only military
and political stabilizing force in 18 years of
chaos unprecedented in modern British history.
And as an Anglican moderate and an instinctive
diplomat, Wilkins not only survived the regime,
but conspicuously prospered under it, even to
the extent of marrying Cromwell’s sister! With
Oxford University in chaos after the Parliamentary army broke the Royalist stronghold in
1646, dons of unswerving Cavalier sympathy
were evicted. Then in 1648 the Parliamentary
Commissioners intruded Wilkins into the Wardenship of Wadham College (Wilkins 1802, iv).
Yet far from coming in as a hard-liner, Wilkins
resolved to moderate the new Puritan rigour,
and turned Wadham into a haven for the sons
of stalwart Royalist families, and even Dr Wren,
the evicted Royal Dean of Windsor, was happy
to send his precociously mathematical son,
Christopher, there as an undergraduate.
Wilkins’s genius for friendship, moderation
and inspiration led to his college lodgings
becoming the focus of a club of philosophical
(experimental) scientists in Oxford and up from
London (Purver 1967). Young men of Royalist
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Chapman: John Wilkins
Though lamented at the time, this necessity for
independent financing would become a blessing
in disguise, guaranteeing research and intellectual freedom, and an independence that
contrasted noticeably with the vertical domination – by patron or state – of the emerging
Continental societies, such as the Parisian Académie. An identical formula of royal smiles,
graces and loyal toasts drunk at dinners – but
no money or control – was employed when the
1820-founded Astronomical Society of London was chartered 10 years later to become the
Royal Astronomical Society.
New discoveries
6: Design for a wind car, with a back-axle
transmission system. Might a similar
arrangement power a “Flying Chariot”? From
Mathematical Magick (1648). (Wadham College)
background, such as Wren and Hooke, mixed
creatively with others of Puritan descent, such
as the young John Locke and John Wallis, and
moderate Calvinist-Anglicans such as Robert
Boyle. Astronomers, chemists, physicists and
medics made up the Club, and they reported on
researches as diverse as the nature of Saturn’s
rings and why an intravenously injected opiate causes stupor faster than administering the
same dose orally.
This Oxford Club melded effortlessly, with
experimentalist friends and frequent exchanges
of personnel, with the group meeting at
Gresham College, London. And Wilkins himself
moved between them, as he travelled between
Oxford and London to advise Cromwell’s officers of state in the old Whitehall Palace. He left
Wadham in 1659 to become Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge, though when the monarchy was restored in May 1660, Wilkins in turn
was ejected after only 11 months as Master.
The Royal Society
In November 1660, the now largely Greshambased London group (Dr – the future Sir Christopher – Wren being Gresham Professor of
Astronomy) approached the new King Charles
II about some sort of patronage. They got no
money from the quizzically minded albeit
impoverished King, but they got a charter
conferring valuable privileges, some ceremonial regalia, and a title: “The Royal Society of
London for Promoting Natural Knowledge”
(Purver 1967). This Society would become the
format for all subsequent British royal learned
societies: free to elect their own members,
run their own affairs, and conduct their own
researches – with not a penny of public money.
A&G • February 2014 • Vol. 55 I suggest that the discoveries made between
1648 and 1687 undermined the whole rationale of a sky voyage. The first was made in 1648,
when Florin Perier took one of Torricelli’s new
barometer tubes up the Puy de Dôme, finding
that pressure fell with altitude. And likewise,
early thermometers carried up high mountains
showed that increasing altitude cold was a
physical reality. The second occurred within
the very heart of Warden Wilkins’s Club, when
Robert Boyle’s and Robert Hooke’s new laboratory evacuating pump demonstrated the physics
of the vacuum (Maddison 1969, Hunter 2009).
If small animals died in diminished air-pressure – as Hooke himself almost did in a mansized vacuum chamber in 1671 – then could the
breathlessness and cold experienced by mountaineers be caused by thinning air? (Birch 1756).
And thirdly, work done by Christiaan Huygens,
Robert Hooke and others in the 1660s and
1670s strongly suggested that a proportionate
“gravitating force” permeated the solar system,
culminating in Newton’s Theory of Universal
Gravitation in 1687 (Hooke 1674, Birch 1756).
By this time, therefore, new physical, experimental evidences suggested that space was a
freezing vacuum that no human could cross;
nor could one expect to escape the Earth’s pull
at a given altitude, enabling one to glide effortlessly to the Moon!
Yet while flying to the Moon was never a
possibility, references in Hooke’s Posthumous
Works and Diary stated that in the 1650s he
and Wilkins had tried out a “Module” (model)
in Wadham College gardens, “which, by the
help of Springs and Wings rais’d and sustained
itself in the Air”. The world’s first self-propelled model aircraft, perhaps? We would love
to have known more! (Robinson and Adams
1935, Waller 1705).
John Wilkins’s achievement
Wilkins was neither an original scientific discoverer nor an especially original thinker. But as
an eclectic visionary he was unsurpassed. And
part of his vision lay in his use of clear, readable
English as a major vehicle for scientific discussion. While we have no firm indication of what
his speaking and teaching styles were like, we
might hazard a guess, at least from his surviving
prose and accounts of his personal affability and
charm, that in his person he was an inspiring
figure. This becomes all the clearer when we
review his career following the restoration of
the monarchy in 1660.
Following his politically motivated eviction
from Trinity – the College Fellows wanted to
keep him as Master – his essentially moderate
political position enabled Wilkins to become
not only Secretary of the Royal Society (he
should have been Founding President, but he
was Cromwell’s brother-in-law after all), but
also a pillar of the newly restored Church of
England. As a significant theologian as well as
a scientist, Wilkins moved to a good City benefice and the Deanery of Ripon, and on to win
his crown on Earth as Bishop of Chester with a
seat in the House of Lords in 1668.
John Wilkins was a major influence upon the
age in which he lived, as an educator and a farsighted proponent of science, technology and
even space travel; but perhaps most of all as the
first man to take the big ideas of the astronomical Renaissance to plain-English readers. He
died in 1672. ●
Allan Chapman is a historian of astronomy at
Wadham College, Oxford.
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