Page 34 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

Ideas & Inventions / Global milestones

Jai Singh II’s vast Jantar
Mantar buildings, used
to accurately predict
astronomical events

INDIAN
W
ENLIGHTENMENT
The 18th-century search for
enlightenment spreads east
thanks to a far-sighted king
One of the most accurate scientific
instruments of the 18th century was
built in India. The Maharajah Jai Singh II
W PACIFIC NAVIGATORS was a keen astronomer. And in Jaipur
he built the Jantar Mantar, a series of
With basic materials and centuries-old techniques, Pacific enormous stone astronomical instru-
islanders successfully mapped their vast ocean world ments, completed in 1734. The largest
of these, the Vrihat Samrat Yantra, can
When Captain Cook travelled to the navigators a picture of the wind and measure local time to the nearest two
Pacific in the 1760s, he took with him currents, with individual islands seconds. At 27m tall, it is still the world’s
the most advanced navigational marked by shells. This proved much largest sundial. The other instruments
instruments the Royal Navy could more effective for navigating such a which make up the Jantar Mantar
supply. Carefully plotting each stage vast ocean. When Cook arrived in allowed Jai Singh to calculate and
of their journey, Cook and his crew Tahiti in 1769, he was amazed to find a publish detailed astronomical tables,
used clocks and telescopes to find local man named Tupaia who was able predicting the movement of planets and
their way to Tahiti and on to New to draw an incredibly accurate map of stars. Another instrument, the Chakra
Zealand. The Pacific Ocean is so vast, the surrounding islands. By following Yantra, gave Jai Singh the local time at
with little land to guide navigation, that Tupaia’s map of the wind and currents, different observatories around the world.
few Europeans had contemplated Cook’s voyages relied on both Pacific This, after all, was an age in which
crossing it until the Enlightenment age and European navigational tools. mathematical and astronomical
of scientific exploration. But for knowledge was exchanged across
hundreds of years before Cook’s cultures. Jai Singh wanted to know
arrival, the indigenous people of the about astronomy in London, and to
Pacific had been navigating this compare his own tables of measure-
enormous ocean. They did so using ments with those published in Paris.
their own sophisticated navigational In Jaipur, Jai Singh read the latest
technologies. Among these were French astronomical books brought
sea charts made from shells and over by Jesuit missionaries. Later in the
sticks collected on the beach. century, in Calcutta, the astronomer
Rather than a map of the land Tafazzul Husain Khan translated Isaac
and water, these charts gave Newton’s masterpiece, Principia
Mathematica, into Arabic. The laws of
motion, like Enlightenment science
Sticks and shells denote
wave patterns and islands more generally, reached far beyond GETTY/ALAMY
in this chart made by Newton’s study in Cambridge.
Marshall Islanders

34 The Story of Science & Technology