Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
water, crops, and churches. The documents were delivered to the royal cartographer,
Nicolas Sanson (1600-1667), who compiled all the maps into summary works. The
difficulties and inconsistencies in completing the survey confirmed what Colbert
had suspected - that the maps were inaccurate.
Colbert decided to set up projects to rectify the situation and to tackle other
scientific problems of importance to France. In the early seventeenth century,
European scientists gathered in each other's houses for informal meetings. They
networked and discussed the scientific works of each other and of the people who
had sent letters to them describing what they had done. Even now scientists use
terminology that reminds us of this time, for example calling some scientific papers
“Letters to the Editor”. In Britain these meetings led to the formation of the Royal
Society of London in 1662. In France from 1665-1666 Colbert founded the
Académie Royale des Sciences using a similar model, and he personally invited
internationally known scientists to join the Academy in Paris.
One major difference between the Academy and the Royal Society was that Colbert
offered the Academicians significant sums of money as salaries (1500 livres
7
per year)
and for research (1200 livres), whereas the Royal Society's Fellows received nothing
except the honor of being members. In the words of a recent President of the Royal
Society, P. M. S. Blackett (1967): “King Louis XIV generously endowed his new
Academy of Sciences in 1666 with funds to conduct experiments and make inves-
tigations. All that the Royal Society got from its founder, King Charles the Second,
was a mace and his blessing.” In return for financial support, however, the French
Academicians had to work not only on projects that they themselves originated and
carried out with their research funding but also on particular problems and projects
chosen by the people who paid them. The British Fellows worked only individually
and in ad hoc groups on what roused their curiosity. The Royal Society never exe-
cuted national projects like the one described in this topic.
Very soon after its foundation, a group of the Academy's new members made a
proposal through Colbert to the King, in order to establish an observatory in Paris
as a base for scientific investigations. The investigations were to be of a wide scope,
not just what today would be called “astronomy.” It was intended that the observa-
tory would be the base for the whole Academy and its function a laboratory, not
only for astronomy but also for meteorology and physics such as the determination
of the speed of sound. Eventually its location was considered too remote from the
center of Paris (it is a good two kilometers from Notre Dame!) The Academy was
therefore provided with a new headquarters closer to the center of Paris and on the
banks of the River Seine.
7
The
livre,
literally a pound, was used as a unit of weight (roughly the same as the British and
American pound). The name survives in French markets as meaning half a kilogram. The
livre
was
also a unit of money based on the value of a pound of silver, but its specification varied across the
country. In the seventeenth century, 1
livre
could buy two pounds of butter or two chickens. In
1795 the Revolutionary Government replaced the
livre
with the
franc
, devalued by inflation at that
time to 5 grams of silver, and now superseded by the single currency of the core nations of the
European Union. the
euro
.
