Hutton’s wife and children did not accompany him to Woolwich. His relationship with Isabella had broken down some time after the birth of their fourth child in 1769, and she never left the North-East.
Hutton and his family were always coy about this, and most of his obituarists and early biographers did all they could to avoid telling the story; so it’s hard to say just what really happened. One Newcastle historian was indiscreet, though, and related in the 1820s that Hutton was initially accompanied to Woolwich by a different woman: an officer’s widow named Maxwell. Apparently he soon found himself obliged to dismiss this lady on account of her extravagant habits. That sounds slightly fanciful, and it was written many years after the fact by a writer whose sources of information are far from clear. It is certain, though, that within a few years Hutton was living with another woman. At least some of his friends knew Margaret Ord as ‘Mrs Hutton’ – although his first wife was undoubtedly still living – and in 1778 she bore him a daughter, Charlotte Matilda.
Who was Margaret Ord? Born around 1752, she was in her twenties during Hutton’s first decade in Woolwich: eighteen years younger than Isabella. It would be interesting to know something about her background: how she compared with the first Mrs Hutton in terms of social rank, for instance. Unfortunately for the curious historian, Ord was not an uncommon name. There were Ords in the Royal Artillery and a prominent family of the same name in Newcastle; the latter, indeed, were part owners of the Long Benton colliery where Hutton, once, had worked. There were three Fellows of the Royal Society named Ord around this time. Margaret could have been related to any of them; the fact is that we know nothing of her origins, nothing of where and how she and Charles Hutton met.
Isabella remained in Newcastle and took to styling herself a widow, but by March 1776 Hutton’s son Harry was in Woolwich as a cadet at the Royal Military Academy. He graduated about a year later and went into the Royal Artillery. Hutton’s other children initially stayed with their mother, but by the early 1780s they too had moved to Woolwich. Just what had passed between them, their father and their mother we will never know.
Not quite a hermit, then: by the end of his first decade at Woolwich Hutton headed a household consisting of himself, Margaret, and his four daughters ranging from twenty-one-year-old Isabella down to six-year-old Charlotte.
But still, Woolwich was not London, and it could indeed feel isolated. You can walk to Woolwich from the City of London, but it takes half a day. You can shorten the time by riding, or take a boat; to row from the Tower of London down to Woolwich took a couple of hours. In time, Hutton took to renting a set of rooms in the city, at one of the Inns of Court, and spent a couple of days there every fortnight, judging that that made the best use of his time.
Much of Hutton’s time was in fact his own, since his teaching filled only three afternoons each week. He took every opportunity he could find to fill that time by doing extra work and making new professional connections. He was, and would always remain, a superb networker.
Nevil Maskelyne.
A couple of miles up the river, at Greenwich, lay the Royal Observatory. This was the domain of the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, who was a member of the committee that examined the candidates for the Woolwich job and selected Hutton. And as Hutton put it in his letter of 1779, Maskelyne was his closest scientific neighbour. As early as September 1773 Hutton was corresponding with Maskelyne’s assistant Reuben Burrow, lending books back and forth, and soon Hutton was on good terms with the Astronomer Royal himself. They would remain close until Maskelyne’s death; an obituarist reckoned Hutton among Maskelyne’s ‘most intimate friends’.
Honest and popular, Maskelyne was a key member of the London scientific world. By the mid-1780s Hutton was sending him drafts of his papers to look at, and on occasion detailed comments from Maskelyne found their way into the published versions of Hutton’s books. Hutton acknowledged Maskelyne’s ‘generous advice and assistance’ with a dedication to him in 1785.
One of the projects in which he involved Hutton arose from his role on the Board of Longitude. The board existed to assess – and potentially to reward – schemes for finding the longitude at sea, a problem whose unsolved state was leading to losses of life for Britain and for every nation engaged in more than coastal seafaring. Maskelyne had a scheme of his own for finding the longitude: to use the moon’s predictable motion across the background of stars – or relative to the sun – as a sort of clock. Starting in 1767, with the blessing of the Board of Longitude, he oversaw the printing of tables of the moon’s position in the sky up to several years in advance, under the title of The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris. If you observed the moon’s position and compared it with the table of predictions, you could deduce exactly what time it was. Knowing the exact time, an accurate look at the apparent position of the sun or the stars would tell you where you were.
The annual books of tables cost two shillings and sixpence; you also needed an instrument for observing the moon – a ‘Hadley’s quadrant’ costing eight pounds or so – and a two-shilling book of extra tables. The calculations could be reduced to a feasible, if laborious, recipe that took about half an hour. The Nautical Almanac was distributed at ports around Britain, Europe and America, and during the final third of the eighteenth century ‘lunars’, so called, became an accepted method of finding your position at sea, and much the cheapest. An alternative way to determine the exact time and hence your position was to carry a really good clock; but a clock accurate and reliable enough – like the chronometers built and promoted by John Harrison – cost dozens of guineas, and unlike books of lunar tables they broke if you dropped them. Maskelyne took some criticism for his suspicion of the chronometer method, but frankly he was right; for most sailors it was still an inaccessible and impractical answer to the ‘longitude problem’.
An issue of the Nautical Almanac contained the moon’s position for every three hours, night and day, of the whole year. Making the tables in the first place was laborious, and far beyond the power of one person, even if Maskelyne had had nothing else to do (he did) and had been paid to work on the Nautical Almanac (he was not). Instead he outsourced the work on the cottage-industry model, to a network of human ‘computers’ around the country. Maskelyne’s computers were teachers, surveyors, minor mathematical authors: much the same kind of people who contributed to philomath journals like The Ladies’ Diary. Indeed, they were sometimes recruited directly from the ranks of the Diary’s problem-solvers.
They worked not with the equations and geometry that described lunar theory, but rather from a set of computational instructions prepared by Maskelyne. Calculating a single lunar position typically involved looking up about a dozen figures in printed tables and carrying out a similar or larger number of seven- or eight-figure arithmetical operations, all done in base 60. It was demanding, meticulous work.
The computers were (mostly) good at what they did, but errors had the potential to lead to large losses of life, and a good deal of careful checking was needed to make sure no disastrous mistakes found their way into the printed tables. So a ‘comparer’ kept an eye on things, standing between Maskelyne and the computers. And here Hutton got involved. It was unglamorous work involving