WEBVTT
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If you've ever had one of those days, cheer up.
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This man had one of those lives.
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This is the story of Guillaume Rugenti, the world's unluckiest astronomer.
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Hello, and welcome to the obscure, a podcast describing interesting people that deserve to be better known.
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Hello, Minna, how are you doing today?
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It's actually nice.
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I'm not melting anymore.
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The temperature has dropped a little bit, so life feels almost like you can breathe.
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Well, we've had um it's a lot cooler than that here in sunny Essex, but we have had a little bit of rain over the last few days, so weather is kind of heading back to normal here as well.
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So okay, well, today I'd like to have a chat about Guillaume Legentie, the world's unluckiest astronomer.
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Guillaume Legenty was a French astronomer born in September 1725.
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So born just over 300 years ago.
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Initially, he was going to enter the church, but as a young man, he heard a lecture from an astronomer whose name was Joseph Nicolas Delisle.
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I wanted to know a little bit about this Delisle that he had taken his inspiration from, and I can't really find anything that he accomplished as an astronomer, but as a general scientist, he did come up with a temperature scale.
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The Delile scale, basically, the higher the number is, the colder the temperature.
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But not only that, um water boils at zero degrees and it freezes at 150 degrees.
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Mm-hmm.
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Okay.
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Um now that temperature scale, surely that is so silly that nobody would ever actually adopt that system.
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Apart from Russia, who used it for nearly a century, right the way through into the 1840s.
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That was the Russian adopted temperature scale.
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Well, looking at it from Finland, I would say that that is a typically Russian thing to do, but I mean, there you go.
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Um but he wasn't there for the lecture on temperature scales, he was there for astronomy, and LeJonti basically became hooked, became a professional astronomer.
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A lot of his work was based around the idea of establishing what we call the astronomical unit, so the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
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Now, fortunately, somebody had already worked that out, and it was somebody called Edmund Halley, who we know as the Halley's comic guy.
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Now, he had devised a way of doing it back in 1716.
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But before we start talking too much about the astronomical unit, the distance to the sun stuff, because I'm afraid that's not going to reflect that well on DeJounty.
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Um, I am going to give him some credit.
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He was a successful astronomer, he did do some, he made some important discoveries.
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Back in the 1700s, there were basically two types of static objects in the night sky.
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There were stars, and there was everything that isn't a star, or an which were called nebulae.
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And he actually discovered, for the first time, he discovered three nebulae.
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So brand new things that nobody had identified before.
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So he did, he was a successful astronomer in that sense.
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But what about, let's go back to the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
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Now, Halley, Edmund Halley had come up with the way to do it.
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He suggested that if you watched the planet Venus cross in front of the Sun, it would take a slightly different amount of time, depending on how far north or south you were on the Earth.
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And you could use that slight difference to do some very clever geometry.
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And if you know how far apart your observers are and how different the amount of time is that it takes to cross the sun, you can calculate the distance to the sun.
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That slight difference is because of parallax, you'd know how far apart the observation points were, so you just do basically some really hard sums.
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But you need Venus to cross in front of the Sun to do that, and it doesn't do it that often.
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Yeah, she's rather shy.
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She is rather shy.
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Once she shows herself, she will show herself again, but then she'll get all shy again for quite a while.
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Basically, the transits they happen about twice every century or so.
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Right.
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So you have one, then you have an eight-year gap, then you have another one, then you have either 121 years or 105 years, and then it happens again.
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Right.
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Okay.
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So if you come up with a way of doing it in 1715, he would then have to wait 45 years to prove himself right.
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And unfortunately, Halley didn't live another 45 years.
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And uh I think that uh yeah, it calls for a certain amount of patience.
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But he left the idea of how to do it.
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The Royal Society of Um England decided, right, we will do this.
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We're gonna take his instructions and we will measure the transit, we will record the transit, and if we just do that in Greenwich, that tells us almost nothing.
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We have to do it in Greenwich and in different places, so we need to be far away, as far away from Greenwich as we can possibly get, and use those differences to actually create the gaps.
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So this would need people to travel as far away from Greenwich as possible to make these measurements.
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What basically the Royal Society agreed was that we need to work with some other people.
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And the French were very, very keen on this as well.
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Because of the work that LeJonty had already started to do, they were kind of thinking along the same lines.
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Now you might be thinking, does it really matter how far away the Earth is from the Sun?
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I mean, we now know it's about 150 million kilometres, so what?
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But it's a big deal.
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It's not just a trivial fact that sits all on its own, but the distance to the sun tells us, it means we can calculate the size, the mass of the sun, it can tell us about the sizes of the other planets in the solar system, the distance to the stars, the scale of the universe, and basically everything that we need to know outside of the sphere of the earth itself.
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Now, to actually um learn all of this stuff, to pick up all of this stuff, I was referring to LeJonte's own notes to this.
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But LeJontine um he actually wrote a really in-depth um treatise on this called Voyage dans les Mers de Land or Journey in the Indian Seas.
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And I have to say, I did find it a little bit intimidating.
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For one thing, it's 777 pages long.
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Right, okay.
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All in French, and better still, it's in French printed in the 18th century.
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I still I dived in anyway, and the very first section of this 777-page book is called A Precy, and that's only 87 pages long, but it's the book, it basically tells you everything that the rest of the book tells you, but cuts out all of the boring bits, so that made it a lot easier to actually um get to grips with the story.
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Now, I would propose doing an episode on somebody else who is a French scientist who was sent by the Academie des Sciences to carry out um a challenging observation in a future episode because it does seem to be a real habit of the French in the 18th century to if there's an easy way to do it, a hard way, and a really, really, really hard way, they always go for option three.
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I'm sure that in their Gallic mind they somehow convinced themselves that that was the only sensible way of doing it.
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But basically, for this particular project, it meant somewhere that was far away and difficult to get to.
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So Le Gentil was sent off to go to Pondicherry in India.
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He set off in 1760, so a year before, or more than a year before, the um transit was due to take place.
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He in fact he had about 15 months to get from France to Pondicherry in India.
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So even if things went a little bit pear-shaped on the way, 15 months was still plenty of time.
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He set off on a ship called the Berrier on the 23rd of March 1760, and got to Mauritius on the 10th of July.
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Mauritius was it was called the Ile de France in the 1700s, and predictably was very much a French territory, so it was a nice stopping off point for the French.
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I think uh Napoleon's Josephine was from the Mauritius, yeah, well, Ile de France.
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Ah oh that's fascinating.
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Uh I had no idea of that.
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But it took him basically more than three and a half months just to get to that bit, because of course, in those days, there's no Suez Canal, you're going right the way around Africa and round the Cape of Good Hope, around the southern part of Africa.
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And because of the way the winds blew, the ship wouldn't have hugged the African coast, stopping off every now and then to pick up fresh supplies.
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What you actually did was sail right out into the Atlantic, almost as far as South America, to pick up the winds to take you around the bottom of Africa.
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But for this particular ship, what they they'd have probably stopped off maybe at Madeira, probably at the Cape Verde Islands, but then they possibly at somewhere like Tristan de Cunha or Ascension Island, one of those, but they wouldn't have been African coastal stops, they'd have been the islands, Atlantic Islands, on the way round, um, just to pick up supplies.
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So three and a half months later, they're at Ile de France or Mauritius, and probably completely fed up of mouldy biscuits.
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So he spent a bit of time in Mauritius, um, did some stuff there, astronomical observations, some calculations.
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He did a lot of very good work, let's put it that way, around establishing the size of things like Mauritius, for example.
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When he got to Mauritius, the bad news was that Pondicherry in India was now in the middle of the Seven Years' War.
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Ah, okay.
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Things change.
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Things change.
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This wonderful scientific collaboration was actually still going on, but only between the scientists.
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The nations themselves, Britain and France, were at war.
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And as we discussed on a previous episode, this Seven Years' War was a worldwide war.
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So, not the best time to be going to India with your telescope.
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No.
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And Venus wasn't going to put off her plans just because of a bit of a back.
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She has been gathering her, you know, uh strength and uh courage to show herself for such a long time.
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I mean, good heavens, stupid human beings.
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Basically, what that meant was that even if LeJontee had said, blow the war, I'm still going anyway, the only way to get there would be by ship.
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And they just weren't sailing there.
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Basically, that meant that he was really struggling now to see um whether he was going to be there in time to see the transit.
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He was hoping that there'd be some sort of peace beforehand, but he had no choice but to just sit on Mauritius and wait to see what happened next.
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To keep himself busy, he contracted a nasty bout of dysentery.
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Well, I mean, I know that they didn't have Netflix at the time, but that's a pretty, pretty dismal choice.
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I think so.
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It's not quite what he had in mind, but at least it was readily available on the island.
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Once he got better, what he decided was rather than going to Pondicherry, what he would do instead is go to Rodriguez Island, which is quite close to Mauritius.
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Well, I say quite close, perhaps a couple of hundred miles away.
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Um, yeah, 300 kilometres, four hundred kilometres, something like that.
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Now he's still a long way away from France, so there's still going to be value to this, apart from the fact that the Academie des Sciences already had someone there.
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Double walking, no.
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So Monsieur Pangre, who was already been sent there, was like, Well, you can come, but there's no point because I'm not going anywhere else.
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There was no point in him going there.
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There's no real point in him staying in Mauritius, because that difference of a few hundred miles really wouldn't have given much to know in terms of the distance.
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He then found that there was a ship, a ship called La Silfeed, which was actually a warship.
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So that was sailing to Pondicherry, uh, because to go and have a bit of a punch up with the British.
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So he managed to get permission to sail on this ship.
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So I am going to Pondicherry after all, but I'm going to a war zone.
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Probably.
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The captain said, Look, this is the fastest ship in the Indian Ocean, will be there in about two months.
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It made me smile that yeah, he had that level of confidence, and the name La Sylphide feels very much like that's a sleek, fast name, isn't it?
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La Sylphide.
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Yeah.
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Yes, yes.
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I mean something like right in the company of a Venus, but anyway, there we go.
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Quite, yes, indeed.
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So they set off from Mauritius on the 11th of March.
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So still nearly three months to spare.
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It's going to take two months at the outside.
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What can possibly go wrong?
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Well, it became obvious quite soon into the journey that the wind was either not blowing hard enough or blowing in the completely wrong direction.
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It all went pear-shaped, basically, and it was fairly obvious pretty soon after.
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So eventually the captain, and bear in mind the captain was going, he was off to have a fight, but they had to abandon the journey, turn around and head back to Mauritius.
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And they got back to Mauritius on the 23rd of June.
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Oh dear.
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Which was uh 17 days after the transit had taken place.
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He'd been on the ship at the time, and even if the clouds had parted, there's no way that he could have done any sort of observations on board a ship that was tossing and turning in the sea.
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So um, but the weather hadn't been good anyway, so he hadn't even been able to see the sun whilst Venus was transiting, let alone anything else.
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Um so he'd travelled all that way round to Mauritius, started out on the last leg of the journey, had to turn back, and missed the whole thing.
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Now, I think that's pretty unfortunate, but when you consider this was what his career had been building up to, he'd built his career as an astronomer on observing this.
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But he actually seems really upbeat about this failure.
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Because in his own words, translated obviously, but in his own words, he says, although the voyage I had just undertaken had not lived up to my expectations, it did at least provide me with knowledge of the monsoons that I had not previously possessed.
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Probably something like ladling water with buckets over the over the railing, not to drown, and so forth, etc.
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I mean, that is the most positive trip review that one could possibly make.
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Quite four stars did not quite live up to expectations.
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Oh goodness.
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I mean, it could be worse because that was the first of this double transit.
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It was only going to be a mere eight years until the next one.
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Because he'd had, you know, it was a long journey to get to Mauritius, and we had the aborted journey next, he didn't want to go back to France and then chance another trip right the way around.
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He said, I'm staying here to wait for the next one.
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So he was then going to stay in the Indian Ocean.
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So he would stay on Mauritius, he would move perhaps to other islands to make observations there, and basically keep himself busy, and he actually spent a lot of time on Madagascar because there was still a lot not known about the size and the layout of Madagascar, so he did a lot of geographical work to map accurately the size and location of Madagascar.
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So he did a lot of very good work, and but when we got to 1765, he started to think right, we are getting towards the second transit now.
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And he did his own calculations of where would be the best place to watch the 1769 transit from because it would be slightly different, it would yeah, it's not going to be an identical thing in identical places or even at identical times.
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And he calculated that the best place to observe from would be the Philippines or the Mariana Islands.
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So that's even further round.
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You're just moving into the Pacific Ocean this time.
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Now, luckily for him, and he doesn't get to say luckily for me very often, uh luckily for him, there was a ship travelling from Cadiz to Manila that stopped off at Mauritius while he was there.
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LeJonte got to know the captain of the ship and he was offered passage, but this is a very strange part of his summarising of the trip because he was offered passage, and the moment he was given the ticket, if you like, they then started throwing all sorts of obstacles in the way.
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It's like, yes, of course you can come.
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Have you got this?
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Or you'll need to get that.
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Yes, you've got that, that's perfect.
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Ah, but have you now got this?
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And it became quite a diplomatic thing.
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I think the governor of Mauritius had to get involved.
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Um, I think the governor of Mauritius changed during the time that this was all being negotiated.
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So it took about a month of negotiating just for him to get this seat on the boat.
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Now, fortunately, the the ship hadn't sailed in that time.
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But eventually they got there.
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Um they got there as in the agreement that he could sail.
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Was the ship French or what?
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I mean, ah, it may have been Spanish actually, and perhaps some of the negotiation was.
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Was that the French Academy of Science had an arrangement with the French East India Company that uh scientific missions didn't have to pay for anything?
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You didn't you didn't buy a ticket on the French East India Company ship if you were from the French Academy of Sciences.
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There was kind of an arrangement in place.
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Whereas I should imagine there was probably some funds had to be exchanged to take place on this ship.
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But the um the wonderful thing here is that um he set off for Manila in May 1766.
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So we are now three years before the next um transit.
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So everything is being allowed for here.
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There's nothing can go wrong this time that's going to prevent them seeing the transit of Venus in 1769.
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Now LeJontie made some really good friends in the Philippines.
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He made lifelong friends, he loved Melilla, but found the governor didn't like him very much, didn't trust him, was jealous of him.
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And um Le Jonte described him as a restless man, ill disposed towards the French.
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And the governor was suggesting that um when LeJontie had arrived, he had shown letters of recommendation.
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And the governor was looking at some of the letters and saying, Well, that couldn't have got here in that time.
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That's obviously a forgery.
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There's no way that could have got here that quickly.
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And and it could.
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Yeah, they with the regular transit of French ships all round the world.
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Um, yeah, the French, the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese were all doing lots and lots of worldwide travel by boat at that time.
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Basically, LeJonte said, Well, if I'm that unwelcome here, then I'm going back to Pondicherry.
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Obviously, that would be the most natural thing to do at this point.
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At least the Seven Years' War was over, and Pondicherry was in French hands.
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Things were relatively calm on the international war front.
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Um, so that would still be a reasonable place to go.
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Manila, he'd already calculated would be the best place.
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The Marianas would have been better, but it would have been a real lottery as to whether he could have found passage to the Mariana Islands.
00:24:31.599 --> 00:24:31.839
Right.
00:24:32.400 --> 00:24:35.680
So there weren't really ships travelling there from Manila.
00:24:36.079 --> 00:24:38.559
He didn't want to miss this second trip.
00:24:38.720 --> 00:24:42.880
He certainly wasn't going to wait another 105 years for the next one afterwards.
00:24:43.119 --> 00:24:47.200
So whether that would have been an option, but anyway, there we go.
00:24:47.519 --> 00:24:51.200
So it's I don't want to stay in Manila because they don't like me here.
00:24:51.359 --> 00:24:56.720
I don't want to chance the Marianas because I might not get passage there in time.
00:24:56.960 --> 00:25:01.359
I can get to Pondicherry, and that's where I was going to go last time.
00:25:01.440 --> 00:25:03.359
So let's go to Pondicherry.
00:25:03.599 --> 00:25:10.480
He'd almost been convinced to stay in Manila though, in spite of the governors not liking him.
00:25:10.720 --> 00:25:17.119
For the last three months, 87 out of the previous 90 days had been nice and clear and bright.
00:25:17.200 --> 00:25:20.640
And of course, these are all visual observations.
00:25:20.720 --> 00:25:21.200
Yeah.
00:25:21.519 --> 00:25:23.920
You need a clear day.
00:25:24.160 --> 00:25:26.640
But he was he wasn't too worried.
00:25:26.799 --> 00:25:30.400
Um, yeah, it's going to be nice and sunny in Pondicherry as well.
00:25:30.720 --> 00:25:32.640
So it's not that big a deal.
00:25:32.880 --> 00:25:39.359
But he loves the fact that in his book, bear in mind he wrote the book about 10 years after this.
00:25:40.319 --> 00:25:50.000
He tells that the governor of Manila, the one who didn't like him, was actually arrested a couple of years after all of this, and he died in prison.
00:25:50.240 --> 00:25:50.559
Okay.
00:25:52.640 --> 00:25:55.680
No doubt consumed by remorse.
00:25:57.519 --> 00:25:57.920
Well.
00:25:58.240 --> 00:26:04.480
The governor of Manila had been up to no good, but he died because he so regretted upsetting me.
00:26:05.039 --> 00:26:05.440
Right.
00:26:05.680 --> 00:26:05.920
Okay.
00:26:06.400 --> 00:26:10.640
Uh no feeling of self-consequence or anything of the sort there.
00:26:10.960 --> 00:26:15.920
But in February of 1768, so again, plenty of time in hand still.
00:26:16.079 --> 00:26:25.119
He set off on a ship that was initially going off to Malacca, and there he managed to pick up a further ship that took him to India.
00:26:25.359 --> 00:26:30.240
So he arrived safe and sound in Pondicherry, 27th of March.
00:26:30.640 --> 00:26:37.680
So we've still got more than a year before the transit's due to take place, and he's where he needs to be.
00:26:38.160 --> 00:26:40.160
He was really nicely treated.
00:26:40.720 --> 00:26:48.000
The Governor General of all of the French settlements in India, somebody called Monsieur Law, built him an observatory.
00:26:48.480 --> 00:26:50.640
That's nice after the uh treatment in Manila.
00:26:51.119 --> 00:27:00.240
Yeah, so he's being looked after, he's got everything he needs, he is well prepared for the transit that was coming up on the 3rd of June.
00:27:00.960 --> 00:27:14.960
He'd even been given a three-foot telescope by the English who were on the other side of India, so many, many hundreds of kilometres away, but they'd given him a really good telescope.
00:27:15.119 --> 00:27:17.519
That was on the that would be the third of June.
00:27:17.680 --> 00:27:23.519
The whole of May was fine weather, so everything's looking good.
00:27:24.400 --> 00:27:40.319
And on the evening of the 2nd of June, the night before, he actually showed, um, I think he showed the Governor General, one of the great and the good um of Pondicherry, he showed them Jupiter's moons through the telescope.
00:27:41.359 --> 00:27:55.759
So everything's perfect, and then the following morning, just as the transit was about to start, a strong wind whipped up, clouds formed and blocked out the sun.
00:27:57.839 --> 00:27:58.559
Oh god.
00:28:01.200 --> 00:28:03.440
Now the clouds didn't last long.
00:28:03.839 --> 00:28:06.400
But it precisely at the time though.
00:28:08.160 --> 00:28:13.200
Just just long enough to completely ruin it.
00:28:13.519 --> 00:28:21.039
They even cleared just before Venus had completed transiting, so he could watch the end of the transit.
00:28:21.279 --> 00:28:32.400
Oh dear, but he couldn't see when it began, so basically, there is no accurate measurement, then I would have probably been beating somebody with that telescope by that time.
00:28:34.160 --> 00:28:42.640
Quite, I would not have been wanting to look through the telescope to see the look what you just missed kind of view.
00:28:43.200 --> 00:28:44.400
Oh goodness.
00:28:46.000 --> 00:28:47.759
So that was it.
00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:54.960
He'd missed it again, and it's going to be more than a century until the next one.
00:28:55.039 --> 00:29:01.680
Now it would be no consolation at all that his English colleagues in Madras had had the same problem.
00:29:01.839 --> 00:29:04.160
A similar thing had happened there.
00:29:04.480 --> 00:29:11.119
The English observation in India was actually headed up by somebody called Sir Neville Masculine.
00:29:12.000 --> 00:29:21.759
And I'm looking to do an episode probably next spring that will feature Sir Neville Masculine.
00:29:21.920 --> 00:29:25.759
So uh watch this space for more stories of him.
00:29:26.079 --> 00:29:34.000
It was even less consolation that in Manila it stayed beautifully sunny for the whole time.
00:29:34.160 --> 00:29:37.119
Oh good God, that's that's so ironic.
00:29:37.920 --> 00:29:41.119
That's oh my dear.
00:29:41.279 --> 00:29:57.519
Um shouldn't have moved, should have put up with the uh, you know, absolutely awful governor, and just you know, tell him, like, you know, just give me 15 minutes and you know, just complaining.
00:29:57.839 --> 00:29:58.960
I'll be out of your hands.
00:29:59.200 --> 00:30:00.160
I'll be right with you.
00:30:00.559 --> 00:30:01.680
I'll be out of your hand.
00:30:02.640 --> 00:30:03.279
Yes.
00:30:03.759 --> 00:30:05.759
And it's such a shame.
00:30:05.920 --> 00:30:21.119
And I think just as much of a shame, I as part of the research for this, I actually found a couple of or a copy of the two-volume book of the um Journeys of Captain James Cook.
00:30:21.759 --> 00:30:23.440
Um, wonderful books.
00:30:23.599 --> 00:30:32.160
I I was astonished in the difference between the size of the book that I was expecting to arrive and the one that did arrive.
00:30:32.400 --> 00:30:45.359
But this is volume one of the Journeys of Captain Cook, and his first journey was specifically to record the transit of Venus.
00:30:45.759 --> 00:30:45.920
Okay.
00:30:46.240 --> 00:31:01.440
Now he had a fairly trouble-free journey down from England, down around the Cape Horn at the southern tip of the Americas, into the Pacific and sailed to Tahiti.
00:31:01.839 --> 00:31:02.319
All right.
00:31:03.920 --> 00:31:11.279
He set up observation equipment, the sun shone, he saw the transit, got the information he needed, and sailed home.
00:31:11.599 --> 00:31:12.720
That's the British way.
00:31:13.200 --> 00:31:16.240
That Legeantee is how you do it.
00:31:16.480 --> 00:31:21.920
But if I could just read from this, it's wonderful the way that he describes it.
00:31:22.079 --> 00:31:25.680
So this book was printed in 1820.
00:31:25.839 --> 00:31:27.759
It's um it's a gorgeous book.
00:31:27.920 --> 00:31:32.480
There's a little bit of scuffing on the cover, but the print is absolutely perfect.
00:31:32.559 --> 00:31:37.519
For a 206-year-old book, I'm really happy to have this.
00:31:38.000 --> 00:31:51.039
But it describes in here they could not sleep in peace the preceding night, but their apprehensions were happily removed by the sun's rising on the morning of the 3rd of June without a cloud.
00:31:51.359 --> 00:31:59.759
The weather continued with equal clearness through the whole of the day, so that the observation was successfully made in every quarter.
00:32:02.480 --> 00:32:15.119
It could not be much more different to what Le Gentil ended up describing the situation as, which was such is the fate that awaits astronomers.
00:32:15.359 --> 00:32:18.720
I had travelled nearly 10,000 leagues.
00:32:18.880 --> 00:32:37.119
It seemed that I had traversed such a vast expanse of sea, exiling myself from my homeland, only to be thwarted by a fateful cloud which appeared before the sun at the very moment of my observation, robbing me of the fruit of my labours and my toils.
00:32:37.519 --> 00:32:42.240
Well, at least he didn't say that it was just quite disappointing.
00:32:42.880 --> 00:32:44.079
Yes, quite.
00:32:44.319 --> 00:32:46.720
This also failed to meet expectation.
00:32:47.039 --> 00:32:51.279
But there was nothing really to stay for now.
00:32:51.519 --> 00:32:53.119
He did stay on a little while.
00:32:53.279 --> 00:32:56.400
He had to stay a while because he did contract another fever.
00:32:56.720 --> 00:33:01.519
Um, so that held him up for a few months because he really was quite poorly.
00:33:01.839 --> 00:33:08.880
In 1769, there was something called the Great Comet as well.
00:33:09.039 --> 00:33:16.799
So, as well as having the transit of Venus, which to be honest, to either of us, had we been around at the time, we wouldn't have even known it was happening.
00:33:17.039 --> 00:33:22.799
And something that would have caused a big holourblue would have been this great comet that happened after the transit.
00:33:22.960 --> 00:33:35.279
So, in around about autumn, I think, autumn-winter time of 1769, there was this great comet, and that was such a big comet.
00:33:35.359 --> 00:33:38.079
I mean, you do get comets from time to time.
00:33:38.240 --> 00:33:46.000
I've seen a couple in my time where they take up a little bit, they're they're fascinating to look at and wonderful to observe.
00:33:46.240 --> 00:33:50.720
But this one was called the Great Comet because it really was quite great.
00:33:50.960 --> 00:33:53.680
It could be seen during the middle of the day.
00:33:54.000 --> 00:34:02.000
The tail of it took up most of the night sky, so when it was dark, it was a line right the way across the whole sky for several months.
00:34:02.319 --> 00:34:15.119
I hope that they alerted the public that it wasn't the sign of end times or there would have been an awful lot of discussion that that's exactly what it did mean.
00:34:15.280 --> 00:34:22.239
Um, but it wouldn't have affected you if you were in Pondicherry because it was a rainy season.
00:34:22.400 --> 00:34:23.280
Oh dear.
00:34:25.039 --> 00:34:31.599
By the time he got to see it, it was just a tiny little speck in the the night sky.
00:34:32.000 --> 00:34:40.559
Basically, like you know he missed the whole of heading the other way or something, and you just see the blinking real light.
00:34:42.239 --> 00:34:44.320
Exactly that, exactly.
00:34:44.480 --> 00:34:46.880
And I just think yo, you poor fella.
00:34:47.119 --> 00:34:54.960
I mean, if if he was in his dotage explaining to grandchildren, oh I was an astronomer in 1769.
00:34:55.440 --> 00:34:56.400
1769?
00:34:56.480 --> 00:34:57.840
Oh, so you saw the great comet.
00:34:58.000 --> 00:34:59.440
Well, no, I missed that.
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:01.679
That was the transit of Venus, wasn't it?
00:35:02.159 --> 00:35:03.840
Don't even mention the transit of Venus.
00:35:06.000 --> 00:35:12.639
So what a str I can list you several instances which I missed due to adverse weather conditions.
00:35:13.679 --> 00:35:19.599
Or sitting on the throne because my tummy was being upset again.
00:35:21.920 --> 00:35:22.880
Absolutely.
00:35:23.119 --> 00:35:26.159
So what astronomy did you actually do then, grandad?
00:35:26.880 --> 00:35:31.199
Well, it's it's a it's a touchy subject.
00:35:32.239 --> 00:35:33.199
I was great.
00:35:35.039 --> 00:35:36.960
Yes, that's it.
00:35:37.199 --> 00:35:44.880
Um but basically he did set off for home in March of the following year, so 1770 now.
00:35:45.679 --> 00:36:01.199
He was he was still wasn't right there, he was still poorly, and there was a ship that would stop off at Mauritius, so he was be able to pick up some of his stuff that was in Mauritius because he'd spent so much time there, he'd kind of had a home there and and stuff.
00:36:02.320 --> 00:36:12.400
But when he got to Mauritius, he was still so poorly that it wasn't really worth chancing the trip round the Cape of Good Hope to get home.
00:36:12.559 --> 00:36:18.719
So it was basically look, I'm gonna stay on Mauritius until I'm well enough for the last bit.
00:36:19.440 --> 00:36:30.800
Before he'd left Pondicherry, he'd got a letter from his solicitor in France that his heirs had started to spread rumours that he was dead.
00:36:31.039 --> 00:36:34.639
He'd been gone so long he must be dead.
00:36:35.840 --> 00:36:39.199
Now, he was on the other side of the world, there wasn't a lot he could do.
00:36:39.280 --> 00:36:46.239
So he heard that there were these rumours being spread, but there wasn't a lot that he could do to refute those rumours.
00:36:47.280 --> 00:36:51.360
And it must have felt France must have felt a very long way away at that time.
00:36:51.679 --> 00:37:02.079
Well, decidedly, but so wouldn't he have been in touch with the Royal Academy or or Academie de Science or something of the sort, one would presume.
00:37:02.239 --> 00:37:07.599
So it's not like there is a ghostwriter on the other side of the world or something.
00:37:08.960 --> 00:37:14.719
Well, he wasn't having papers published, so he was in correspondence with them.
00:37:15.199 --> 00:37:21.360
Um and these were only rumors rather than actually certified as yet.
00:37:21.440 --> 00:37:23.360
So they just started spreading rumours.
00:37:23.440 --> 00:37:24.719
Oh LeJonte's dead.
00:37:25.199 --> 00:37:42.239
Now LeJonte had also been corresponding with his solicitor, but he in his infinite wisdom, his solicitor rather than share those letters with the heirs, had just said, Oh no, I've heard from him, he's fine.
00:37:43.199 --> 00:37:48.800
With no not look, here's a letter dated such and such in Le Gentil's hand.
00:37:49.039 --> 00:37:51.760
It was, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I've heard from him, he's fine.
00:37:51.840 --> 00:37:52.719
Don't worry, don't worry.
00:37:53.039 --> 00:37:53.679
Nothing to see here.
00:37:54.400 --> 00:38:10.079
Now he did find another ship to take him the next bit of the journey, but that ship was then battered by hurricanes and turned round and limped back to Mauritius.
00:38:11.519 --> 00:38:27.199
So it was okay, we've got a ship, but the weather's not great, and it was when he was using the word um hurricane, which in French was Uragan, um, which is not a word I'd ever heard before.
00:38:27.360 --> 00:38:35.440
But when Le Gentil is talking about hurricane, he's talking, he's not me saying it's a bit windy with everything that he'd been through.
00:38:35.760 --> 00:38:44.639
A hurricane would have been a proper this'll blow the masts off the ship hurricane, and in actual fact the masts were severely damaged on this ship.
00:38:44.800 --> 00:38:46.880
So turned round, came back again.
00:38:47.039 --> 00:39:05.360
But eventually he did then find another Spanish ship again, which was kind of heading in the right direction, and that was in early March of 1771 now, so nearly two years after the failed transit, and he still only got as far as uh Mauritius still.
00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:23.760
But he got passage on this Spanish ship, started to take his stuff aboard, set up his cabin, went ashore to have a last meal with all of his friends in Mauritius, and he'd been told that if the ship is about to leave, it's going to let off a cannon.
00:39:23.840 --> 00:39:29.519
So when he heard a cannon at ten o'clock in the morning the next morning, he thought, oh no, they're going.
00:39:29.760 --> 00:39:33.519
So he had to run at top speed to get the boat.
00:39:33.840 --> 00:39:43.599
So it's already taken him nearly two years for that first little stint, and he's still having to run to catch the ship.
00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:47.440
Now he didn't miss it, I would say that he didn't miss it.
00:39:47.760 --> 00:39:51.519
Um, but there were severe storms for the rest of it.
00:39:51.920 --> 00:40:13.599
He thought they were gonna have to turn round and come back, but the captain of this Spanish ship was clearly well, he was clearly a good sailor and had a good crew, but he also wasn't a quitter, so they carried on, they kept going, and they got round the Cape, so they're then into the Atlantic, ready for the trip home.
00:40:13.840 --> 00:40:36.480
Just one of the things that I would say here is that um they actually found or met two Chinese ships that belonged to the French East India Company on this trip into the Atlantic, and they actually asked this Spanish ship to escort them because there was still friction between French, Spanish, British.
00:40:36.880 --> 00:40:45.599
So they asked for a bit of help from this Spanish ship that Le Gentil was on because it had, I think, 20 odd guns, 26 guns on it.
00:40:46.239 --> 00:40:50.960
And they said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine, and actually met an English ship on the way.
00:40:51.199 --> 00:41:12.480
The reason that I like this as a little story was that the captain from the English ship jumped onto a small boat to come across to speak with the captain of the Spanish ship, and he said, Look, I don't know what you why you've got all of this military stuff going on, you don't need any guns, we're at peace.
00:41:13.199 --> 00:41:19.679
And the crew of the Spanish ship were like, Yeah, we know you English, that's the sort of thing you would say.
00:41:21.039 --> 00:41:38.639
But he actually had a newspaper that he could prove it, and they ended up basically getting on like a house on fire, they got on very, very, very well, um, so much so that the when the English captain went back to his ship, he sent another boat back with a gift.
00:41:38.800 --> 00:41:45.440
But that this particular gift was a sack of potatoes, okay.
00:41:46.960 --> 00:41:48.239
With butter.
00:41:51.360 --> 00:41:54.880
So I suppose this is memories of Sir Walter Raleigh.
00:41:55.280 --> 00:41:59.199
What were what is a gift fit for a king or fit for a queen?
00:41:59.280 --> 00:42:00.239
It's a sack of potatoes.
00:42:00.639 --> 00:42:14.800
Well, it depends on how long you have been picking wheeles out of your biscuits, so you know, nice mash with butter might have been an actual treat more than it's worth waiting cold.
00:42:15.199 --> 00:42:17.119
I think you might be right there, Minna.
00:42:17.199 --> 00:42:29.039
I think you're spot on that yeah, those ships' biscuits would have got completely dull by now, and yeah, a nice jacket spud with lashings of butter would have gone down very well indeed.
00:42:29.199 --> 00:42:29.840
Yes.
00:42:30.159 --> 00:42:36.320
Now the ship that Le Gente was on ended up it got to Cadiz in August of 1771.
00:42:36.400 --> 00:42:43.360
So it's four months after it's set off, and what are we more than two years now after the ill-fated transit?
00:42:44.320 --> 00:42:54.320
Now, Cadiz was still a long way from home for Le Gentil, that was always its intended destination, but at least he was back on European soil.
00:42:54.639 --> 00:42:56.960
He was closer to home, if not home.
00:42:57.280 --> 00:43:10.639
When he was um in Spain, the next thing, I think he'd probably seen enough ships, so he decided to do the last leg from the southern part of Spain to his home in France over land.
00:43:11.199 --> 00:43:13.119
And I can't say so blame him.
00:43:13.599 --> 00:43:28.719
Um one of the people that he met on the way was somebody called Don Antonio de Ulioa, who was um he'd actually been part of the other expedition that I was talking about that went off to the Andes, actually.
00:43:28.960 --> 00:43:41.599
And when he was in the Andes, he had found some petrified shells, which he'd found at 14,000 feet, 4,250 metres above sea level.
00:43:42.719 --> 00:43:53.920
So uh what Uloa was showing Le Gente were fossils and they were fossils of sea creatures uh at the top of a mountain.
00:43:54.159 --> 00:44:07.679
Before fossil hunting was a thing, before we were really calling fossils fossils, gathered from From high altitude, before anybody else had started talking about plate tectonics or how mountains were formed and stuff.
00:44:08.000 --> 00:44:11.840
So he gave LeJonte two of these shells.
00:44:12.079 --> 00:44:20.000
Now it just so happens that just today I took delivery of a petrified shell as well.
00:44:20.159 --> 00:44:22.239
It's the oldest thing I now possess.
00:44:22.320 --> 00:44:24.159
This is 200 million years old.
00:44:24.400 --> 00:44:24.559
Okay.
00:44:25.679 --> 00:44:29.360
Well, it looks very brightly for us each.
00:44:31.519 --> 00:44:33.119
It does, doesn't it?
00:44:33.280 --> 00:44:42.800
So this is the shell of an Ammonite, and it may well be something similar to this that Zonte was made a gift of by this uh Don Ulloa.
00:44:43.519 --> 00:44:51.599
Um but he said, Oh, these are brilliant, but I'm going to give these to the French Academy of Sciences.
00:44:51.920 --> 00:45:02.639
So he went the rest of the way by land, he went via Madrid, he went through Pamplona and crossed the Pyrenees to reach French soil.
00:45:02.880 --> 00:45:07.119
He was clearly pleased to be home because he hit French soil at 9 a.m.
00:45:07.360 --> 00:45:18.559
on the 8th of October 1771 after an absence of 11 years, six months, and approximately 13 days, in his own words.
00:45:20.400 --> 00:45:21.119
That's a trick.
00:45:21.760 --> 00:45:26.320
If you're going to record it that exactly, then you are quite happy to be home, aren't you?
00:45:26.400 --> 00:45:29.280
But 11 and a half years he's been away.
00:45:29.920 --> 00:45:35.199
Now, what I should have said right at the start is he was a married man.
00:45:36.480 --> 00:45:41.039
So he has been away from the uh the wife for a little while.
00:45:41.280 --> 00:45:43.519
I foresee trouble looming.
00:45:46.400 --> 00:45:50.400
You are prescient in the most extraordinary way.
00:45:50.880 --> 00:46:00.320
You know, just uh you know, this feeling that I guess there might be something like, you know, and you said that you are going around the corner just to get some bread.
00:46:02.000 --> 00:46:05.599
Yes, that milk you went to get had better not be off.
00:46:09.440 --> 00:46:13.039
Uh but I think it is going to transpire that you are right.
00:46:13.199 --> 00:46:14.960
There is trouble ahead.
00:46:15.199 --> 00:46:25.199
Uh but the trouble before that, he got back to Paris and found that he was no longer an active member of the Academy of Sciences.
00:46:26.079 --> 00:46:26.400
Okay.
00:46:26.880 --> 00:46:38.480
So unfortunately was it just the uh renewal subscription renewal was uh lapsed, or because your family said that you're dead?
00:46:40.400 --> 00:46:42.400
It was the latter of those.
00:46:43.280 --> 00:46:50.880
He in fact his um his subscriptions must have still gone through because he was now considered a veteran of the academy.
00:46:54.159 --> 00:47:03.280
Yes, but unfortunately, it is one of those things where the Academy, certainly at that time, had a limited number of active members.
00:47:04.480 --> 00:47:10.079
So it was dead men's shoes, and somebody else had taken his place at the academy.
00:47:10.320 --> 00:47:15.760
So he had veteran status, but I don't think that meant very much.
00:47:16.320 --> 00:47:18.800
Yeah, he's a valued prior member.
00:47:19.199 --> 00:47:25.039
Um, so that's it, he was no longer a member, a full proper member of the Academy.
00:47:25.360 --> 00:47:30.880
Um his possessions had been divided up between his heirs.
00:47:33.679 --> 00:47:50.639
He and when he'd left, he had been, I think he was from quite a well-to-do family because he had an estate, so he had properties, he had farms, there was a lot of land, a lot of possessions, a lot of riches, if you like, that he now had to fight tooth and nail for.
00:47:51.280 --> 00:48:00.480
And Le Jonte had been writing to his lawyer, and as I mentioned earlier, his lawyer hadn't passed any of that correspondence on.
00:48:01.119 --> 00:48:02.000
Sounds fishy.
00:48:02.239 --> 00:48:07.039
He just said or or just sounds absolutely idiotic, but anyway, there we go.
00:48:07.440 --> 00:48:10.079
I think there might have been a combination of both.
00:48:10.320 --> 00:48:13.920
I think the lawyer was both crooked and idiotic.
00:48:14.239 --> 00:48:24.880
Yeah, well, idi idiot crook or something, or just being, you know, persuaded by the family members who wanted to get their mittens on his uh estate.
00:48:25.199 --> 00:48:30.960
I think his his entire name, I mean it it alludes to some sort of uh noble family.
00:48:31.599 --> 00:48:32.559
Quite, quite.
00:48:32.719 --> 00:48:35.360
I I've never given his full name actually.
00:48:35.440 --> 00:48:37.920
I've referred to him as Guillaume Legentie.
00:48:38.320 --> 00:48:46.639
Um his full name was Guillaume Joseph Hyacinth Jean-Baptiste Legentil de la Galazerie.
00:48:46.960 --> 00:48:48.320
Uh Galazierre.
00:48:48.639 --> 00:48:57.199
So the the de la in the end already denominates that it's uh it's a family that with land holdings and estates and etc.
00:48:57.440 --> 00:49:04.800
So they he was clearly from a noble family with land holdings up until just recently.
00:49:05.119 --> 00:49:07.599
Yeah, until you died on paper.
00:49:08.000 --> 00:49:12.000
Which you didn't see because the lawyer didn't show them.
00:49:13.679 --> 00:49:33.920
But the um the way that he writes about it, and again, he must have been quite a stoic chap because he talks about it as being confusion, and once that was resolved and he'd had certain things returned to him, he found that his lawyer had been charging him a fee of 10%.
00:49:34.639 --> 00:49:35.599
Ah, okay.
00:49:36.159 --> 00:49:47.840
He did go um eventually he faced court because uh Le Jonte's solicitor wasn't satisfied with the 10%.
00:49:49.760 --> 00:50:08.880
He then claimed that he'd been robbed, his office had been robbed, and all of LeJontie's cash, so the land holdings were still okay, but everything that was cash has now been stolen, and that was enough that LeJontie said, No, this we've got to go to court for.
00:50:09.679 --> 00:50:10.960
And he lost.
00:50:13.199 --> 00:50:19.360
So the solicitor was like, Yeah, I was only looking after his money, it's not my fault that somebody stole it.
00:50:19.920 --> 00:50:20.480
Right.
00:50:20.719 --> 00:50:26.320
That's that's a nice way of uh well here we go.
00:50:26.800 --> 00:50:30.000
So he ended up having to pay all sorts of costs.
00:50:30.159 --> 00:50:36.320
Um so it it made a big dent in his fortunes, let's put it that way.
00:50:36.559 --> 00:50:41.119
But he went back to his hometown and he does talk of being welcomed by everybody.
00:50:41.440 --> 00:50:50.559
Toulamonde welcomed him back, but he doesn't mention the one person who should have been most pleased to see him, which was his wife.
00:50:51.920 --> 00:50:57.679
Um but she wasn't his wife anymore.
00:50:58.880 --> 00:51:05.440
She had been legally declared his widow, so she'd gone off and found another husband.
00:51:05.840 --> 00:51:06.400
Right.
00:51:06.719 --> 00:51:24.239
Well, again, I can foresee there are reasons why the lawyer didn't show any papers or pursue the uh the matter, so there might have been some pressure put to bear to the uh, you know, let's just say that he died.
00:51:26.000 --> 00:51:27.199
Yeah, quite.
00:51:27.440 --> 00:51:34.960
So this poor Guillaume Jonti had set off in what was it, 1759, I think it was.
00:51:35.280 --> 00:52:06.800
Um and when he set off, he was a respected scientist, a full member of the Academy des Sciences with a wife, family, riches, and when he got back, he'd been sacked from the Academy of Sciences, he was dead, he'd been robbed of all of his wealth, his wife had married somebody else, and he was nearly twelve years older than when he set off with nothing to show for it.
00:52:07.119 --> 00:52:14.159
Yeah, and the cloud went um past the sun on the day that he was supposed to do.
00:52:15.599 --> 00:52:20.800
Do do the one thing, the the the one you had one job.
00:52:21.199 --> 00:52:42.079
It sounds very much like a topic for uh what you would call it, a very, very sad country song, but they didn't, you know, think of in France, so I'm sure that there was something else that they uh the thing that made me the most sad was that somewhere along the way, even his two shells had been stolen.
00:52:42.480 --> 00:52:43.920
I think it's a great story.
00:52:44.000 --> 00:52:47.679
I feel so sorry for him, especially given that he did bear it up.
00:52:47.760 --> 00:52:49.599
Uh he had a stiff upper lip.
00:52:49.840 --> 00:52:52.400
Yeah, surely he should have been born an Englishman.
00:52:52.800 --> 00:52:54.159
Yes, quite.
00:52:54.480 --> 00:53:05.360
But he also feels to me the person that um was kind of echoing most around my mind when thinking of him is Forrest Gump.
00:53:06.079 --> 00:53:10.880
Because to me, it feels like he was an enlightenment version of Forrest Gump.
00:53:10.960 --> 00:53:24.000
Okay, he was he was incredibly smart, he did make some genuine astronomical achievements, but he was inspired to become an astronomer by the man who invented the upside-down temperature scale.
00:53:24.559 --> 00:53:29.199
He accidentally found himself embroiled in the Seven Years' War.
00:53:29.679 --> 00:53:37.519
He met Neville Maskellane, who's the man behind the She Hallian experiment, which I will do a separate episode on.
00:53:38.320 --> 00:53:52.559
He met a man who had found fossils at the top of a mountain before we knew what fossils were, and he even sailed under somebody called Captain Don, which is as close as you can get to Captain Dan.
00:53:55.519 --> 00:54:02.079
He upset the governor of Manila, where it would have been Sally for the second transit of Venus.
00:54:02.320 --> 00:54:09.280
He was robbed and abandoned by his family, but he made lifelong friendship on the other side of the world.
00:54:09.519 --> 00:54:12.239
He did some real science as well.
00:54:12.480 --> 00:54:27.119
He made some um surmises, I guess is the best way, it's not theories, but he surmised things about the temperature difference with it being warmer in one hemisphere, the northern hemisphere, compared to the southern hemisphere.
00:54:27.840 --> 00:54:29.599
And and he was right.
00:54:30.480 --> 00:54:39.679
Hundred years before we actually did the studies that he was kind of guessing at, he was guessing right, and he was guessing right for the right reasons.
00:54:39.840 --> 00:54:42.960
Um he made some genuine advances in geography.
00:54:43.119 --> 00:54:50.880
Um whilst he was in India, he learned about ancient astronomy from Indian astronomies, Brahmins.
00:54:51.039 --> 00:55:15.599
Um, so he did some really good diplomatic work, he did a lot of work to bring people together, but we should be remembering him as the man who measured the distance to the sun, and the only reason it doesn't remember him like that is because of this combination of bad weather, the Seven Years' War, and just plain bad luck.
00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:25.599
So Guillaume Lejonte, he's not the scientist that time forgot, but he's more the scientist that the universe just didn't want us to know about in the world.
00:55:25.760 --> 00:55:30.480
Yeah, I think the universe was basically like, you know, nope, not this guy.
00:55:31.920 --> 00:55:33.360
No, quite.
00:55:33.920 --> 00:55:41.360
So I think he deserves his episode of the obscure, and I hope you agree with me.
00:55:41.599 --> 00:55:42.320
Oh, yes.
00:55:42.559 --> 00:55:49.760
He um I think that fate kind of uh obscured him, even as things were going on.
00:55:50.159 --> 00:55:51.039
Poor man.
00:55:53.280 --> 00:55:55.280
Absolutely, the poor guy.
00:55:55.440 --> 00:56:05.840
Um, so I I've thoroughly enjoyed learning about this guy and looking into this guy, um, and I'm sure we'll be back for the next episode very soon.
00:56:05.920 --> 00:56:13.199
So I look forward to seeing you soon, Minna, and I look forward to seeing all of our audience very soon as well.
00:00:00.959 --> 00:00:04.799
If you've ever had one of those days, cheer up.
00:00:05.280 --> 00:00:07.839
This man had one of those lives.
00:00:08.320 --> 00:00:14.720
This is the story of Guillaume Rugenti, the world's unluckiest astronomer.
00:00:31.600 --> 00:00:39.039
Hello, and welcome to the obscure, a podcast describing interesting people that deserve to be better known.
00:00:39.520 --> 00:00:41.759
Hello, Minna, how are you doing today?
00:00:42.960 --> 00:00:44.000
It's actually nice.
00:00:44.079 --> 00:00:45.600
I'm not melting anymore.
00:00:45.759 --> 00:00:50.240
The temperature has dropped a little bit, so life feels almost like you can breathe.
00:00:50.560 --> 00:01:01.600
Well, we've had um it's a lot cooler than that here in sunny Essex, but we have had a little bit of rain over the last few days, so weather is kind of heading back to normal here as well.
00:01:01.679 --> 00:01:10.959
So okay, well, today I'd like to have a chat about Guillaume Legentie, the world's unluckiest astronomer.
00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:18.560
Guillaume Legenty was a French astronomer born in September 1725.
00:01:18.799 --> 00:01:22.400
So born just over 300 years ago.
00:01:23.200 --> 00:01:34.799
Initially, he was going to enter the church, but as a young man, he heard a lecture from an astronomer whose name was Joseph Nicolas Delisle.
00:01:35.120 --> 00:01:53.519
I wanted to know a little bit about this Delisle that he had taken his inspiration from, and I can't really find anything that he accomplished as an astronomer, but as a general scientist, he did come up with a temperature scale.
00:01:53.680 --> 00:01:59.359
The Delile scale, basically, the higher the number is, the colder the temperature.
00:02:02.640 --> 00:02:12.879
But not only that, um water boils at zero degrees and it freezes at 150 degrees.
00:02:13.520 --> 00:02:14.000
Mm-hmm.
00:02:14.319 --> 00:02:14.560
Okay.
00:02:15.120 --> 00:02:22.879
Um now that temperature scale, surely that is so silly that nobody would ever actually adopt that system.
00:02:23.120 --> 00:02:29.280
Apart from Russia, who used it for nearly a century, right the way through into the 1840s.
00:02:29.360 --> 00:02:31.680
That was the Russian adopted temperature scale.
00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:39.120
Well, looking at it from Finland, I would say that that is a typically Russian thing to do, but I mean, there you go.
00:02:39.680 --> 00:02:49.599
Um but he wasn't there for the lecture on temperature scales, he was there for astronomy, and LeJonti basically became hooked, became a professional astronomer.
00:02:49.759 --> 00:03:00.159
A lot of his work was based around the idea of establishing what we call the astronomical unit, so the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
00:03:00.479 --> 00:03:09.360
Now, fortunately, somebody had already worked that out, and it was somebody called Edmund Halley, who we know as the Halley's comic guy.
00:03:09.599 --> 00:03:13.680
Now, he had devised a way of doing it back in 1716.
00:03:14.159 --> 00:03:23.680
But before we start talking too much about the astronomical unit, the distance to the sun stuff, because I'm afraid that's not going to reflect that well on DeJounty.
00:03:24.159 --> 00:03:26.560
Um, I am going to give him some credit.
00:03:26.719 --> 00:03:32.719
He was a successful astronomer, he did do some, he made some important discoveries.
00:03:33.759 --> 00:03:41.120
Back in the 1700s, there were basically two types of static objects in the night sky.
00:03:41.360 --> 00:03:48.080
There were stars, and there was everything that isn't a star, or an which were called nebulae.
00:03:48.719 --> 00:03:53.439
And he actually discovered, for the first time, he discovered three nebulae.
00:03:54.400 --> 00:03:58.319
So brand new things that nobody had identified before.
00:03:58.479 --> 00:04:02.960
So he did, he was a successful astronomer in that sense.
00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:08.240
But what about, let's go back to the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
00:04:08.639 --> 00:04:12.240
Now, Halley, Edmund Halley had come up with the way to do it.
00:04:12.479 --> 00:04:28.480
He suggested that if you watched the planet Venus cross in front of the Sun, it would take a slightly different amount of time, depending on how far north or south you were on the Earth.
00:04:29.279 --> 00:04:35.759
And you could use that slight difference to do some very clever geometry.
00:04:36.480 --> 00:04:50.720
And if you know how far apart your observers are and how different the amount of time is that it takes to cross the sun, you can calculate the distance to the sun.
00:04:51.120 --> 00:05:01.519
That slight difference is because of parallax, you'd know how far apart the observation points were, so you just do basically some really hard sums.
00:05:01.680 --> 00:05:08.399
But you need Venus to cross in front of the Sun to do that, and it doesn't do it that often.
00:05:08.639 --> 00:05:10.399
Yeah, she's rather shy.
00:05:10.639 --> 00:05:12.560
She is rather shy.
00:05:12.959 --> 00:05:19.600
Once she shows herself, she will show herself again, but then she'll get all shy again for quite a while.
00:05:19.839 --> 00:05:25.360
Basically, the transits they happen about twice every century or so.
00:05:25.680 --> 00:05:26.079
Right.
00:05:26.319 --> 00:05:37.199
So you have one, then you have an eight-year gap, then you have another one, then you have either 121 years or 105 years, and then it happens again.
00:05:37.600 --> 00:05:38.160
Right.
00:05:38.720 --> 00:05:39.040
Okay.
00:05:39.600 --> 00:05:49.759
So if you come up with a way of doing it in 1715, he would then have to wait 45 years to prove himself right.
00:05:50.319 --> 00:05:53.519
And unfortunately, Halley didn't live another 45 years.
00:05:54.079 --> 00:05:58.560
And uh I think that uh yeah, it calls for a certain amount of patience.
00:05:58.879 --> 00:06:00.959
But he left the idea of how to do it.
00:06:01.199 --> 00:06:07.519
The Royal Society of Um England decided, right, we will do this.
00:06:07.600 --> 00:06:20.000
We're gonna take his instructions and we will measure the transit, we will record the transit, and if we just do that in Greenwich, that tells us almost nothing.
00:06:20.720 --> 00:06:36.720
We have to do it in Greenwich and in different places, so we need to be far away, as far away from Greenwich as we can possibly get, and use those differences to actually create the gaps.
00:06:37.199 --> 00:06:45.439
So this would need people to travel as far away from Greenwich as possible to make these measurements.
00:06:45.680 --> 00:06:51.759
What basically the Royal Society agreed was that we need to work with some other people.
00:06:51.920 --> 00:06:55.439
And the French were very, very keen on this as well.
00:06:55.600 --> 00:07:02.639
Because of the work that LeJonty had already started to do, they were kind of thinking along the same lines.
00:07:02.879 --> 00:07:10.560
Now you might be thinking, does it really matter how far away the Earth is from the Sun?
00:07:11.040 --> 00:07:16.240
I mean, we now know it's about 150 million kilometres, so what?
00:07:17.680 --> 00:07:19.120
But it's a big deal.
00:07:19.839 --> 00:07:49.040
It's not just a trivial fact that sits all on its own, but the distance to the sun tells us, it means we can calculate the size, the mass of the sun, it can tell us about the sizes of the other planets in the solar system, the distance to the stars, the scale of the universe, and basically everything that we need to know outside of the sphere of the earth itself.
00:07:49.279 --> 00:07:59.600
Now, to actually um learn all of this stuff, to pick up all of this stuff, I was referring to LeJonte's own notes to this.
00:07:59.759 --> 00:08:13.920
But LeJontine um he actually wrote a really in-depth um treatise on this called Voyage dans les Mers de Land or Journey in the Indian Seas.
00:08:14.480 --> 00:08:18.560
And I have to say, I did find it a little bit intimidating.
00:08:19.439 --> 00:08:24.079
For one thing, it's 777 pages long.
00:08:24.240 --> 00:08:25.040
Right, okay.
00:08:25.360 --> 00:08:31.680
All in French, and better still, it's in French printed in the 18th century.
00:08:32.240 --> 00:09:00.639
I still I dived in anyway, and the very first section of this 777-page book is called A Precy, and that's only 87 pages long, but it's the book, it basically tells you everything that the rest of the book tells you, but cuts out all of the boring bits, so that made it a lot easier to actually um get to grips with the story.
00:09:01.120 --> 00:09:32.799
Now, I would propose doing an episode on somebody else who is a French scientist who was sent by the Academie des Sciences to carry out um a challenging observation in a future episode because it does seem to be a real habit of the French in the 18th century to if there's an easy way to do it, a hard way, and a really, really, really hard way, they always go for option three.
00:09:33.120 --> 00:09:39.600
I'm sure that in their Gallic mind they somehow convinced themselves that that was the only sensible way of doing it.
00:09:39.919 --> 00:09:46.559
But basically, for this particular project, it meant somewhere that was far away and difficult to get to.
00:09:47.120 --> 00:09:52.960
So Le Gentil was sent off to go to Pondicherry in India.
00:09:53.600 --> 00:10:03.200
He set off in 1760, so a year before, or more than a year before, the um transit was due to take place.
00:10:03.279 --> 00:10:10.399
He in fact he had about 15 months to get from France to Pondicherry in India.
00:10:10.639 --> 00:10:16.720
So even if things went a little bit pear-shaped on the way, 15 months was still plenty of time.
00:10:16.960 --> 00:10:28.559
He set off on a ship called the Berrier on the 23rd of March 1760, and got to Mauritius on the 10th of July.
00:10:28.720 --> 00:10:40.159
Mauritius was it was called the Ile de France in the 1700s, and predictably was very much a French territory, so it was a nice stopping off point for the French.
00:10:40.399 --> 00:10:46.559
I think uh Napoleon's Josephine was from the Mauritius, yeah, well, Ile de France.
00:10:47.039 --> 00:10:49.759
Ah oh that's fascinating.
00:10:49.919 --> 00:10:51.919
Uh I had no idea of that.
00:10:52.480 --> 00:11:07.360
But it took him basically more than three and a half months just to get to that bit, because of course, in those days, there's no Suez Canal, you're going right the way around Africa and round the Cape of Good Hope, around the southern part of Africa.
00:11:07.759 --> 00:11:17.039
And because of the way the winds blew, the ship wouldn't have hugged the African coast, stopping off every now and then to pick up fresh supplies.
00:11:17.360 --> 00:11:26.480
What you actually did was sail right out into the Atlantic, almost as far as South America, to pick up the winds to take you around the bottom of Africa.
00:11:26.639 --> 00:11:49.600
But for this particular ship, what they they'd have probably stopped off maybe at Madeira, probably at the Cape Verde Islands, but then they possibly at somewhere like Tristan de Cunha or Ascension Island, one of those, but they wouldn't have been African coastal stops, they'd have been the islands, Atlantic Islands, on the way round, um, just to pick up supplies.
00:11:50.799 --> 00:12:00.320
So three and a half months later, they're at Ile de France or Mauritius, and probably completely fed up of mouldy biscuits.
00:12:01.120 --> 00:12:09.679
So he spent a bit of time in Mauritius, um, did some stuff there, astronomical observations, some calculations.
00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:18.240
He did a lot of very good work, let's put it that way, around establishing the size of things like Mauritius, for example.
00:12:18.559 --> 00:12:29.039
When he got to Mauritius, the bad news was that Pondicherry in India was now in the middle of the Seven Years' War.
00:12:29.360 --> 00:12:30.399
Ah, okay.
00:12:30.639 --> 00:12:31.840
Things change.
00:12:33.519 --> 00:12:34.799
Things change.
00:12:34.960 --> 00:12:41.840
This wonderful scientific collaboration was actually still going on, but only between the scientists.
00:12:41.919 --> 00:12:45.200
The nations themselves, Britain and France, were at war.
00:12:45.759 --> 00:12:52.960
And as we discussed on a previous episode, this Seven Years' War was a worldwide war.
00:12:53.600 --> 00:12:58.480
So, not the best time to be going to India with your telescope.
00:12:58.799 --> 00:12:58.960
No.
00:12:59.519 --> 00:13:04.080
And Venus wasn't going to put off her plans just because of a bit of a back.
00:13:04.480 --> 00:13:12.399
She has been gathering her, you know, uh strength and uh courage to show herself for such a long time.
00:13:12.559 --> 00:13:15.039
I mean, good heavens, stupid human beings.
00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:25.440
Basically, what that meant was that even if LeJontee had said, blow the war, I'm still going anyway, the only way to get there would be by ship.
00:13:25.600 --> 00:13:27.360
And they just weren't sailing there.
00:13:27.600 --> 00:13:36.879
Basically, that meant that he was really struggling now to see um whether he was going to be there in time to see the transit.
00:13:36.960 --> 00:13:47.120
He was hoping that there'd be some sort of peace beforehand, but he had no choice but to just sit on Mauritius and wait to see what happened next.
00:13:47.600 --> 00:13:52.960
To keep himself busy, he contracted a nasty bout of dysentery.
00:13:53.360 --> 00:14:01.519
Well, I mean, I know that they didn't have Netflix at the time, but that's a pretty, pretty dismal choice.
00:14:01.840 --> 00:14:02.799
I think so.
00:14:03.039 --> 00:14:08.159
It's not quite what he had in mind, but at least it was readily available on the island.
00:14:08.399 --> 00:14:18.480
Once he got better, what he decided was rather than going to Pondicherry, what he would do instead is go to Rodriguez Island, which is quite close to Mauritius.
00:14:18.639 --> 00:14:21.919
Well, I say quite close, perhaps a couple of hundred miles away.
00:14:22.159 --> 00:14:25.919
Um, yeah, 300 kilometres, four hundred kilometres, something like that.
00:14:26.080 --> 00:14:39.200
Now he's still a long way away from France, so there's still going to be value to this, apart from the fact that the Academie des Sciences already had someone there.
00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:41.679
Double walking, no.
00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:53.679
So Monsieur Pangre, who was already been sent there, was like, Well, you can come, but there's no point because I'm not going anywhere else.
00:14:53.840 --> 00:14:55.200
There was no point in him going there.
00:14:55.279 --> 00:15:06.000
There's no real point in him staying in Mauritius, because that difference of a few hundred miles really wouldn't have given much to know in terms of the distance.
00:15:06.320 --> 00:15:11.679
He then found that there was a ship, a ship called La Silfeed, which was actually a warship.
00:15:11.919 --> 00:15:18.240
So that was sailing to Pondicherry, uh, because to go and have a bit of a punch up with the British.
00:15:18.399 --> 00:15:21.360
So he managed to get permission to sail on this ship.
00:15:21.440 --> 00:15:25.919
So I am going to Pondicherry after all, but I'm going to a war zone.
00:15:26.159 --> 00:15:26.559
Probably.
00:15:26.799 --> 00:15:36.960
The captain said, Look, this is the fastest ship in the Indian Ocean, will be there in about two months.
00:15:37.279 --> 00:15:49.120
It made me smile that yeah, he had that level of confidence, and the name La Sylphide feels very much like that's a sleek, fast name, isn't it?
00:15:49.200 --> 00:15:50.159
La Sylphide.
00:15:50.559 --> 00:15:51.120
Yeah.
00:15:51.360 --> 00:15:52.320
Yes, yes.
00:15:52.480 --> 00:15:57.600
I mean something like right in the company of a Venus, but anyway, there we go.
00:15:58.320 --> 00:16:00.080
Quite, yes, indeed.
00:16:00.320 --> 00:16:04.240
So they set off from Mauritius on the 11th of March.
00:16:04.480 --> 00:16:07.279
So still nearly three months to spare.
00:16:07.440 --> 00:16:10.240
It's going to take two months at the outside.
00:16:10.720 --> 00:16:13.279
What can possibly go wrong?
00:16:14.240 --> 00:16:25.519
Well, it became obvious quite soon into the journey that the wind was either not blowing hard enough or blowing in the completely wrong direction.
00:16:26.399 --> 00:16:34.000
It all went pear-shaped, basically, and it was fairly obvious pretty soon after.
00:16:34.240 --> 00:16:46.480
So eventually the captain, and bear in mind the captain was going, he was off to have a fight, but they had to abandon the journey, turn around and head back to Mauritius.
00:16:48.000 --> 00:16:52.240
And they got back to Mauritius on the 23rd of June.
00:16:52.559 --> 00:16:53.360
Oh dear.
00:16:53.840 --> 00:16:58.879
Which was uh 17 days after the transit had taken place.
00:16:59.120 --> 00:17:15.200
He'd been on the ship at the time, and even if the clouds had parted, there's no way that he could have done any sort of observations on board a ship that was tossing and turning in the sea.
00:17:15.440 --> 00:17:24.079
So um, but the weather hadn't been good anyway, so he hadn't even been able to see the sun whilst Venus was transiting, let alone anything else.
00:17:24.880 --> 00:17:37.359
Um so he'd travelled all that way round to Mauritius, started out on the last leg of the journey, had to turn back, and missed the whole thing.
00:17:38.400 --> 00:17:49.119
Now, I think that's pretty unfortunate, but when you consider this was what his career had been building up to, he'd built his career as an astronomer on observing this.
00:17:50.160 --> 00:17:56.240
But he actually seems really upbeat about this failure.
00:17:56.640 --> 00:18:13.759
Because in his own words, translated obviously, but in his own words, he says, although the voyage I had just undertaken had not lived up to my expectations, it did at least provide me with knowledge of the monsoons that I had not previously possessed.
00:18:15.039 --> 00:18:24.240
Probably something like ladling water with buckets over the over the railing, not to drown, and so forth, etc.
00:18:24.559 --> 00:18:29.839
I mean, that is the most positive trip review that one could possibly make.
00:18:38.160 --> 00:18:42.720
Quite four stars did not quite live up to expectations.
00:18:43.200 --> 00:18:44.240
Oh goodness.
00:18:45.279 --> 00:18:49.519
I mean, it could be worse because that was the first of this double transit.
00:18:49.599 --> 00:18:53.759
It was only going to be a mere eight years until the next one.
00:18:54.000 --> 00:19:05.119
Because he'd had, you know, it was a long journey to get to Mauritius, and we had the aborted journey next, he didn't want to go back to France and then chance another trip right the way around.
00:19:05.200 --> 00:19:08.400
He said, I'm staying here to wait for the next one.
00:19:09.680 --> 00:19:14.319
So he was then going to stay in the Indian Ocean.
00:19:14.480 --> 00:19:40.000
So he would stay on Mauritius, he would move perhaps to other islands to make observations there, and basically keep himself busy, and he actually spent a lot of time on Madagascar because there was still a lot not known about the size and the layout of Madagascar, so he did a lot of geographical work to map accurately the size and location of Madagascar.
00:19:40.160 --> 00:19:51.599
So he did a lot of very good work, and but when we got to 1765, he started to think right, we are getting towards the second transit now.
00:19:52.559 --> 00:20:12.000
And he did his own calculations of where would be the best place to watch the 1769 transit from because it would be slightly different, it would yeah, it's not going to be an identical thing in identical places or even at identical times.
00:20:13.680 --> 00:20:21.279
And he calculated that the best place to observe from would be the Philippines or the Mariana Islands.
00:20:22.319 --> 00:20:24.559
So that's even further round.
00:20:24.640 --> 00:20:28.720
You're just moving into the Pacific Ocean this time.
00:20:30.720 --> 00:20:44.880
Now, luckily for him, and he doesn't get to say luckily for me very often, uh luckily for him, there was a ship travelling from Cadiz to Manila that stopped off at Mauritius while he was there.
00:20:45.920 --> 00:21:09.519
LeJonte got to know the captain of the ship and he was offered passage, but this is a very strange part of his summarising of the trip because he was offered passage, and the moment he was given the ticket, if you like, they then started throwing all sorts of obstacles in the way.
00:21:09.680 --> 00:21:11.680
It's like, yes, of course you can come.
00:21:11.839 --> 00:21:12.880
Have you got this?
00:21:13.119 --> 00:21:14.799
Or you'll need to get that.
00:21:15.119 --> 00:21:17.039
Yes, you've got that, that's perfect.
00:21:17.200 --> 00:21:18.960
Ah, but have you now got this?
00:21:19.119 --> 00:21:21.599
And it became quite a diplomatic thing.
00:21:21.759 --> 00:21:24.960
I think the governor of Mauritius had to get involved.
00:21:25.039 --> 00:21:30.319
Um, I think the governor of Mauritius changed during the time that this was all being negotiated.
00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:36.480
So it took about a month of negotiating just for him to get this seat on the boat.
00:21:36.559 --> 00:21:39.680
Now, fortunately, the the ship hadn't sailed in that time.
00:21:40.640 --> 00:21:44.319
But eventually they got there.
00:21:45.599 --> 00:21:50.000
Um they got there as in the agreement that he could sail.
00:21:50.480 --> 00:21:53.279
Was the ship French or what?
00:21:53.759 --> 00:21:59.759
I mean, ah, it may have been Spanish actually, and perhaps some of the negotiation was.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:11.519
Was that the French Academy of Science had an arrangement with the French East India Company that uh scientific missions didn't have to pay for anything?
00:22:11.920 --> 00:22:19.920
You didn't you didn't buy a ticket on the French East India Company ship if you were from the French Academy of Sciences.
00:22:20.079 --> 00:22:22.079
There was kind of an arrangement in place.
00:22:22.240 --> 00:22:28.880
Whereas I should imagine there was probably some funds had to be exchanged to take place on this ship.
00:22:29.519 --> 00:22:38.799
But the um the wonderful thing here is that um he set off for Manila in May 1766.
00:22:39.119 --> 00:22:44.960
So we are now three years before the next um transit.
00:22:45.200 --> 00:22:47.839
So everything is being allowed for here.
00:22:47.920 --> 00:22:55.039
There's nothing can go wrong this time that's going to prevent them seeing the transit of Venus in 1769.
00:22:55.279 --> 00:22:59.279
Now LeJontie made some really good friends in the Philippines.
00:22:59.440 --> 00:23:10.720
He made lifelong friends, he loved Melilla, but found the governor didn't like him very much, didn't trust him, was jealous of him.
00:23:11.680 --> 00:23:17.680
And um Le Jonte described him as a restless man, ill disposed towards the French.
00:23:17.839 --> 00:23:25.839
And the governor was suggesting that um when LeJontie had arrived, he had shown letters of recommendation.
00:23:26.000 --> 00:23:30.319
And the governor was looking at some of the letters and saying, Well, that couldn't have got here in that time.
00:23:30.480 --> 00:23:32.079
That's obviously a forgery.
00:23:32.240 --> 00:23:34.880
There's no way that could have got here that quickly.
00:23:35.039 --> 00:23:36.079
And and it could.
00:23:36.319 --> 00:23:41.759
Yeah, they with the regular transit of French ships all round the world.
00:23:41.920 --> 00:23:49.839
Um, yeah, the French, the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese were all doing lots and lots of worldwide travel by boat at that time.
00:23:50.079 --> 00:23:57.680
Basically, LeJonte said, Well, if I'm that unwelcome here, then I'm going back to Pondicherry.
00:23:58.079 --> 00:24:02.000
Obviously, that would be the most natural thing to do at this point.
00:24:02.400 --> 00:24:06.960
At least the Seven Years' War was over, and Pondicherry was in French hands.
00:24:07.279 --> 00:24:12.880
Things were relatively calm on the international war front.
00:24:13.519 --> 00:24:18.960
Um, so that would still be a reasonable place to go.
00:24:19.200 --> 00:24:22.000
Manila, he'd already calculated would be the best place.
00:24:22.079 --> 00:24:31.519
The Marianas would have been better, but it would have been a real lottery as to whether he could have found passage to the Mariana Islands.
00:24:31.599 --> 00:24:31.839
Right.
00:24:32.400 --> 00:24:35.680
So there weren't really ships travelling there from Manila.
00:24:36.079 --> 00:24:38.559
He didn't want to miss this second trip.
00:24:38.720 --> 00:24:42.880
He certainly wasn't going to wait another 105 years for the next one afterwards.
00:24:43.119 --> 00:24:47.200
So whether that would have been an option, but anyway, there we go.
00:24:47.519 --> 00:24:51.200
So it's I don't want to stay in Manila because they don't like me here.
00:24:51.359 --> 00:24:56.720
I don't want to chance the Marianas because I might not get passage there in time.
00:24:56.960 --> 00:25:01.359
I can get to Pondicherry, and that's where I was going to go last time.
00:25:01.440 --> 00:25:03.359
So let's go to Pondicherry.
00:25:03.599 --> 00:25:10.480
He'd almost been convinced to stay in Manila though, in spite of the governors not liking him.
00:25:10.720 --> 00:25:17.119
For the last three months, 87 out of the previous 90 days had been nice and clear and bright.
00:25:17.200 --> 00:25:20.640
And of course, these are all visual observations.
00:25:20.720 --> 00:25:21.200
Yeah.
00:25:21.519 --> 00:25:23.920
You need a clear day.
00:25:24.160 --> 00:25:26.640
But he was he wasn't too worried.
00:25:26.799 --> 00:25:30.400
Um, yeah, it's going to be nice and sunny in Pondicherry as well.
00:25:30.720 --> 00:25:32.640
So it's not that big a deal.
00:25:32.880 --> 00:25:39.359
But he loves the fact that in his book, bear in mind he wrote the book about 10 years after this.
00:25:40.319 --> 00:25:50.000
He tells that the governor of Manila, the one who didn't like him, was actually arrested a couple of years after all of this, and he died in prison.
00:25:50.240 --> 00:25:50.559
Okay.
00:25:52.640 --> 00:25:55.680
No doubt consumed by remorse.
00:25:57.519 --> 00:25:57.920
Well.
00:25:58.240 --> 00:26:04.480
The governor of Manila had been up to no good, but he died because he so regretted upsetting me.
00:26:05.039 --> 00:26:05.440
Right.
00:26:05.680 --> 00:26:05.920
Okay.
00:26:06.400 --> 00:26:10.640
Uh no feeling of self-consequence or anything of the sort there.
00:26:10.960 --> 00:26:15.920
But in February of 1768, so again, plenty of time in hand still.
00:26:16.079 --> 00:26:25.119
He set off on a ship that was initially going off to Malacca, and there he managed to pick up a further ship that took him to India.
00:26:25.359 --> 00:26:30.240
So he arrived safe and sound in Pondicherry, 27th of March.
00:26:30.640 --> 00:26:37.680
So we've still got more than a year before the transit's due to take place, and he's where he needs to be.
00:26:38.160 --> 00:26:40.160
He was really nicely treated.
00:26:40.720 --> 00:26:48.000
The Governor General of all of the French settlements in India, somebody called Monsieur Law, built him an observatory.
00:26:48.480 --> 00:26:50.640
That's nice after the uh treatment in Manila.
00:26:51.119 --> 00:27:00.240
Yeah, so he's being looked after, he's got everything he needs, he is well prepared for the transit that was coming up on the 3rd of June.
00:27:00.960 --> 00:27:14.960
He'd even been given a three-foot telescope by the English who were on the other side of India, so many, many hundreds of kilometres away, but they'd given him a really good telescope.
00:27:15.119 --> 00:27:17.519
That was on the that would be the third of June.
00:27:17.680 --> 00:27:23.519
The whole of May was fine weather, so everything's looking good.
00:27:24.400 --> 00:27:40.319
And on the evening of the 2nd of June, the night before, he actually showed, um, I think he showed the Governor General, one of the great and the good um of Pondicherry, he showed them Jupiter's moons through the telescope.
00:27:41.359 --> 00:27:55.759
So everything's perfect, and then the following morning, just as the transit was about to start, a strong wind whipped up, clouds formed and blocked out the sun.
00:27:57.839 --> 00:27:58.559
Oh god.
00:28:01.200 --> 00:28:03.440
Now the clouds didn't last long.
00:28:03.839 --> 00:28:06.400
But it precisely at the time though.
00:28:08.160 --> 00:28:13.200
Just just long enough to completely ruin it.
00:28:13.519 --> 00:28:21.039
They even cleared just before Venus had completed transiting, so he could watch the end of the transit.
00:28:21.279 --> 00:28:32.400
Oh dear, but he couldn't see when it began, so basically, there is no accurate measurement, then I would have probably been beating somebody with that telescope by that time.
00:28:34.160 --> 00:28:42.640
Quite, I would not have been wanting to look through the telescope to see the look what you just missed kind of view.
00:28:43.200 --> 00:28:44.400
Oh goodness.
00:28:46.000 --> 00:28:47.759
So that was it.
00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:54.960
He'd missed it again, and it's going to be more than a century until the next one.
00:28:55.039 --> 00:29:01.680
Now it would be no consolation at all that his English colleagues in Madras had had the same problem.
00:29:01.839 --> 00:29:04.160
A similar thing had happened there.
00:29:04.480 --> 00:29:11.119
The English observation in India was actually headed up by somebody called Sir Neville Masculine.
00:29:12.000 --> 00:29:21.759
And I'm looking to do an episode probably next spring that will feature Sir Neville Masculine.
00:29:21.920 --> 00:29:25.759
So uh watch this space for more stories of him.
00:29:26.079 --> 00:29:34.000
It was even less consolation that in Manila it stayed beautifully sunny for the whole time.
00:29:34.160 --> 00:29:37.119
Oh good God, that's that's so ironic.
00:29:37.920 --> 00:29:41.119
That's oh my dear.
00:29:41.279 --> 00:29:57.519
Um shouldn't have moved, should have put up with the uh, you know, absolutely awful governor, and just you know, tell him, like, you know, just give me 15 minutes and you know, just complaining.
00:29:57.839 --> 00:29:58.960
I'll be out of your hands.
00:29:59.200 --> 00:30:00.160
I'll be right with you.
00:30:00.559 --> 00:30:01.680
I'll be out of your hand.
00:30:02.640 --> 00:30:03.279
Yes.
00:30:03.759 --> 00:30:05.759
And it's such a shame.
00:30:05.920 --> 00:30:21.119
And I think just as much of a shame, I as part of the research for this, I actually found a couple of or a copy of the two-volume book of the um Journeys of Captain James Cook.
00:30:21.759 --> 00:30:23.440
Um, wonderful books.
00:30:23.599 --> 00:30:32.160
I I was astonished in the difference between the size of the book that I was expecting to arrive and the one that did arrive.
00:30:32.400 --> 00:30:45.359
But this is volume one of the Journeys of Captain Cook, and his first journey was specifically to record the transit of Venus.
00:30:45.759 --> 00:30:45.920
Okay.
00:30:46.240 --> 00:31:01.440
Now he had a fairly trouble-free journey down from England, down around the Cape Horn at the southern tip of the Americas, into the Pacific and sailed to Tahiti.
00:31:01.839 --> 00:31:02.319
All right.
00:31:03.920 --> 00:31:11.279
He set up observation equipment, the sun shone, he saw the transit, got the information he needed, and sailed home.
00:31:11.599 --> 00:31:12.720
That's the British way.
00:31:13.200 --> 00:31:16.240
That Legeantee is how you do it.
00:31:16.480 --> 00:31:21.920
But if I could just read from this, it's wonderful the way that he describes it.
00:31:22.079 --> 00:31:25.680
So this book was printed in 1820.
00:31:25.839 --> 00:31:27.759
It's um it's a gorgeous book.
00:31:27.920 --> 00:31:32.480
There's a little bit of scuffing on the cover, but the print is absolutely perfect.
00:31:32.559 --> 00:31:37.519
For a 206-year-old book, I'm really happy to have this.
00:31:38.000 --> 00:31:51.039
But it describes in here they could not sleep in peace the preceding night, but their apprehensions were happily removed by the sun's rising on the morning of the 3rd of June without a cloud.
00:31:51.359 --> 00:31:59.759
The weather continued with equal clearness through the whole of the day, so that the observation was successfully made in every quarter.
00:32:02.480 --> 00:32:15.119
It could not be much more different to what Le Gentil ended up describing the situation as, which was such is the fate that awaits astronomers.
00:32:15.359 --> 00:32:18.720
I had travelled nearly 10,000 leagues.
00:32:18.880 --> 00:32:37.119
It seemed that I had traversed such a vast expanse of sea, exiling myself from my homeland, only to be thwarted by a fateful cloud which appeared before the sun at the very moment of my observation, robbing me of the fruit of my labours and my toils.
00:32:37.519 --> 00:32:42.240
Well, at least he didn't say that it was just quite disappointing.
00:32:42.880 --> 00:32:44.079
Yes, quite.
00:32:44.319 --> 00:32:46.720
This also failed to meet expectation.
00:32:47.039 --> 00:32:51.279
But there was nothing really to stay for now.
00:32:51.519 --> 00:32:53.119
He did stay on a little while.
00:32:53.279 --> 00:32:56.400
He had to stay a while because he did contract another fever.
00:32:56.720 --> 00:33:01.519
Um, so that held him up for a few months because he really was quite poorly.
00:33:01.839 --> 00:33:08.880
In 1769, there was something called the Great Comet as well.
00:33:09.039 --> 00:33:16.799
So, as well as having the transit of Venus, which to be honest, to either of us, had we been around at the time, we wouldn't have even known it was happening.
00:33:17.039 --> 00:33:22.799
And something that would have caused a big holourblue would have been this great comet that happened after the transit.
00:33:22.960 --> 00:33:35.279
So, in around about autumn, I think, autumn-winter time of 1769, there was this great comet, and that was such a big comet.
00:33:35.359 --> 00:33:38.079
I mean, you do get comets from time to time.
00:33:38.240 --> 00:33:46.000
I've seen a couple in my time where they take up a little bit, they're they're fascinating to look at and wonderful to observe.
00:33:46.240 --> 00:33:50.720
But this one was called the Great Comet because it really was quite great.
00:33:50.960 --> 00:33:53.680
It could be seen during the middle of the day.
00:33:54.000 --> 00:34:02.000
The tail of it took up most of the night sky, so when it was dark, it was a line right the way across the whole sky for several months.
00:34:02.319 --> 00:34:15.119
I hope that they alerted the public that it wasn't the sign of end times or there would have been an awful lot of discussion that that's exactly what it did mean.
00:34:15.280 --> 00:34:22.239
Um, but it wouldn't have affected you if you were in Pondicherry because it was a rainy season.
00:34:22.400 --> 00:34:23.280
Oh dear.
00:34:25.039 --> 00:34:31.599
By the time he got to see it, it was just a tiny little speck in the the night sky.
00:34:32.000 --> 00:34:40.559
Basically, like you know he missed the whole of heading the other way or something, and you just see the blinking real light.
00:34:42.239 --> 00:34:44.320
Exactly that, exactly.
00:34:44.480 --> 00:34:46.880
And I just think yo, you poor fella.
00:34:47.119 --> 00:34:54.960
I mean, if if he was in his dotage explaining to grandchildren, oh I was an astronomer in 1769.
00:34:55.440 --> 00:34:56.400
1769?
00:34:56.480 --> 00:34:57.840
Oh, so you saw the great comet.
00:34:58.000 --> 00:34:59.440
Well, no, I missed that.
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:01.679
That was the transit of Venus, wasn't it?
00:35:02.159 --> 00:35:03.840
Don't even mention the transit of Venus.
00:35:06.000 --> 00:35:12.639
So what a str I can list you several instances which I missed due to adverse weather conditions.
00:35:13.679 --> 00:35:19.599
Or sitting on the throne because my tummy was being upset again.
00:35:21.920 --> 00:35:22.880
Absolutely.
00:35:23.119 --> 00:35:26.159
So what astronomy did you actually do then, grandad?
00:35:26.880 --> 00:35:31.199
Well, it's it's a it's a touchy subject.
00:35:32.239 --> 00:35:33.199
I was great.
00:35:35.039 --> 00:35:36.960
Yes, that's it.
00:35:37.199 --> 00:35:44.880
Um but basically he did set off for home in March of the following year, so 1770 now.
00:35:45.679 --> 00:36:01.199
He was he was still wasn't right there, he was still poorly, and there was a ship that would stop off at Mauritius, so he was be able to pick up some of his stuff that was in Mauritius because he'd spent so much time there, he'd kind of had a home there and and stuff.
00:36:02.320 --> 00:36:12.400
But when he got to Mauritius, he was still so poorly that it wasn't really worth chancing the trip round the Cape of Good Hope to get home.
00:36:12.559 --> 00:36:18.719
So it was basically look, I'm gonna stay on Mauritius until I'm well enough for the last bit.
00:36:19.440 --> 00:36:30.800
Before he'd left Pondicherry, he'd got a letter from his solicitor in France that his heirs had started to spread rumours that he was dead.
00:36:31.039 --> 00:36:34.639
He'd been gone so long he must be dead.
00:36:35.840 --> 00:36:39.199
Now, he was on the other side of the world, there wasn't a lot he could do.
00:36:39.280 --> 00:36:46.239
So he heard that there were these rumours being spread, but there wasn't a lot that he could do to refute those rumours.
00:36:47.280 --> 00:36:51.360
And it must have felt France must have felt a very long way away at that time.
00:36:51.679 --> 00:37:02.079
Well, decidedly, but so wouldn't he have been in touch with the Royal Academy or or Academie de Science or something of the sort, one would presume.
00:37:02.239 --> 00:37:07.599
So it's not like there is a ghostwriter on the other side of the world or something.
00:37:08.960 --> 00:37:14.719
Well, he wasn't having papers published, so he was in correspondence with them.
00:37:15.199 --> 00:37:21.360
Um and these were only rumors rather than actually certified as yet.
00:37:21.440 --> 00:37:23.360
So they just started spreading rumours.
00:37:23.440 --> 00:37:24.719
Oh LeJonte's dead.
00:37:25.199 --> 00:37:42.239
Now LeJonte had also been corresponding with his solicitor, but he in his infinite wisdom, his solicitor rather than share those letters with the heirs, had just said, Oh no, I've heard from him, he's fine.
00:37:43.199 --> 00:37:48.800
With no not look, here's a letter dated such and such in Le Gentil's hand.
00:37:49.039 --> 00:37:51.760
It was, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I've heard from him, he's fine.
00:37:51.840 --> 00:37:52.719
Don't worry, don't worry.
00:37:53.039 --> 00:37:53.679
Nothing to see here.
00:37:54.400 --> 00:38:10.079
Now he did find another ship to take him the next bit of the journey, but that ship was then battered by hurricanes and turned round and limped back to Mauritius.
00:38:11.519 --> 00:38:27.199
So it was okay, we've got a ship, but the weather's not great, and it was when he was using the word um hurricane, which in French was Uragan, um, which is not a word I'd ever heard before.
00:38:27.360 --> 00:38:35.440
But when Le Gentil is talking about hurricane, he's talking, he's not me saying it's a bit windy with everything that he'd been through.
00:38:35.760 --> 00:38:44.639
A hurricane would have been a proper this'll blow the masts off the ship hurricane, and in actual fact the masts were severely damaged on this ship.
00:38:44.800 --> 00:38:46.880
So turned round, came back again.
00:38:47.039 --> 00:39:05.360
But eventually he did then find another Spanish ship again, which was kind of heading in the right direction, and that was in early March of 1771 now, so nearly two years after the failed transit, and he still only got as far as uh Mauritius still.
00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:23.760
But he got passage on this Spanish ship, started to take his stuff aboard, set up his cabin, went ashore to have a last meal with all of his friends in Mauritius, and he'd been told that if the ship is about to leave, it's going to let off a cannon.
00:39:23.840 --> 00:39:29.519
So when he heard a cannon at ten o'clock in the morning the next morning, he thought, oh no, they're going.
00:39:29.760 --> 00:39:33.519
So he had to run at top speed to get the boat.
00:39:33.840 --> 00:39:43.599
So it's already taken him nearly two years for that first little stint, and he's still having to run to catch the ship.
00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:47.440
Now he didn't miss it, I would say that he didn't miss it.
00:39:47.760 --> 00:39:51.519
Um, but there were severe storms for the rest of it.
00:39:51.920 --> 00:40:13.599
He thought they were gonna have to turn round and come back, but the captain of this Spanish ship was clearly well, he was clearly a good sailor and had a good crew, but he also wasn't a quitter, so they carried on, they kept going, and they got round the Cape, so they're then into the Atlantic, ready for the trip home.
00:40:13.840 --> 00:40:36.480
Just one of the things that I would say here is that um they actually found or met two Chinese ships that belonged to the French East India Company on this trip into the Atlantic, and they actually asked this Spanish ship to escort them because there was still friction between French, Spanish, British.
00:40:36.880 --> 00:40:45.599
So they asked for a bit of help from this Spanish ship that Le Gentil was on because it had, I think, 20 odd guns, 26 guns on it.
00:40:46.239 --> 00:40:50.960
And they said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine, and actually met an English ship on the way.
00:40:51.199 --> 00:41:12.480
The reason that I like this as a little story was that the captain from the English ship jumped onto a small boat to come across to speak with the captain of the Spanish ship, and he said, Look, I don't know what you why you've got all of this military stuff going on, you don't need any guns, we're at peace.
00:41:13.199 --> 00:41:19.679
And the crew of the Spanish ship were like, Yeah, we know you English, that's the sort of thing you would say.
00:41:21.039 --> 00:41:38.639
But he actually had a newspaper that he could prove it, and they ended up basically getting on like a house on fire, they got on very, very, very well, um, so much so that the when the English captain went back to his ship, he sent another boat back with a gift.
00:41:38.800 --> 00:41:45.440
But that this particular gift was a sack of potatoes, okay.
00:41:46.960 --> 00:41:48.239
With butter.
00:41:51.360 --> 00:41:54.880
So I suppose this is memories of Sir Walter Raleigh.
00:41:55.280 --> 00:41:59.199
What were what is a gift fit for a king or fit for a queen?
00:41:59.280 --> 00:42:00.239
It's a sack of potatoes.
00:42:00.639 --> 00:42:14.800
Well, it depends on how long you have been picking wheeles out of your biscuits, so you know, nice mash with butter might have been an actual treat more than it's worth waiting cold.
00:42:15.199 --> 00:42:17.119
I think you might be right there, Minna.
00:42:17.199 --> 00:42:29.039
I think you're spot on that yeah, those ships' biscuits would have got completely dull by now, and yeah, a nice jacket spud with lashings of butter would have gone down very well indeed.
00:42:29.199 --> 00:42:29.840
Yes.
00:42:30.159 --> 00:42:36.320
Now the ship that Le Gente was on ended up it got to Cadiz in August of 1771.
00:42:36.400 --> 00:42:43.360
So it's four months after it's set off, and what are we more than two years now after the ill-fated transit?
00:42:44.320 --> 00:42:54.320
Now, Cadiz was still a long way from home for Le Gentil, that was always its intended destination, but at least he was back on European soil.
00:42:54.639 --> 00:42:56.960
He was closer to home, if not home.
00:42:57.280 --> 00:43:10.639
When he was um in Spain, the next thing, I think he'd probably seen enough ships, so he decided to do the last leg from the southern part of Spain to his home in France over land.
00:43:11.199 --> 00:43:13.119
And I can't say so blame him.
00:43:13.599 --> 00:43:28.719
Um one of the people that he met on the way was somebody called Don Antonio de Ulioa, who was um he'd actually been part of the other expedition that I was talking about that went off to the Andes, actually.
00:43:28.960 --> 00:43:41.599
And when he was in the Andes, he had found some petrified shells, which he'd found at 14,000 feet, 4,250 metres above sea level.
00:43:42.719 --> 00:43:53.920
So uh what Uloa was showing Le Gente were fossils and they were fossils of sea creatures uh at the top of a mountain.
00:43:54.159 --> 00:44:07.679
Before fossil hunting was a thing, before we were really calling fossils fossils, gathered from From high altitude, before anybody else had started talking about plate tectonics or how mountains were formed and stuff.
00:44:08.000 --> 00:44:11.840
So he gave LeJonte two of these shells.
00:44:12.079 --> 00:44:20.000
Now it just so happens that just today I took delivery of a petrified shell as well.
00:44:20.159 --> 00:44:22.239
It's the oldest thing I now possess.
00:44:22.320 --> 00:44:24.159
This is 200 million years old.
00:44:24.400 --> 00:44:24.559
Okay.
00:44:25.679 --> 00:44:29.360
Well, it looks very brightly for us each.
00:44:31.519 --> 00:44:33.119
It does, doesn't it?
00:44:33.280 --> 00:44:42.800
So this is the shell of an Ammonite, and it may well be something similar to this that Zonte was made a gift of by this uh Don Ulloa.
00:44:43.519 --> 00:44:51.599
Um but he said, Oh, these are brilliant, but I'm going to give these to the French Academy of Sciences.
00:44:51.920 --> 00:45:02.639
So he went the rest of the way by land, he went via Madrid, he went through Pamplona and crossed the Pyrenees to reach French soil.
00:45:02.880 --> 00:45:07.119
He was clearly pleased to be home because he hit French soil at 9 a.m.
00:45:07.360 --> 00:45:18.559
on the 8th of October 1771 after an absence of 11 years, six months, and approximately 13 days, in his own words.
00:45:20.400 --> 00:45:21.119
That's a trick.
00:45:21.760 --> 00:45:26.320
If you're going to record it that exactly, then you are quite happy to be home, aren't you?
00:45:26.400 --> 00:45:29.280
But 11 and a half years he's been away.
00:45:29.920 --> 00:45:35.199
Now, what I should have said right at the start is he was a married man.
00:45:36.480 --> 00:45:41.039
So he has been away from the uh the wife for a little while.
00:45:41.280 --> 00:45:43.519
I foresee trouble looming.
00:45:46.400 --> 00:45:50.400
You are prescient in the most extraordinary way.
00:45:50.880 --> 00:46:00.320
You know, just uh you know, this feeling that I guess there might be something like, you know, and you said that you are going around the corner just to get some bread.
00:46:02.000 --> 00:46:05.599
Yes, that milk you went to get had better not be off.
00:46:09.440 --> 00:46:13.039
Uh but I think it is going to transpire that you are right.
00:46:13.199 --> 00:46:14.960
There is trouble ahead.
00:46:15.199 --> 00:46:25.199
Uh but the trouble before that, he got back to Paris and found that he was no longer an active member of the Academy of Sciences.
00:46:26.079 --> 00:46:26.400
Okay.
00:46:26.880 --> 00:46:38.480
So unfortunately was it just the uh renewal subscription renewal was uh lapsed, or because your family said that you're dead?
00:46:40.400 --> 00:46:42.400
It was the latter of those.
00:46:43.280 --> 00:46:50.880
He in fact his um his subscriptions must have still gone through because he was now considered a veteran of the academy.
00:46:54.159 --> 00:47:03.280
Yes, but unfortunately, it is one of those things where the Academy, certainly at that time, had a limited number of active members.
00:47:04.480 --> 00:47:10.079
So it was dead men's shoes, and somebody else had taken his place at the academy.
00:47:10.320 --> 00:47:15.760
So he had veteran status, but I don't think that meant very much.
00:47:16.320 --> 00:47:18.800
Yeah, he's a valued prior member.
00:47:19.199 --> 00:47:25.039
Um, so that's it, he was no longer a member, a full proper member of the Academy.
00:47:25.360 --> 00:47:30.880
Um his possessions had been divided up between his heirs.
00:47:33.679 --> 00:47:50.639
He and when he'd left, he had been, I think he was from quite a well-to-do family because he had an estate, so he had properties, he had farms, there was a lot of land, a lot of possessions, a lot of riches, if you like, that he now had to fight tooth and nail for.
00:47:51.280 --> 00:48:00.480
And Le Jonte had been writing to his lawyer, and as I mentioned earlier, his lawyer hadn't passed any of that correspondence on.
00:48:01.119 --> 00:48:02.000
Sounds fishy.
00:48:02.239 --> 00:48:07.039
He just said or or just sounds absolutely idiotic, but anyway, there we go.
00:48:07.440 --> 00:48:10.079
I think there might have been a combination of both.
00:48:10.320 --> 00:48:13.920
I think the lawyer was both crooked and idiotic.
00:48:14.239 --> 00:48:24.880
Yeah, well, idi idiot crook or something, or just being, you know, persuaded by the family members who wanted to get their mittens on his uh estate.
00:48:25.199 --> 00:48:30.960
I think his his entire name, I mean it it alludes to some sort of uh noble family.
00:48:31.599 --> 00:48:32.559
Quite, quite.
00:48:32.719 --> 00:48:35.360
I I've never given his full name actually.
00:48:35.440 --> 00:48:37.920
I've referred to him as Guillaume Legentie.
00:48:38.320 --> 00:48:46.639
Um his full name was Guillaume Joseph Hyacinth Jean-Baptiste Legentil de la Galazerie.
00:48:46.960 --> 00:48:48.320
Uh Galazierre.
00:48:48.639 --> 00:48:57.199
So the the de la in the end already denominates that it's uh it's a family that with land holdings and estates and etc.
00:48:57.440 --> 00:49:04.800
So they he was clearly from a noble family with land holdings up until just recently.
00:49:05.119 --> 00:49:07.599
Yeah, until you died on paper.
00:49:08.000 --> 00:49:12.000
Which you didn't see because the lawyer didn't show them.
00:49:13.679 --> 00:49:33.920
But the um the way that he writes about it, and again, he must have been quite a stoic chap because he talks about it as being confusion, and once that was resolved and he'd had certain things returned to him, he found that his lawyer had been charging him a fee of 10%.
00:49:34.639 --> 00:49:35.599
Ah, okay.
00:49:36.159 --> 00:49:47.840
He did go um eventually he faced court because uh Le Jonte's solicitor wasn't satisfied with the 10%.
00:49:49.760 --> 00:50:08.880
He then claimed that he'd been robbed, his office had been robbed, and all of LeJontie's cash, so the land holdings were still okay, but everything that was cash has now been stolen, and that was enough that LeJontie said, No, this we've got to go to court for.
00:50:09.679 --> 00:50:10.960
And he lost.
00:50:13.199 --> 00:50:19.360
So the solicitor was like, Yeah, I was only looking after his money, it's not my fault that somebody stole it.
00:50:19.920 --> 00:50:20.480
Right.
00:50:20.719 --> 00:50:26.320
That's that's a nice way of uh well here we go.
00:50:26.800 --> 00:50:30.000
So he ended up having to pay all sorts of costs.
00:50:30.159 --> 00:50:36.320
Um so it it made a big dent in his fortunes, let's put it that way.
00:50:36.559 --> 00:50:41.119
But he went back to his hometown and he does talk of being welcomed by everybody.
00:50:41.440 --> 00:50:50.559
Toulamonde welcomed him back, but he doesn't mention the one person who should have been most pleased to see him, which was his wife.
00:50:51.920 --> 00:50:57.679
Um but she wasn't his wife anymore.
00:50:58.880 --> 00:51:05.440
She had been legally declared his widow, so she'd gone off and found another husband.
00:51:05.840 --> 00:51:06.400
Right.
00:51:06.719 --> 00:51:24.239
Well, again, I can foresee there are reasons why the lawyer didn't show any papers or pursue the uh the matter, so there might have been some pressure put to bear to the uh, you know, let's just say that he died.
00:51:26.000 --> 00:51:27.199
Yeah, quite.
00:51:27.440 --> 00:51:34.960
So this poor Guillaume Jonti had set off in what was it, 1759, I think it was.
00:51:35.280 --> 00:52:06.800
Um and when he set off, he was a respected scientist, a full member of the Academy des Sciences with a wife, family, riches, and when he got back, he'd been sacked from the Academy of Sciences, he was dead, he'd been robbed of all of his wealth, his wife had married somebody else, and he was nearly twelve years older than when he set off with nothing to show for it.
00:52:07.119 --> 00:52:14.159
Yeah, and the cloud went um past the sun on the day that he was supposed to do.
00:52:15.599 --> 00:52:20.800
Do do the one thing, the the the one you had one job.
00:52:21.199 --> 00:52:42.079
It sounds very much like a topic for uh what you would call it, a very, very sad country song, but they didn't, you know, think of in France, so I'm sure that there was something else that they uh the thing that made me the most sad was that somewhere along the way, even his two shells had been stolen.
00:52:42.480 --> 00:52:43.920
I think it's a great story.
00:52:44.000 --> 00:52:47.679
I feel so sorry for him, especially given that he did bear it up.
00:52:47.760 --> 00:52:49.599
Uh he had a stiff upper lip.
00:52:49.840 --> 00:52:52.400
Yeah, surely he should have been born an Englishman.
00:52:52.800 --> 00:52:54.159
Yes, quite.
00:52:54.480 --> 00:53:05.360
But he also feels to me the person that um was kind of echoing most around my mind when thinking of him is Forrest Gump.
00:53:06.079 --> 00:53:10.880
Because to me, it feels like he was an enlightenment version of Forrest Gump.
00:53:10.960 --> 00:53:24.000
Okay, he was he was incredibly smart, he did make some genuine astronomical achievements, but he was inspired to become an astronomer by the man who invented the upside-down temperature scale.
00:53:24.559 --> 00:53:29.199
He accidentally found himself embroiled in the Seven Years' War.
00:53:29.679 --> 00:53:37.519
He met Neville Maskellane, who's the man behind the She Hallian experiment, which I will do a separate episode on.
00:53:38.320 --> 00:53:52.559
He met a man who had found fossils at the top of a mountain before we knew what fossils were, and he even sailed under somebody called Captain Don, which is as close as you can get to Captain Dan.
00:53:55.519 --> 00:54:02.079
He upset the governor of Manila, where it would have been Sally for the second transit of Venus.
00:54:02.320 --> 00:54:09.280
He was robbed and abandoned by his family, but he made lifelong friendship on the other side of the world.
00:54:09.519 --> 00:54:12.239
He did some real science as well.
00:54:12.480 --> 00:54:27.119
He made some um surmises, I guess is the best way, it's not theories, but he surmised things about the temperature difference with it being warmer in one hemisphere, the northern hemisphere, compared to the southern hemisphere.
00:54:27.840 --> 00:54:29.599
And and he was right.
00:54:30.480 --> 00:54:39.679
Hundred years before we actually did the studies that he was kind of guessing at, he was guessing right, and he was guessing right for the right reasons.
00:54:39.840 --> 00:54:42.960
Um he made some genuine advances in geography.
00:54:43.119 --> 00:54:50.880
Um whilst he was in India, he learned about ancient astronomy from Indian astronomies, Brahmins.
00:54:51.039 --> 00:55:15.599
Um, so he did some really good diplomatic work, he did a lot of work to bring people together, but we should be remembering him as the man who measured the distance to the sun, and the only reason it doesn't remember him like that is because of this combination of bad weather, the Seven Years' War, and just plain bad luck.
00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:25.599
So Guillaume Lejonte, he's not the scientist that time forgot, but he's more the scientist that the universe just didn't want us to know about in the world.
00:55:25.760 --> 00:55:30.480
Yeah, I think the universe was basically like, you know, nope, not this guy.
00:55:31.920 --> 00:55:33.360
No, quite.
00:55:33.920 --> 00:55:41.360
So I think he deserves his episode of the obscure, and I hope you agree with me.
00:55:41.599 --> 00:55:42.320
Oh, yes.
00:55:42.559 --> 00:55:49.760
He um I think that fate kind of uh obscured him, even as things were going on.
00:55:50.159 --> 00:55:51.039
Poor man.
00:55:53.280 --> 00:55:55.280
Absolutely, the poor guy.
00:55:55.440 --> 00:56:05.840
Um, so I I've thoroughly enjoyed learning about this guy and looking into this guy, um, and I'm sure we'll be back for the next episode very soon.
00:56:05.920 --> 00:56:13.199
So I look forward to seeing you soon, Minna, and I look forward to seeing all of our audience very soon as well.
