Persuasion by Projection: Charles Piazzi Smyth and the Performance of Scientific Expertise

Abstract

In 1864, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer-Royal for Scotland, set out to measure the Great Pyramid of Giza in order to prove that its design had been devised by none other than God himself. Smyth’s actions and conclusions were informed by the work of John Taylor, a book publisher who sought to thwart Britain’s adoption of the French metric system by demonstrating that the Great Pyramid was a storehouse of sacred measurements from which the English inch originated. As an eccentric but otherwise respected scientist, Smyth was no stranger to the procedure of having a theory vetted by the academic community. In addition to authoring several books on the subject of Pyramid Metrology, he employed the photographic lantern slide to disseminate the boldest idea he had ever proposed. Initially performed before learned societies, Smyth’s lectures became so popular with fringe movements, such as British-Israelism, that he eventually engaged a Manchester photographer to reproduce his slides for public sale. Through a study of extant lecture transcripts and glass slides, this article examines how Smyth’s photographs were imbricated in a rhetoric of persuasion that was grounded in the performance of scientific knowledge.

A version of this article was read in 2019 at Stars, Pyramids & Photographs: Charles Piazzi Smyth, 1819–1900, a symposium held by Rebekah Higgit and Andy Lawrence at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Completing this research during a global pandemic was not easy and I was fortunate to be supported in this endeavour by Karen Moran, librarian at the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh, Janina Warzecha of Concordia University Library in Montréal, and my friend David Haslam. I am also grateful for the stimulating email exchanges that I shared with Daniel Potter of National Museums Scotland, Eric Reisenauer and Martyn Jolly. This article also benefitted from the editorial attention of Karla McManus, Tal-Or Ben-Choreen and an anonymous peer reviewer. This work was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture under the Bourse de doctorat en recherche (B2Z).

Notes

1 – Charles Piazzi Smyth, ‘Exhibition of a Series of Photographs, Illustrating the Land of Egypt, the Great Pyramid, the Second Pyramid, the Third Pyramid, the Sphinx, King Shafre’s Tomb, Cliffe Tombs, and Moving Figures’, Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, 7 (1868), 209–15 (210). Earlier that month, Smyth’s photographic slides were displayed by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but they were laid out on a table, amid all kinds of archaeological samples and instruments, and were not projected.

2 – Ibid., 213.

3 – John Taylor, The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? And Who Built It? (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859). For a discussion of the movement known as Great Pyramid Metrology, see Eric Michael Reisenauer, ‘“The Battle of the Standards”: Great Pyramid Metrology and British Identity, 1859–1890’, The Historian 65, no. 4 (Summer 2003), 931–78.

4 – Reisenauer, ‘Battle of the Standards’, 938–39.

5 – Although Herschel would regard Taylor’s argument as flawed, he nevertheless supported his conclusion that the British inch, adjusted to match the so-called Pyramid inch, was a more adequate standard of length than the metre. John Herschel, ‘British Modular Standard of Length’, Athenæum (28 April 1860), 581–82.

6 – Simon Schaffer provides a helpful outline of this debate. Simon Schaffer, ‘Metrology, Metrication, and Victorian Values’, in Victorian Science in Context, ed. by Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 438–74.

7 – Reisenauer, ‘Battle of the Standards’, 932.

8 – Charles Piazzi Smyth, ‘On the Reputed Metrological System of the Great Pyramid’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 23 (1864), 667–706 (692).

9 – Comprehensive biographical information on Smyth can be found in H. A. Brück and Mary T. Brück, The Peripatetic Astronomer: The Life of Charles Piazzi Smyth (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1988).

10 – Reisenauer, ‘Battle of the Standards’, 948–49.

11 – William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who also worked with Gabri in Giza in the 1880s, explained his spelling of Gabri’s name thus: ‘Called Ali Dobree by Prof. Smyth. G is universally pronounced hard by Egyptians, soft by Arabs; thus either Gabri or Jabri’; both of these latter spellings are accepted by today’s standards. Before being employed by Smyth, Gabri had participated in Colonel Richard Howard Vyse’s 1837 survey of the pyramids of Giza; see William Matthew Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (London: Field & Tuer, 1883), 7.

12 – Donald Malcom Reid discusses in detail the creation of the Antiquities Service as a governmental agency and Mariette’s tenure as director; see Donald Malcom Reid, Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), esp. 93–136.

13 – This view is most exhaustively expounded in Smyth’s three-volume report on his Egyptian expedition. Charles Piazzi Smyth, Life and Work at the Great Pyramid, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867). Smyth would also distil his ideas in his bestselling book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, which would go through a total of five printings in his lifetime. The first edition of Our Inheritance appeared in 1864, prior to Smyth’s journey to Egypt.

14 – See Smyth, Life and Work, iii.

15 – Ibid., 469.

16 – These narratives, which seek to supplant archaeological research by suggesting that aliens are responsible for some of the most astounding ancient structures, implicitly undermine the capabilities and intelligence of non-Western cultures; texts on fallacious interpretations of ancient history are collected in Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, ed. by Garrett G. Fagan (London: Routledge, 2006).

17 – David Knight, ‘God’s Clockworld’, in Public Understanding of Science: A History of Communicating Scientific Ideas (London: Routledge, 2006), 13–28; see also Frank M. Turner, ‘The Victorian Conflict Between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension’, Isis 69, no. 3 (1978), 356–76.

18 – Smyth’s biographers describe him as ‘a devout Christian with evangelical leanings’. Brück and Brück, Peripatetic Astronomer, 97.

19 – David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 132.

20 – Charles Piazzi Smyth, A Poor Man’s Photography at the Great Pyramid (London: Henry Greenwood, 1870), 24.

21 – Alan G. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 3.

22 – The exact numbers and subjects of Smyth photographs are detailed in Smyth, Life and Work, ii, 279–92.

23 – According to photography historian Larry Schaaf, John Smith Pollitt was engaged by Smyth as early as 1872 because the astronomer ‘had frequent requests for lantern slides’. Larry Schaaf, ‘Charles Piazzi Smyth’s 1865 Conquest of the Great Pyramid’, History of Photography, 3, no. 4 (October 1979), 331–54 (345).

24 – I am inspired by the speculative methodology employed by Gabrielle Moser in her analysis of the photographic slides commissioned by the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee; see Gabrielle Moser, Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).

25 – Charles Piazzi Smyth, Descriptive Catalogue of Photographs of the Great Pyramid (Manchester: J. Pollitt, 1874), 12. Italics in original.

26 – David N. Livingstone, ‘Science, Site and Speech: Scientific Knowledge and the Spaces of Rhetoric’, History of the Human Sciences, 20, no. 2 (2007), 71–98 (75).

27 – For praise of photographic slides from Smyth’s contemporaries, see Samuel Highley, ‘The Application of Photography to the Magic Lantern, Educationally Considered’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 11, no. 530 (16 January 1863), 141–47; and John Nicol, ‘The Camera and the Lantern’, in British Journal Photographic Almanac and Photographer’s Daily Companion (London: Henry Greenwood, 1867), 93–95.

28 – This point is argued in Jens Ruchatz, ‘The Magic Lantern in Connection with Photography: Rationalisation and Technology’, in Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century, ed. by Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 2000), 38–49.

29 – Nicol, ‘Camera and the Lantern’, 93.

30 – On the use of photography in scientific practice, see Kelley Wilder, Photography and Science (London: Reaktion, 2009); and Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2005).

31 – Charles Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe: An Astronomer’s Experiment (London: Lovell Reeve, 1858), x.

32 – Smyth, ‘Exhibition of a Series’, 210.

33 – His appointment to the EPS, in tandem with William Henry Fox Talbot and Sir David Brewster, is recorded in the British Journal of Photography, 4, no. 159 (1 February 1862), 52. On Smyth’s work in Tenerife, see Larry Schaaf, ‘Piazzi Smyth at Teneriffe: Part 1, The Expedition and the Resulting Book’, History of Photography, 4, no. 4 (1980), 289–307.

34 – For an analysis of the technological developments pioneered by Smyth in Egypt, see Schaaf, ‘Charles Piazzi Smyth’s 1865 Conquest’, 331–54.

35 – My summary of Smyth’s RSSA presentation is gleaned from the RSSA’s transactions; see also Smyth, ‘Exhibition of a Series’, 213–15.

36 – Elizabeth Edwards makes a similar point about the lantern slides produced by Cambridge’s Torres Strait Expedition of 1898, stating that they attempted ‘to produce in the viewers’ minds the effect of direct witness or replication [via] naturalistic images of the raw data themselves’, in her ‘Performing Science: Still Photography and the Torres Strait Expedition’, in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, ed. by Anita Herle and Sandra Rose (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–35 (127).

37 – J. Chris McGlone, ‘Photogrammetry’, in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. by John Hannavy (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1081–82.

38 – Joseph Sidebotham, ‘On Certain Phenomena Connected with the Perspective and Measurement of Photographic Pictures’, British Journal of Photography (10 February 1865), 69–70 (69).

39 – Ibid., 70.

40 – Smyth, ‘Exhibition of a Series’, 210.

41 – McGlone, ‘Photogrammetry’, 1081–82.

42 – Jordan Bear, Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 132.

43 – Gillian Rose, ‘On the Need to Ask How, Exactly, is Geography “Visual”?’, Antipode, 35, no. 2 (2003), 212–21 (216).

44 – In the interim, Smyth also presented his slides to Edinburgh’s Philosophical Institution to great acclaim. Here, again, he leaned on his ‘skill in handling instruments or power of measuring I might possess as an astronomer’ to bolster his scientific authority; for a summary of this talk see ‘Professor Piazzi Smyth on the Great Pyramid’, Daily Review (6 March 1867), 7.

45 – For a history of the Ordnance Survey, its military origins and service as Royal Engineers, see A History of The Ordnance Survey, ed. by W. A. Seymour (Folkestone, Kent: Dowson, 1980), 〈https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/documents/resources/os-history.pdf〉.

46 – Colonel Henry James, Notes on the Great Pyramid of Egypt and the Cubits Used in Its Design (Southampton: Thomas G. Gutch, 1869), 18.

47 – Smyth reproduced the Daily Review articles as appendices in his published transcript of A Poor Man’s Photography at the Great Pyramid.

48 – Smyth, A Poor Man’s Photography at the Great Pyramid, 19.

49 – Ibid., 22.

50 – Ibid., 24.

51 – Ibid., 27.

52 – Ibid., 28. Italics in original.

53 – Meira Gold, ‘Victorian Egyptology and the Making of a Colonial Field Science, 1850–1909’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2019); for a discussion of the instability of Egyptology as a discipline, see William Carruthers, ‘Introduction: Thinking about Histories of Egyptology’, in Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures, ed. by William Carruthers (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1–15.

54 – Gold, ‘Victorian Egyptology’, 14.

55 – In addition to Gold’s doctoral thesis, this hierarchical valuation of labour is addressed in Stephen Quirke, Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–1924 (London: Duckworth, 2010); and Wendy Doyon, ‘On Archaeological Labour in Modern Egypt’, in Histories of Egyptology, ed. by Carruthers, 141–56.

56 – Smyth, Poor Man’s Photography, 28. Italics in original.

57 – Christina Riggs, ‘Shouldering the Past: Photography, Archaeology, and Collective Effort at the Tomb of Tutankhamun’, History of Science, 55, no. 3 (2017), 336–63.

58 – Allison Mickel, ‘Essential Excavation Experts: Alienation and Agency in the History of Archaeological Labor’, Archaeologies, 15, no. 2 (2019), 181–205. Like other locally hired workers, Gabri would go on to become indispensable to the production of Egyptological knowledge. In 1880 he was enlisted to work with Petrie on the strength of his experience with Smyth, and eventually operated his own business as an antiquities dealer. I thank Daniel Potter, curator of the Ancient Mediterranean of National Museums Scotland, for this information. For a brief biography of Ali Gabri, see Frederik Hagen and Kim Ryholt, The Antiquities Trade in Egypt, 1880–1930: The H.O. Lange Papers (Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2016), 195–96.

59 – Smyth, Poor Man’s Photography, 32.

60 – Ibid., 33.

61 – For a probing analysis of the rise of objectivity in scientific illustrations, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations, 40 (Fall 1992), 81–128.

62 – Smyth, Poor Man’s Photography, unpaginated preface.

63 – Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

64 – Olga Amsterdamska, ‘Surely you are joking, Monsieur Latour!’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 15, no. 4 (Fall 1990), 495–504.

65 – ‘Edinburgh Photographic Society’, British Journal of Photography, 16 (10 December 1869), 594.

66 – On the undoing of Smyth’s theory, see Reisenauer, ‘Battle of the Standards’, 969–74.

67 – Richard A. Proctor, ‘The Religion of the Great Pyramid’, Fraser’s Magazine, 15 (March 1877), 331–43.

68 – This withdrawal is most dramatically detailed in a tract published by Smyth, which revealed his fraught correspondence with the President of the Royal Society. Charles Piazzi Smyth, The Great Pyramid and the Royal Society, London: W. Ibister & Co., 1874. To this day, Smyth is the only person ever to have resigned from his Royal Society fellowship.

69 – In addition to Britain, this movement was popular in the USA and Australia. Reisenauer, ‘Battle of the Standards’, 958–67.

70 – For more information about Britain’s political engagement with Egypt, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Lanver Mak, The British in Egypt: Community, Crime and Crises, 1882–1922 (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012).

71 – Ibid., 966.

72 – Notices for Pollitt’s slide set were reproduced in the 1879 and 1890 editions of Smyth’s Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. ‘Transparencies for the lantern from Professor Piazzi Smyth’s Fine Negatives’ were listed among Pollitt’s stock in advertisements that appeared in the 1879 and 1880 volumes of the British Journal and Photographic Almanac.

73 – Sarah Dellmann, ‘Lecturing without an Expert: Word and Image in Educational “Ready-Made” Lecture Sets’, Magic Lantern Gazette, 28, no. 2 (Summer 2016), 3–14 (5).

74 – Smyth, Descriptive Catalogue, 11 and 12.

75 – Ibid., 13.

76 – The hypothesis that the pyramid’s Grand Gallery might be read like some kind of calendar was not devised by Smyth, but suggested to him by a fellow Scotsman called Robert Menzies. Smyth took to the idea with great enthusiasm, expanding on it in the 1874 edition of Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid and all subsequent editions. The theory is also laid out in the appendix of the commercial set’s script. Smyth, Descriptive Catalogue, 18–21.

77 – José Antonio Mayoral, ‘Antithesis’, in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. by Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 27–28.

78 – On the cavalier absconding of Egyptian antiquities by Europeans and Americans, see Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

79 – Smyth, Descriptive Catalogue, 4.

80 – Ibid.

81 – Ibid., 5.

82 – Ibid.

83 – Garett G. Fagan, ‘Diagnosing Pseudoarchaeology’, in Archaeological Fantasies, ed. by Fagan, 27–28.

84 – Smyth, Descriptive Catalogue, 8.

85 – Ibid., 10.

86 – Ibid., 14.

87 – Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15–31 (25).

88 – Smyth, Descriptive Catalogue, 12. Italics in original. This was not the first nor last time that this phrase was employed by Smyth. A version of it appeared in the very first edition of Our Inheritance in 1864.

89 – Smyth’s work was discredited by many late nineteenth-century Egyptologists, including Auguste Mariette who expressed indignation with theories that sought an explanation for the pyramids beyond the framework of ancient Egyptian funerary practice. In what is possibly a reference to Smyth’s work, Mariette’s popular Itinéraire de la Haute-Égypte, published in 1872 and first translated into English in 1877, declared: ‘it is doing violence to all that we know of Egypt, to all that archaeology has taught us on the subject of the monumental habits of this country, to imagine for a moment that they could ever have been intended for aught else but tombs’. Auguste Mariette-Bey, The Monuments of Upper Egypt: A Translation of ‘Itinéraire de la Haute Égypte’, trans. by Alphonse Mariette (Alexandria: A. Mourès, 1877 [1872]), 68.

90 – ‘Assembly Rooms St. Leonards’, Hastings and St. Leonards Observer (23 April 1881), 1. Capitalisation as in original. See Stephen Herbert, ‘A Slide of Lantern Life: Lantern Presentations In and Around Hastings in Early 1881’, in Realms of Light: Uses and Perceptions of the Magic Lantern from the 17th to the 21st Century, ed. by Richard Crangle, Mervyn Heard and Ine van Dooren (London: Magic Lantern Society, 2005), 185–92.

91 – ‘Assembly Rooms St. Leonards’, 1.

92 – ‘Lectures on the Great Pyramid’, Hastings and St. Leonards Observer (30 April 1881), 7.

93 – Ibid.

94 – A sales catalogue for J. W. Queen & Co., a Philadelphia business which sold optical apparatuses, lists a set called ‘The Great Pyramid. (From direct negatives.) By Prof. Piazzi Smyth’. See J. W. Queen & Co., Photographic Illustrations for Projection (Philadelphia, 1897). The National Library of Australia houses one of the most complete sets of Smyth’s ready-made lecture. It was formerly the property of the Australian Inland Mission, a Presbyterian organisation devoted to spreading the gospel to the most remote communities of Australia, both settler and indigenous; see ‘Australian Inland Mission’, National Library of Australia, 〈https://www.nla.gov.au/selected-library-collections/australian-inland-mission〉.

95 – Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. by Angela Davies (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1988 [1983]), 221.

96 – James D. Proctor, ‘In ___ We Trust: Science, Religion, and Authority’, in Science, Religion, and the Human Experience, ed. by James D. Proctor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 87–108 (96).

97 – Reisenauer, ‘Battle of the Standards’, 971–73.

98 – Gross, Rhetoric of Science, 4.

99 – Richard Crangle, ‘Slide Set: The Great Pyramid (lecture: York & Son, 48 slides, in/before 1891)’, LUCERNA, 〈http://lucerna.exeter.ac.uk/set/index.php?id=3002888〉.