The British and American Nautical Almanacs in the 19th Century

Abstract

In Britain, embroiled in the global conflicts of the early 19th century, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, was an established national institution, founded as it was for the perfection of discovering the longitude at sea, performing its regular astronomical observations and cataloguing the results. Additionally, Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811), the Astronomer Royal, edited the Nautical Almanac, which involved a large amount of extraneous work. Inheriting the Royal Observatory in 1811 John Pond (1767–1836), the next Astronomer Royal, modernised the instrumentation, much improving the accuracy of the results, but paying less attention to the onerous publication of the Almanac. The testing of the Royal Navy’s chronometers was a further burden on the Astronomer Royal and his staff, who sometimes lacked reliability, and errors crept into the Almanac. In 1818 these difficulties lead to the appointment of a superintendent to oversee the Almanac’s production, the first step on a path leading by 1832 to the foundation of Britain’s Nautical Almanac Office (NAO), greatly enhancing the reputation of the publication. By the end of the century, co-operation between the UK NAO and other international almanac offices was agreed at the Paris Conference of 1896.