LITMIR.BIZ

      Hutton was in London on Mensuration business when he heard from a friend – Edward Williams of the Royal Artillery – that an unusual job was open. John Lodge Cowley, professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, had retired due to declining health. The job attracted two hundred pounds a year and a house at the Academy. Plenty of people wanted it, and quite probably some of them knew some mathematics. The official in charge – George, Viscount Townshend, Master-General of the Ordnance – reckoned it would be a good idea to fill the post with a man of ability rather than a well-connected nonentity. He had taken the rare step of announcing a public competition, giving it to be understood that ‘merit alone’ would decide the result. Advertisements had appeared in the newspapers.

      Williams urged Hutton to present himself as a candidate. Back in Newcastle his supporter Robert Shaftoe did the same, and Hutton let himself be persuaded. In May 1773 he travelled back to London to take part in the supposedly impartial competition.

      Merit alone? ‘Merit is useless,’ wrote Horace Walpole, ‘it is interest alone that can push a man forward. By dint of interest one of my coach-horses might become poet-laureate, and the other, physician to the household.’ There were increasingly meaningful public examinations at the British universities during the eighteenth century, and it was not absolutely unknown for public appointments to be made on a competitive basis. Expectations about public life and the right use of patronage were changing, after all, but they were changing slowly.

      So the candidates for Townshend’s ‘impartial’ examination turned up armed with the usual array of recommendations from noblemen and politicians: testimonials, promises of favour or reminders of favours owed. Hutton would later claim that he himself competed ‘without any interest’. But in reality he too took his precautions. He obtained a recommendation from his acquaintance the Duke of Northumberland, to whom he had dedicated his Mensuration. Northumberland was a prominent Tory, a colliery owner and a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he controlled seven votes in Parliament. Through Robert Shaftoe, Hutton also obtained a recommendation from the Earl of Sandwich, a Whig (the party was in power at the time) who had been First Lord of the Admiralty; to Master-General Townshend his was probably a louder voice than Northumberland’s. Having covered both political bases, Hutton finally equipped himself with a letter from the prominent northern mathematician William Emerson, testifying to his intellectual abilities. Thus protected, he faced the examiners.

      Theirs were names he knew, but none was even an acquaintance. Three, however, were men you had almost certainly heard of if you had any contact with the British scientific and mathematical scene. Nevil Maskelyne was the Astronomer Royal; Samuel Horsley a member of the Council of the Royal Society; John Landen a highly regarded mathematical author and Fellow of the Royal Society. The fourth examiner, representing the military side, was Henry Watson, a military engineer with experience from Havana to Bengal as well as a contributor to The Ladies’ Diary and a friend of and literary executor to its former editor.

      They started by examining the candidates viva voce. It was a stiff competition. Other candidates included Benjamin Donne, Master of Mechanics to the King, and Hugh Brown, translator of major works on military mathematics. (There were at least six candidates in all, but Hutton’s telling of the tale seems to have grown over the years. The obituaries have him facing down a field of nearly a dozen.)

      The questions ranged across the entire field of mathematics, its history, what the best books were on certain subjects, and how best to teach it. When the first day was over the examiners handed the candidates a set of deliberately abstruse written problems in mathematics and natural philosophy, telling them to come back at the end of the week with whatever answers they could manage.

      A persistent rumour – it was still circulating in 1825, after Hutton was dead – said that Hutton, away from his books and his friends, struggled with the written questions, and visited the Duke of Northumberland in London in some despondency. The Duke, so the tale goes, got the examiners to provide a new, fairer set of written questions. Even if that is true, it must have been a tough week, wrestling with the problems all day for several days before finally writing up whatever answers one had been able to obtain and turning them in at the end of the week. And Hutton must have spent a tense weekend in his London lodgings waiting for the result.

      It came on Monday. The examiners reckoned that most of the candidates were sufficiently well qualified to do the job and had given complete satisfaction as far as the written and verbal questions were concerned. But they felt compelled to single out Hutton for particular recommendation, on account of the exceptional strength of his performance. The Board of Ordnance ratified their decision on 25 May. And so patronage and merit worked together (as they sometimes did) and Charles Hutton became Professor Hutton, of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.