NavList:

This story was well-known among late 20th century historians of the longitude problem, and it also appears in Sobel's "Longitude" (1995) and in various media based on that wildly successful book. The question (unresolved): was the essay satire? A good joke? In fairness to the articles, books, and documentaries that have included it among the "crazy ideas" for solving the longitude problem, stabbing dogs is certainly absurd and absolutely gets modern viewers either laughing or crying. It's memorably loony!

Were there people who really believed that such a thing was possible? The date for the essay, 1687, could be counted as the year modern science was born since it's the year that Newton's Principia including his laws of motion and his inverse-square model of gravitation was first published (for a very narrow audience at first). Then again 1687 is five years before the infamous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts. We're on the swampy border here between the paranoia and spiritualism of the Early Modern Era and the reductionist rationalism of The Enlightenment.

Did anyone believe something like a "powder of sympathy" might be used to send signals thousands of miles? There are plenty of intelligent people today who imagine that quantum entanglement --a fundamental and real phenomenon at the heart of modern quantum physics-- can send signals faster than the speed of light --a sort of "photonic sympathy". Hell, there are plenty of people today who have been brainwashed into believing that the Earth is flat. So of course. Of course there was some number circa 1700 who thought the powder of sympathy could solve the longitude problem since, as we know so well today, people will believe just about anything. I suspect they were a small and insignificant minority, and there do not appear to have been any serious attempts to torture puppies in the pursuit of accurate navigation. Assuming the essay in 1687 was intended as satire, how many people got the humor of it?

Frank Reed