Jane Squire, Lady Longitude

Among the many candidates who applied for the longitude prize announced in 1714 by the British government were, as far as is known, at least two women: Jane Squire (1686-1743) and Elizabeth Johnson (1721-1800). The latter did so much later, towards the end of the eighteenth century, but Squire developed her proposal during the 1730s and gave it to the press in 1742 under the title A Proposal to Determine our Longitude (a second edition appeared in 1743). The work collects several letters exchanged between Squire and the “Board of Longitude”, in which the mathematician complains of discriminatory treatment because she was a woman. One of them, written on January 16, 1742, reads as follows:

To the Honorable the Board of Commissioners for discovering the Longitude. […] I sent a Copy of this Table of Longitude to Sir Charles Wager, as first commissioner, in 1732: but as I have reason given me to apprehend, that (coming from a Woman) it is either thrown away, or given away; I send another, with this form.

Her discouragements in this regard were shared with Sir Thomas Hanmer (1677-1746), one of the Board’s commissioners, who replied as follows:

All I can say to the Disappointments you meet with when you address yourself to the Commissioners for the Longitude is this, that your good sense I am sure will tell you that you are expected to lie under some Prejudice upon account of your Sex. Man, arrogant man, assumes to himself the Prerogative of Science, and when a Woman offers to teach them in any of the abstruse Parts of it, they are apt to turn a disdainful Ear. To this arrogance therefore, I believe you are to impute their Want of Attention to you upon this occasion, and I have long despaired of finding the Cure of their Faults…

Squire’s proposal mixed religious and astronomical elements, and consisted, roughly speaking, in the fragmentation of the firmament into more than a million fractions that could be easily distinguished by sailors, from which they could calculate their position in longitude. Although impractical, Squire’s audacity in bringing her proposal to the “Board” and into print has, in recent times, allowed her work and her figure to be studied with the attention it deserves. If you want to know more about her, I recommend you to take a look at Alexi Baker’s works. [José María Moreno Madrid]