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Inventories (research guide)

From time to time, inventories of the Observatory’s instruments were compiled for or by the Board of Visitors. Although this was sometimes done on an annual basis, often it was not. Of the surviving documents, some are complete lists with no amendments, some are lists (or copies of lists?) which have been overwritten with amendments. Others are just lists of changes to an existing inventory.

The documents are held in two separate archives - those of the Royal Society in London, and those of the Royal Greenwich Observatory at Cambridge. Sometimes they have been catalogued as inventories, sometimes as lists and sometimes as catalogues. The documents at Cambridge in RGO6/21 & RGO6/22 are copies made in the 1850s of originals (or copies of the originals?) held by the Royal Society. As can be seen from the table below, the location of much of the original material that was copied is currently unknown. It may reside with the Council minutes.

Some lists are dated, others are not. Where a list carries both a date and later amendments, the date has to be regarded as ambiguous. It may represent the date of the original list, or it may it may be the date when the amendments were made. A detailed comparison of the different lists might shed some light on this.

Inventories 1711–1831

The table below lists the locations of copies of the inventories. There are omissions from the inventories, particularly of the less significant instruments which were no longer useful.

No minutes of the Visitations have been found in RGO6/22 for the following years, though for those marked (*) there is a reference to them (or a report) having been read:

*1813 Jul 23, *1814 Jul 22, *1815 Jun 30, *1816, Jul 19, 1817, Jul 12, *1818 Jun 26, *1819 Jul 16, 1820 Jul 14, *1821 Jun 30, *1822 Jun 15, *1823 Jun 14, 1824 Jun 4, *1825 Jun 17, *1826 Jun 2, *1827, *1828, Jun 7, 1829 Jun 13, 1830 May 29

Inventories 1831 onwards

Following the reform of the Board of Visitors in 1830, copies of the inventories appear to have been no longer held by the Royal Society. The instruments were still inspected annually and checked against ‘the list’ as was reported in the minutes of each visitation (ADM190/4 & 6). Inventories were not however kept with the minutes, though a note does appear to have been made in the minutes of any changes. As the inventories became ever longer, they were not formally checked by the Visitors; additions to the equipment of the Observatory were however still recorded in the minutes up to and including 1964, after which the Board of Visitors was dissolved.

It would seem that the principle followed (at least to start with) was that items in each room were given a number, new items for that room being allocated the next available number. It was this together with a brief description that was referred to in the minutes. Each room had its own set of numbers. Because of the way the inventories were compiled and because the ‘master lists’ were never labelled as such, much care needs to be taken in reconciling the different sources of information.

With Airy’s arrival as Astronomer Royal in 1835, the inventories became far more detailed. Minor items were included as a matter of course and descriptions became much more precise. Prior to 1835, many of the clocks listed in the inventories were not named and only a description was given. It was Airy who assigned names to the clocks. These include the three clocks made by George Graham, which are now known as ‘Graham 1’, ‘Graham 2’ and ‘Graham 3’. The clocks were not however given identifying marks. As well as lists of instruments, lists of furniture and fixtures and fittings were also compiled, sometimes as separate catalogues, but at other times in combined catalogues.

What are assumed to be the ‘master lists’ are held in the archives of the Royal Observatory at Cambridge, seemingly in RGO39. Links to sections of the catalogue of the Observatory’s archive where inventories are known to have been listed are given below. They should not be regarded as exhaustive.