Sunday 2 June 1661

Annotations

• N daniel on Wed 2 Jun 2004, 11:42pm

  “…and so he was forced to stay longer than I desired.”

  yes, sam, we all surely know the feeling. even the best of guests must depart eventually.

• N A. De Araujo on Wed 2 Jun 2004, 11:59pm

  “at night after prayers to bed” if my memory is correct it is the first time he mentions praying before going to bed.

• N Sjoerd on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 12:04am

  “what is got as to matter of strength is lost by them as to matter of time”

  If you read “strength” to be what we call “force” these days it should be “…as to matter of DISTANCE”.

  But Newton isn’t going to watch his apple fall until next year, isn’t he ?

• N chris on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 02:03am

  Sorry to persist with the wig thing; but does “the barber having done with me” indicate running repairs on the flowing locks, or a shave and clippers, or perhaps all of the above?
  p.s. Isn’t the use of “doubt” interesting?

• N dirk on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 02:25am

  bedside prayers - re A. De Araujo

  Last mentioned on Sunday 19 May 1661:
  “I took leave and went home, where to prayers (which I have not had in my house a good while), and so to bed.”
  

• N daniel on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 03:04am

  “the barber”

  this could also have been letting blood as barbers also did this-though Sam usually mentions this ritual.

• N Ruben on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 04:10am

• N Jesse on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 05:07am

• N Australian Susan on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 05:57am

  Sam gets himself smartened up for Church on Whitsunday, which was also a traditional time for women to have new clothes, but no mention of Elizabeth being caught out in any extravagance nor of Sam being proud of her appearance. In fact, no mention at all……Where is she??

• N Sjoerd on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 07:42am

  A lever , like a crowbar for instance , can lift a very heavy crate for maybe an inch.
  To do this you would have to move the handle down for maybe 10 inches, increasing the force by ten (not considering things like friction and the weight of the crowbar itself).
  So while you DEcrease the force needed on the handle side, you INcrease the distance it has to move.
  And as Ruben points out, the speed as well.
  You could demonstrate this using a hinged rod and some weights, maybe that is what Greatorex did.

  Great name for a scientist/alchemist, isn’t it ?

• N Mary on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 07:58am

  Bedside prayers?

  It’s Sunday. Much more likely to be household prayers for all members of the extended family living at the Pepys’ Seething Lane lodgings. This is a practice that persisted into the 20th Century in many larger households in this country. Even little Daisy Ashford (“The Young Visiters”) describes it.

• N Mary on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 08:18am

  No wig for Sam.

  Sam will not start wearing a periwig until 1663. He would probably have mentioned any blood-letting (he’s always careful of health matters). Most likely that this call was for a trim and a shave, getting spruced up for Whitsunday attendance at church. Not very likely that he had a ‘shampoo’; he would surely have mentioned any application of water to the head, as he was wary of getting his extremities (and other parts of him) wet and, at a later date, will complain that washing the feet is a very risky business.

  Not that shampoo as such had been invented, but scented waters (flower or herb based) had been available for many years for freshening up greasy and dirty locks. Gilly flower water was one mentioned fairly often.

• N Pedro. on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 09:24am

• N Ruben on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 09:58am

• N Kevin Sheerstone on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 10:14am

  Levers and such.

  Based on this entry, and several previous examples, I am beginning to think that Sam is simply not ‘mechanically inclined’. It is true of course that he cannot have been familiar with Newtonian principles, or calculus, but the basic principles of leverage require neither. I have always imagined, on no good authority, that his education at St Paul’s, although undoubtedly heavily weighted in favour of the classics, would have included at least a smattering of ‘Euclid’, and perhaps Archimedes.

  Formal education aside, Sam, although no seaman, has certainly been on more than a few ships and would surely have seen the block and tackle in use. That is, after all, simply a series of levers in rotation: I would have thought it common knowledge that with a purchase of (say) 10:1, ten length- units of rope have to be pulled for every unit of lift.

• N Kevin Sheerstone on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 10:19am

  Ruben above - sorry, I should have checked.(Your entry wasn’t there when I started typing!)

• N deepfatfriar on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 11:39am

  Archimedes: “Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.”

  Quoting Aristotle?

• N Ruben on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 01:21pm

  deepfatfriar:
  you are right. Just a lapsus between the name of the classics…or may be a half a century old memory bit, stored in the wrong place!

• N A. Hamilton on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 01:36pm

  Household prayers

  My great-great grandfather, staunch Presbyterian, used to hold family prayers on a regular basis, to the dismay of his grandchildren. A nephew brought back an African Gray parrot from a trip to the Congo, and gave it to the household, where the grandchildren dicovered how clever it was. One day the family head called everyone together for prayers and started up. From the back of the room came the parrot’s voice:”Aw, dry up!”

• N Rich Merne on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 05:17pm

  Kevin Sheerstone at al.
  Yes Kevin and even more demonstrably the common capstan on ships of those times. The modern equivalent of the capstan being the simple winch, which may be seen on every modern boat from about 17 feet up; (sailboats generally that is)
  “Lost in time”. I think S., surprisingly may be a little lost in time here. ‘Time’, has actually nothing to do with the fundamental principal of levers which S. is talking about. This principal, of Archimedean fame, concerns itself with ‘mechanical advantage’ to use the old fashioned term. In a simple lever set-up, the ratio of the opposing unequal lengths of lever arm about it’s fulcrum, is identical to the ratio of the applied force and the resultant force of reaction, (discounting minor aberrations which may not intrude on the purity of the principal). ie. in a simple lever of 3 M /fulcrum /1 M, a force of 1KN applied through a distance of say 0.3M will move 1000Kg. or 1 Tonne through 0.1M, ie. a three to one lever doing three to one work. This will all happen in the same time span. Bringing ‘time’ into it, obscures the principal in discussion. Hope I’m accurate here as I’m running****……..

• N Ann on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 05:34pm

  “It rained very hard, as it hath done of late so much that we begin to doubt a famine, “
  Chris notes the interesting use of “doubt” above. OED says doubt can mean “With infinitive phrase or objective clause: To fear, be afraid (that something uncertain will take or has taken place)” Also: “b. To suspect, have suspicions about. c. With infin. phrase or clause: To apprehend; to suspect.” Also, to fear.
  
  So, Sam fears that with so much rain, there WILL be famine, not that there won’t be one.

  I love looking up words whose meaning we take for granted and learning an entirely new twist on them!

• N Mary on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 05:44pm

  “we begin to doubt a famine”

  According to an L&M footnote, there was indeed a sharp rise in the price of grain from 1660 to 1661, so Sam’s doubts may have been justified.

• N Ruben on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 07:25pm

• N Sjoerd on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 09:23pm

  Pepys Greatorex Huygens

  Pepys has his “ear to the ground” here and reports what he remembers.
  “Time” is not a very interesting factor in regular levers, it is much more interesting in the context of pendulums.
  On january 23st Samuel, together with Greatorex, paid his first visit to Gresham College base of the Royal Society.

  The dutchman Christiaan Huygens lives in London around this time, is made a member of the Society, and must have discussed levers, pendulums and air pumps with Greatorex. Huygens was the first to put forward the concept of Impetus (Force x Time) and will build the first reliable pendulum clock. We know Greatorex and Huygens actually built Air pumps in 1661.

  Reliable clocks would prove enormously interesting for the navy, because they were the only way to measure longitude. This was one of the main goals of the Royal Soc. Still it would take another century for a solution to the problem to be accepted by the Society.

  Huygens is one of those people you would like to have heard from in the diary, but don’t.

  http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Longitude2.html
  

• N Pedro. on Thu 3 Jun 2004, 10:14pm

  Pepys, Jonas Moore.

  A few days ago Sam was talking with Jonas Moore who had given support to Flamsteed and his work on clocks/latitude see;

  http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Moore_Jonas.html

• N john lauer on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 03:08am

  For the record: v = d / t (not d x t); d = v x t

  Not surprising that Sam could not perfectly relate the concepts of distance and time, which Greatorex did not have the language and terminology to express clearly to him, before Newton!

• N Ruben on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 03:17am

  Sjoerd & Pedro & John:
  Now you are speaking!

• N vicente on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 03:26am

  Leverage was used. I’m sure that they used poles to lever up crunched coaches after the wheel fell off. They just could not express wot it is they don did. {v=d/t or f=ma or any other funny way of saying I did it} But ask how many fish make a bakers dozen and answer they would.They also knew how many fart[h]ings there were in 5s 1d 3/4., before any get out their free calculator[or aba cus].

• N dirk on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 03:42am

  “levers … what is got as to matter of strength is lost by them as to matter of time”

  Let’s try the simplest “translation”:

  [Using a lever,] if you gain strength (if it becomes easier) you have to exercise your (now smaller) force for a longer time (by moving the lever over a longer distance than you would have had to move the original object)to do the job.

  Force x time = work done

  Am I wrong?
  

• N Rich Merne on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 09:27am

  Ruben,
  Sorry, I insist, the relations between levers arms and their strenghts does not (‘include’) embrace the element of either time or velocity.
  John Lauer’s little header is of course correct, but it has nothing to do with the principal of ‘the strenght that levers have’.

• N Sjoerd on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 09:52am

  Today we reserve very strict meanings for some of these words which were not so established then.

  Work = force x distance
  (for a lever: time does not come into it , Rich is right)

  Impulse = force x time

  and

  Momentum = mass x velocity

  The last two were used by Huygens studying bouncing balls and pendulums.
  For instance, the change in momentum in a billiard ball is equal to the total impulse it gets from the cue.

  A concept called “Vis Viva” (living force) was used as well, which Huygens expressed as mass x velocity^2.
  This looks very much like the formula for Kinetic Energy 1/2.m.v^2, but the concept of energy was developed later.

• N Ruben on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 10:33am

  E pur si muove!

• N E on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 01:04pm

  If you move the handle end of your lever at a constant speed, then yes it will take longer to shift something the same distance with a “stronger” (longer) lever.

  This is much more obvious in the related matter of a block and tackle (pulley) setup as used on ships, where you have to pull through much more rope on a “stronger” system. We now encapsulate the relationship in the equation work = force x distance, but it was not an unreasonable guess to think it was the length of time the lesser force operated that produced the magic effect, rather than the distance of movement.

• N Rich Merne on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 02:19pm

  Greatorex, ‘great name for scientist’ etc.
  Sjoerd, for interesting geneology of the name ‘Greatorex’ and some digressive but amusing commentary, try link below if you havn’t already done so.
  http://www.winster.org/History/Greatorex/The%20Name%20of%20Greatorex.htm

• N Jackie on Fri 4 Jun 2004, 05:53pm

  It is fascinating to see what we regard now as basic science and common knowledge being at the cutting edge of scientific debate in Pepy’s time. The importance of Newton and which equations on work done being force X distance and the calculations of impulses and steady forces was a revolution - but he wasn’t the only person trying to puzzle this all out.

  The people thrashing these issues out were real scientific greats.

• N language hat on Sat 5 Jun 2004, 08:50pm

  “geneology of the name