by Niccolò Guicciardini
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Hutton, Charles (1737-1823), mathematician, was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 14 August 1737, the youngest son of Henry Hutton, an overseer in a local colliery, who died in June 1742; Hutton's mother, Eleanor, married again the same year; her second husband was Francis Fraim (or Frame), who also worked in a colliery, as pit overman. When he was seven Hutton dislocated his right elbow in a street fight; he could not recover the full use of his right arm so was considered unfit for hard labour and, while his brothers were sent to the mine, Hutton went to school. His first teacher was an old Scottish woman who taught in Percy Street, where the Huttons lived. His next teacher was one Mr Robson, who kept a school at Benwell. When the family moved to High Heaton, Hutton went to a school run by Ivison, an Anglican clergyman, in Jesmond, then a village near Newcastle. After a short period in which he worked as a coal cutter in a pit at Long Benton, he was able, about 1756, to take the place of Ivison, who had obtained a curacy at Whitburn. Hutton's income was now higher than the wage that he could earn as a handicapped miner--coal cutters were paid on the basis of the amount of coal they could work and wage notes for September 1755 and March 1756 prove that Hutton was the least productive of the workforce. Notwithstanding his youth, Hutton's tenure at the school in Jesmond was a success, and he had to move the school to Stott's (or Stote's) Hall, a mansion where he could accommodate the increasing number of pupils. In the meantime he attended evening classes in mathematics in a school in Newcastle run by a Mr James. During his residence in Jesmond, Hutton became a follower of the Methodists; he wrote sermons and even preached, but was soon, however, to distance himself from the church.
In 1760 James left, and Hutton moved his school from Jesmond to Newcastle. On 14 April 1760 the opening of Hutton's 'writing and mathematical school' was announced. Hutton established himself as one of the most successful mathematics teachers of the region. His syllabus was orientated towards applied mathematics--bookkeeping, navigation, surveying, dialling, and so on. Pupils at the local grammar school were sent to his mathematical lessons, and among his students was Robert Shafto of Benwell Hall, who made available to Hutton his rich mathematical library. In 1766 Hutton began a course intended for mathematics schoolmasters, to be attended during the Christmas holidays. This course was probably based on The Schoolmaster's Guide (1764), Hutton's first publication. His next work, Treatise on Mensuration, was published by subscription (more than 1000 subscribers) in numbers, the last appearing in 1770. Hutton's early works were engraved by Ralph Beilby, whose assistant, Thomas Bewick, who was to become one of the great masters of woodcuts, contributed to the Treatise. In 1770 Hutton was asked by the mayor and corporation of Newcastle to prepare a survey of the town. The destruction on 11 November 1771 of several bridges across the Tyne, caused by a flood about 9 feet higher than the usual spring tides, motivated him to study bridge building: in 1772 he published The Principles of Bridges.
In 1773 the chair of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy became vacant on the retirement of John Lodge Cowley, and a public examination was held for the election of the new professor: Hutton was appointed on 24 May 1773. His researches centred on the convergence of series, experiments in ballistics, the building of bridges, and measurement of the density of the earth. His elaborate calculations of the mean density of the earth, based on Maskelyne's observations on the deviation of the plumb line close to Mount Schiehallion, Perthshire, were praised by Pierre-Simon Laplace. In 1778, for his papers on the relationships between the 'force' of gunpowder and the velocity of projectiles, he was awarded the Copley medal of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected fellow in 1774.
In 1779 the University of Edinburgh awarded Hutton the degree of doctor of laws, and in the same year he became foreign secretary of the Royal Society. It is not surprising that his publishing career and his teaching at Woolwich did not allow him much time for these additional duties. In 1783, when the council decided that the foreign secretary should reside in London, he was compelled to resign. In fact, his expulsion was engineered by Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society. A group of Hutton's supporters tried unsuccessfully, in February 1784, to reinstate him as foreign secretary, and then tried to support his candidacy as secretary. When this second attempt failed, Hutton, among other 'mathematicians', resigned from the society. It is a reasonable view that the controversy between Hutton and Banks reflects two different views on the role of mathematicians in the Royal Society, and that this opposition was also determined by the lower social status of the mathematical practitioners in comparison with other members.
From 1771 to 1775 Hutton published in numbers, bound in 1775 in five volumes, an annotated edition of the literary and mathematical parts of the Ladies' Diary from the first issue in 1704 to the 1773 issue, and he was the editor of this famous periodical from 1773-4 to 1818. In 1781 and 1785 he published volumes of mathematical tables. In addition, he wrote A Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary (1795-6) and a two-volume Course of Mathematics (1798-1801). The Course was published in various editions in a period of fifty years: it was even translated into Arabic. The dictionary reveals a deep and extensive knowledge of British and continental works and is still used by historians as a valuable source. The British reader was provided with bibliographical and biographical information on continental mathematicians such as D'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange. The entries on engineering are particularly valuable, while mechanics, optics, and astronomy are less complete, especially from the point of view of mathematical treatment. Hutton referred very often to Euler with great esteem; the article 'Euler' is very detailed and appreciative. He did not hide his admiration for analytical methods and his belief, at odds with most of his countryfellows, that geometrical constraints are extraneous to research. However, the dictionary did not include technical details of the foreign works. It is revealing that the brief entries for 'differential' and 'integral' referred to 'fluxions' and 'fluents'. The explanation for this last entry went as far as the integration of rational functions, but almost nothing was said about differential equations. In the dictionary the 'new analysis' of the continentals was advocated, but Hutton was unable to convey a detailed idea of it. The second edition contains among its additions a ten-page presentation, written by 'a friend', of Edward Waring's mathematical achievements. From 1803 to 1809 Hutton, together with the physician Richard Pearson and the naturalist George Shaw, worked to the preparation of the abridgement of the Philosophical Transactions from 1665 to 1800, in eighteen volumes: from this work he obtained at least £6000.
Hutton's publications guaranteed him a good income and in 1786 he moved into the building business. He built several houses for letting on Shooter's Hill, the hill south of the Thames overlooking Woolwich. He also manufactured bricks and tiles. When the academy was moved from the riverside to the hilltop, the decision was taken to buy Hutton's houses; these were then sold by Hutton to the crown and subsequently converted into official residences for artillery field officers and professors of the academy.
Hutton married first in 1760, 'a hasty and unhappy marriage'. He married again and his second wife died in 1817. From these marriages he had two daughters and at least one son, George Henry Hutton [see below]. His second daughter married Henry Vignoles, captain of the 43rd regiment, and, with her husband, died of yellow fever in June 1794 at Guadeloupe, where they were prisoners of war. In July 1807, Hutton, suffering from pulmonary disorders, resigned his professorship and the Board of Ordnance assigned him a pension of £500 per year. He moved to Bedford Row, London, where he died of a severe cold on 27 January 1823. He was buried at St Luke's, Charlton, on 4 February, perhaps alongside his wife, as a Margaret Hutton was buried there on 27 March 1817; his grandson, Charles Henry Hutton, was buried there on 16 February 1815.
Hutton patronized the study of mathematics in several ways: he was influential in the choice of Captain William Mudge as suitable for conducting the trigonometrical survey of England and Wales; he supported the appointment of Francis Bonnycastle, Peter Barlow, Lewis Evans, and Olynthus Gregory at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and the appointment of Edward Riddle at the Trinity House School in Newcastle and at the Naval Hospital in Greenwich; he encouraged and assisted Margaret Bryan in the publication of her Compendious System of Astronomy (1797) of which he was one of the subscribers; he financed several institutions in his native Newcastle and subscribed £5 per year to public lectures in the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle; and he supported the Royal Jubilee School and the Protestant Schoolmasters' Association.
Hutton belonged to a group of mathematicians, interested in applied mathematics and open to innovations from the continent, active in the military schools of Woolwich and Sandhurst at the end of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century, who prepared the ground for the reformation of British mathematics during the first half of the nineteenth century.
George Henry Hutton (d. 1827), only surviving son of Charles Hutton, was appointed second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1777. His early service was in the West Indies where, in action against the French forces who were occupying Guadeloupe, he discovered imprisoned the infant son and nursemaid of his sister and her husband. Hutton was able to free the two and send them back to England. In a later action, a musket ball caused the loss of his right eye, and he was held prisoner of war for about a year, until his exchange in 1796.
Hutton was twice married; his first wife died at Canterbury in 1802 leaving a son, Charles, who died while he was a cadet at the Royal Military Academy. Hutton then married a Miss Barlow of Bath, about 1807, by which time he had been promoted to major, then to lieutenant-colonel, and appointed to command the artillery in Ireland, rising in 1811 to major-general and in 1821 to lieutenant-general. Their only son Henry (1809-1863) graduated BA and MA at Wadham College, Oxford, and was rector of St Paul, Covent Garden, until his death.
George Hutton cultivated a passion for architecture and antiquarian pursuits and was elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He was often resident at Aberdeen, and amassed a sizeable collection of documents and drawings of Scottish ecclesiastical antiquities. He founded bursaries and a prize at the University of Aberdeen, which in 1816 conferred the degree of LLD on him. He died at his residence, Moate, co. Westmeath, Ireland, on 28 June 1827.
NICCOLÒ GUICCIARDINI
Sources
G. Howson, A history of mathematics education in England (1982), 59-74
D. P. Miller, 'The revival of the physical sciences in Britain, 1815-1840', Osiris, 2nd ser., 2 (1986), 107-34
O. Gregory, 'Brief memoir of the life and writings of Charles Hutton', Imperial Magazine, 5 (1823), 201-27
J. Bruce, A memoir of Charles Hutton (1823)
R. Welford, Men of mark 'twixt Tyne and Tweed, 3 vols. (1895)
Public characters, 10 vols. (1799-1809), vol. 2. pp. 107-30
C. Knight, ed., The English cyclopaedia: biography, 3 (1856)
W. Johnson, 'Charles Hutton, 1737-1823: the prototypical Woolwich professor of mathematics', Journal of Mechanical Working Technology, 18 (1989), 195-230
J. L. Heilbron, 'A mathematicians' mutiny, with morals', World changes, Thomas Kuhn and the nature of science, ed. P. Horwich (1993), 81-129
I. Grattan-Guinness, 'French calcul and English fluxions around 1800: some comparisons and contrasts', Jahrbuch überblicke Mathematik (1986), 167-78
GM, 1st ser., 97/2 (1827), 561-2 [George Henry Hutton]
Archives
Yale U., Farmington, Lewis Walpole Library, catalogue of mathematical library
Likenesses
B. Wyon, bronze medal, 1821, NPG; repro. in Imperial Magazine, 5 (1823), 201
S. Gahagan, marble bust, 1822, Literary and Philosophical Society, Newcastle upon Tyne
A. Morton, portrait, 1823, Literary and Philosophical Society, Newcastle upon Tyne [see illus.]
stipple, pubd 1823 (after medal by B. Wyon), BM
J. Thomson, stipple (after S. Gahagan), BM, NPG; repro. in European Magazine (1823)
C. Turner, print (after H. Ashby), BM, NPG; repro. in C. Hutton, Tracts on mathematical and philosophical subjects (1812)
portraits, Newcastle City Library
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