Wright, Edward

(bap. 1561, d. 1615), mathematician and cartographer

by A. J. Apt

© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

Wright, Edward (bap. 1561, d. 1615), mathematician and cartographer, a younger son of Henry and Margaret Wright, was born in Garveston, Norfolk, and was baptized there on 8 October 1561. Perhaps, like his elder brother Thomas (d. 1579), he was educated at school in Hardingham before matriculating as a sizar at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, on 8 December 1576. His father was already deceased when Thomas was admitted a pensioner at Caius in April 1574. Edward proceeded BA in 1580-81, then remained as a scholar until proceeding MA in 1584. He was a fellow of the college from 1587 to 1596, having married on 8 August 1595 Ursula Warren (d. 1625); their son Samuel (1596-1616) was admitted as a sizar at Caius in 1612. Little more is known of his family.

As a student at Cambridge, Wright was a near contemporary of Robert Devereux, the adolescent earl of Essex; if not at Cambridge then later, Wright became close to the earl, for the latter was meeting with him over his studies even in the weeks before his rebellion, in 1600-01. Other contemporaries at Cambridge included Henry Briggs and Christopher Heydon (another friend of the earl's), with whom Wright shared intellectual interests and studies.

In 1589, while still a fellow of his Cambridge college, Wright temporarily forsook the life of a scholar, and with dispensations from the crown and college, he shipped, as Captain Edward Carelesse, on a boat of a fleet commanded by George, earl of Cumberland, on a raiding voyage to the Azores, confiscating 'lawful' prizes from the French, Portuguese, and Spanish there and en route. The account of this expedition, referring to Wright in the third person, is appended to his treatise Certaine Errors of Navigation (1599) and is presumed to have been written by him. In the same sentence in which Wright introduces himself, he says that he was captain of the Hope in Sir Francis Drake's West Indian voyage of 1585-6, which evacuated Sir Walter Ralegh's Virginia colony and took the settlers back to England. Wright probably had ample opportunity on the return voyage to make the acquaintance of and to discuss navigational mathematics with Thomas Harriot, one of the colonists and his near contemporary. The Azores expedition was successful in its accumulation of captured goods and ships, but the return voyage, which ran short of fresh water, was harrowing. There is no evidence of Wright's ever having put to sea again.

Wright resumed his Cambridge fellowship and resigned it in 1596, having evidently already moved to London before then, for he was there making observations of the sun with his fellow Norfolk native Christopher Heydon in 1594-7. (Heydon, although a patron of astronomers, seems not to have provided Wright with financial support.) In London he became a lecturer in mathematics for the education of the merchant seamen and completed Certaine Errors of Navigation. The impetus for Wright's publication of the first edition of Certaine Errors came from his outrage at two apparent cases of plagiarism. A well-regarded navigator, Abraham Kendall, died at sea (1596) in possession of a manuscript copy of Wright's work, and this text, retrieved and brought to London, was taken to be Kendall's own, until it was passed to Wright for his review. At roughly the same time the cartographer Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612), who was deeply chagrined upon the discovery of his borrowing, used Wright's methods without acknowledgement in one of his maps. The exact nature of Wright's London employment is somewhat uncertain until some years had elapsed; certainly by 1614, but perhaps as early as 1612, his services as a lecturer in navigation were funded by the East India Company, at £50 a year. He was also employed as a tutor to Prince Henry, to whom he dedicated the second edition of Certaine Errors in 1610 and, but for the prince's death in 1612, would have been his librarian. Upon the prince's death Wright, described as 'a very poor man', was left £30 8s. He was employed by Sir Hugh Myddleton as a surveyor for the New River project of bringing water to London, and, similarly, he prepared a plan to show how to bring water from Uxbridge for the use of the royal household.

In his first years in London, Wright evidently developed a close working relationship with William Gilbert (1544-1603), to whose De magnete (1600) he not only wrote the preface, but also (as a near contemporary writer, Mark Ridley, asserts) for which he anonymously composed chapter 12 of book 4, describing a method of determining the magnetic variation by reference to astronomical observations. He was a practical man, and designed astronomical instruments, even if he did not make them himself. His Description and Use of the Sph¾re (1613), about a kind of armillary sphere, can be read as a guide to the use of a kind of instrument, but it was specifically written as the manual for the use of one instance of it, the one built for Prince Henry.

But it is upon his work on the mathematics of navigation that Wright's fame chiefly rested, and the most famous project, within this body of work, was the further development of the map projection created by Mercator in his map of 1569. This work proceeded more or less in parallel with the mathematical explorations of Thomas Harriot in the 1590s, and the first fruits appeared in print, with acknowledgement, in Thomas Blundeville's M. Blundevile his Exercises, Containing Sixe Treatises, in 1594. Hakluyt, in the 1599-1600 edition of Principal Navigations, issued the first world map built on the Mercator projection to be published in England; it was the work of Wright. This seems to be the map alluded to by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night (III. ii): 'He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies'. Wright's development of the Mercator projection (which is often visualized as the projection of a sphere from its centre onto the interior surface of an enclosing cylinder) was the numerical solution, in the absence of the integral calculus, of the following problem: to increase the distance apart of parallels of latitude in proportion to the exaggeration arising from the assumption that, for any given difference in longitude, they are equally long. Harriot had a contemporaneous solution of the problem. Wright's chart of the Azores, which accompanies his account of the voyage, is the first usable published chart to be based on this rigorous application of the Mercator projection.

Like other practical mathematicians of his time, Wright immediately took up John Napier's new invention, logarithms, upon Napier's first publication, and he translated this work, Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (1614), into English as A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithmes (1616), which contained tables extended by Wright and additional information by Henry Briggs. It was this book upon which he was working at his death, in London, in late November 1615. The work was then completed by his son Samuel and, upon the latter's death, seen through the press by Briggs. (A nineteenth-century claim that this book contains the first example of the decimal point is clearly incorrect.) Wright was buried on 2 December at St Dionis Backchurch.

A. J. APT

Sources  
D. W. Waters, The art of navigation in England in Elizabethan and early Stuart times, 2nd edn (1978)
R. Strong, Henry, prince of Wales and England's lost Renaissance (1986)
J. V. Pepper, 'Harriot's earlier work on mathematical navigation: theory and practice', Thomas Harriot: Renaissance scientist, ed. J. Shirley (1974)
M. Feingold, The mathematicians' apprenticeship: science, universities and society in England, 1560-1640 (1984)
P. J. Wallis, 'Wright, Edward', DSB
A. J. Apt, 'The reception of Kepler's astronomy in England: 1596-1650', DPhil diss., U. Oxf., 1982
parish register, London, St Michael Cornhill, 8 Aug 1595, GL [marriage]
parish register, London, St Dionis Backchurch, 2 Dec 1615, GL [burial]

Archives  
BL, papers, Sloane MS 651
TCD, observations, MSS 3, 387, 396


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