ABSTRACT
In 1796, Nevil Maskelyne, the fifth Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, sacked his experienced assistant David Kinnebrook because Kinnebrook’s measurements of the precise moments when stars crossed fixed reference points were consistently slower than his own. Maskelyne is remembered for his attempts to suppress and undermine the achievement of John Harrison, whose innovative clocks were the first practical solution to the problem of determining longitude: a problem that Maskelyne also had a strong vested interest in solving. Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, working in Konigsberg, was aware of inconvenient inconsistencies between astronomers’ timings of the same observations. When he checked Maskelyne’s and Kinnebrook’s data, he noticed that although Kinnebrook’s observations were, on average, eight-tenths of a second slower than Maskelyne’s, each was very consistent when compared against himself. Tim Salthouse took a further step and calculated that, after differences in information processing speed have been taken into account, differences in people’s ages have no further effect on their scores on memory tests.
