Shipwrecks and Stargazers: The Origins of Scientific Psychology
Central Washington University Natural Science Seminar
April 20, 2000
Warren R. Street
Department of Psychology and College of the Sciences
The
historian of science Stephan Brush once
published an article in Science
titled, “Should the History of Science be Rated X?” Brush pointed out that when
we tell students about the history of science, it all sounds so orderly. One
fact is piled on top of another, one generation passes its knowledge to the
next, and some day they, too, will inherit this legacy and stand on the
shoulders of giants. But Brush said that the real history of science isn’t like
that at all. Progress is made by accidents and overheard remarks, lifetimes of
work come to nothing, critical facts are discovered over and over without being
recognized – all is chaos. We shouldn’t tell impressionable students about
this. The real history of science should be X-rated.
The history of scientific
psychology is like that. Who would guess that, at least by some accounts, it
really began when an 
overconfident
British admiral drove his fleet onto the rocks in one of Great Britain’s
greatest maritime disasters?
The storm of November 27, 1703 was one of the most severe in history of England, even to this day. Ships were sunk all along the coast of England, Queen Anne, then only one year into her reign, was taken to a cellar of her palace for safety. Salt water blown on the wind killed crops for miles inland. The 90-gun warship Association, anchored in the western English channel, parted her anchor lines and was blown across shoals and rocks to the coast of Holland. The fact that the Association survived, though, made sailors regard it as a lucky ship.
Perhaps for this reason, Sir Cloudisley Shovell made the Association his flagship four years later, in 1707, in Lisbon. 
(Map) Sir Cloudisley was a favorite of the queen, a
skilled admiral of the British Navy and hero of the War of The Spanish
Succession, well under way in 1707. With his fleet, Sir Cloudisley ravaged the
French fleet at Toulon, and sailed back through Gibralter, bound for an
anticipated hero’s welcome in Portsmouth. The war ships and some private
British vessels made up a fleet of 21 ships.
By midday Oct 22, a series of
storms and cloudy weather left the fleet unsure of its position. Sir Cloudesley
conferred with his captains and concluded they were in the mouth of the English
Channel at a spot that dictated a northeasterly course to Portsmouth. Shovell 
sent
three ships ahead to announce his arrival. As fate would have it, Sir
Cloudesley was fatally mistaken about his position. Like many navigators of his
day, he was relatively sure of his latitude (north-south position) but had only
a crude guess as to his longitude (east-west position) He was actually west of
his estimated position and a northeasterly course would take the fleet to the
Isles of Scilly. (Map)
The
three-ship vanguard reached the Isles of Scilly 
in
early evening, with enough daylight to see the rocks and avoid disaster. The
fleet itself, however, ran onto the (Map)
Western Rocks of the Isles at 8:00 at night.
The Association sank almost immediately, followed by the Romney, the Eagle, and the Firebrand
(McDonald, 1972; Sobel, 1995). Two thousand men died within a few minutes, Sir
Cloudesley among them. His body, found on shore, was taken to Westminister
Abbey, where it rests today.
Several legends grew up around this disaster. One held that Sir Cloudesley was warned of his navigational error by a seaman, who was hanged for mutiny. Another story is that Sir Cloudesley reached shore barely alive but he was killed by a Scilly Islander and his ring finger cut from his hand. Whatever the validity of these legends, we do know that Queen Anne was devastated.
In 1714, the year of Anne’s death, Parliament created The Longitude Prize, directing that 20,000 pounds sterling would be awarded for a method of determining longitude to within half a degree. Half a degree of longitude is about thirty miles at the equator. The current value of the prize is estimated in the millions of dollars.
Winning this prize would be no simple accomplishment. Determining one’s longitude depends on knowing the exact time of day at two places: one’s current position and some standard location. For example, I know it’s three o’clock in the afternoon where I am, and it’s noon in Los Angeles, where am I? (Someplace on the east coast of the United States or western Atlantic Ocean.) The Royal Observatory at Greenwich was the British standard location for longitude measurements, so the difference between one's local time and Greenwich time would tell you how far east or west of Greenwich you are. This is easy enough if you’re actually near Greenwich, but if it’s 1714, you’ve not seen land for two months, and you’re on the middle of the Atlantic on the deck of a ship at night, how do you know what time it is in Greenwich?
There were two competing methods that promised an answer to this question. The competition, rivalry, and sabotage between the two camps is described in the fascinating book, Longitude, by Dava Sobel.
One method was the chronological method. Those in this camp pursued making a very accurate clock that would maintain its accuracy during long voyages on unstable ships. This was ultimately the winning method, when a meticulous clockmaker, John Harrison, overcame the limitations of pendulum clocks with spring driven escapement designs and produced successively more accurate timepieces until his fourth model, made in 1760, achieved an accuracy three times greater than that required by the prize.
According to Sobel, serious consideration of Harrison’s chronometers and the actual award of the prize were obstructed by astronomers, who promoted a second method of timekeeping, the astronomical method. These methods involved telling time by the knowing the positions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets. They were the eventual losers in the pursuit of the longitude prize because of the difficulty of making accurate observations on a moving ship at sea or under cloudy skies, because of imperfect understanding of the precise positions of the moon, planets, and stars, and because of the hours of calculations needed to convert these observations into time estimates.
The
method favored by some astronomers was the lunar distance method. It involved
observing the angle between the sun and the moon in daytime, and the distance
between the moon and nearby stars at night. Its accuracy depended on detailed
knowledge of the path of the moon and the apparent positions of stars. Work on
this method 
had
actually begun in 1676 when Charles II founded
the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. New urgency
was added with the loss of the fleet and the Longitude Prize. The champion of
the astronomical method in our story is the fifth Astronomer Royal of England, Nevil Maskelyne. Maskelyne participated in field
trials of Harrison's timepiece in 1764 and was appointed Astronomer Royal in
1765.
Some of Maskelyne's work involved
measuring the transit times of stars. That is, the precise time at which a star
appears be directly overhead at Greenwich. 
The
observations were made in the Octagon Room,
which looks today much as it did in the 18th
century. A telescope positioned
exactly on meridian. Wire of 1/1000th inch width in exact middle of field of
view corresponded to the meridian. When the target star approached the wire,
astronomer looked at a pendulum clock 
and
started to count ticks. Noted star's position on the tick
before it crossed the wire and the tick after. (Show audience a series of 3 frames, ask
them to interpolate Example is 8/10th sec). By
interpolation, the astronomer estimated the tenth of a second that the
star crossed the wire. The approved method of interpolation was called the
"eye and ear" method. To refine the estimate, two additional timings
were taken before the star crossed the meridian wire and two more were taken
afterward. The final time was the mean of the five observations, or Greenwich
"mean" time.
Maskelyne had a series of assistants helping him with these observations and in 1794 to 1796, the assistant was one David Kinnebrook. Kinnebrook was dismissed in 1796, when Maskelyne had been Astronomer Royal for 30 years. Kinnebrook’s offense was to make time estimate that were as much as .8 seconds later than Maskelyne's. (Boring, 1950; Kirsch, 1976; Mollon & Perkins, 1996). Maskelyne thought that accuracy to the nearest tenth of a second should be the norm.
To quote from Maskelyne’s annual report of 1796: "I think it necessary to mention that my Assistant, Mr. David Kinnebrook, who had observed the transits of the stars and planets very well, in agreement with me, all the year 1794, and for a great part of the present year, began, from the beginning of August last, to set them down half a second of time later than he should do, according to my observations; and in January of the succeeding year, 1796, he increased his error to 8/10th of a second. As he had unfortunately continued a considerable time in this error before I noticed it, and did not seem to me likely ever to get over it, and return to a right method of observing, therefore, though with reluctance, as he was a diligent and useful assistant to me in other respects, I parted with him."
From
the observation log of 1796, we read, "My
Assistant, Mr. David Kinnebrook, having at this Time unfortunately commenced a
vitious way of observing the times of the Transits too late, it will be
necessary to make an allowance for those Errors where his Observations,
distinguished with the initials D.K. of his name, are intermixed with
mine."
The Kinnebrook incident was mentioned in an article in Zeitschrift fur Astronomie in 1816, 20 years after Kinnebrook was fired. It was seen there by the celebrated astronomer at Köningsberg, Friedrich Bessel (2 slides). From 1820 to 1823, Bessel conducted a series of transit time estimation experiments and found disagreements of as much as 1.1 seconds between trained astronomers (Sanford, 1888). In fact, Bessel found it rare that agreement on transit times would fall within the .1 second that Maskelyne thought to be the norm.
By
1838, astronomers began to publish personal correction factors for each
astronomer, but found that these attempts to compensate for observational
errors were unreliable. They found that one’s error varied with brightness and
apparent speed of the star, the years of experience of the astronomer, personal
bias in rounding estimates to a tenth, fatigue, time of night, etc. Over time,
mechanical advances in electrical recording chronometers improved observations
so that the major error remaining was reaction time of the human observer. All
the observer had to do was pull a trigger and a pip would be recorded on a line
drawn on a revolving drum. Electrical relays overlaid pips at every second
except the sixtieth of every minute. In this way, the transit time could be
measured with great precision at leisure after the night’s observations had
been completed.
Electromechanical chronographic methods were perfected by 1860 by the U. S. Coast Survey, now the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Some of these investigations were based on laboratory abstractions of the transit time event. That is, mechanical apparatuses were built to look like stars crossing the field of a telescope. Two human processes seemed to be at the heart of transit time errors: the inability of humans to attend to two stimuli at the same time, and reaction time, that is, the time between when an event happens and when a human can make a physical response to it.
Early scientific psychology was built on these two lines of investigation, the time consumed by the process of willful attention, and reaction time. They were interesting to early psychologists because time provided a physical measurement for a mental process and because it was believed that reaction time provided a way of measuring mental fitness, or intelligence, in individuals.
Franciscus
Cornelius Donders was one of the first non-astronomers to study factors
affecting 
reaction
time. In his 1865 doctoral dissertation, Reaction Time and Mental Processes,
Donders presented human participants with reaction time tasks of differing
complexity. (Kirsch, 1976). Donders
differentiated what he called simple, choice, and discrimination reaction
times. In his first studies, he provided a mild electric shock to a
experimental participant’s foot, and required the participant to press a
telegraph key when the shock was felt. The time between stimulus and response
was recorded. 
This measure provided a “simple response time.” Choice response
time was obtained wiring both feet to the shock generator and telling the
participant to press the key when the right foot was shocked, but not when the
left foot was shocked. Discrimination reaction time was measured by providing a
second key and instructing the participant to press the right key when the
right foot was shocked, and press the left key when the left foot was shocked. Here’s a photo of a person in a discrimination reaction time study, this time with
signal lights instead of foot shock.
At
about this same time, the early 1860s, a young German professor at Heidelberg, Wilhelm Wundt, devised an apparatus that presented
participants with an abstraction of the transit time judgments in astronomy. He
called his device a “thought meter” or “complication apparatus” ( 3 slides). The apparatuses all consisted of a
pendulum 
and
a means of making a sound, such as a clicker or a bell. 
Wundt
asked participants to report the position of the pendulum when the sound
occurred. Wundt studied how speed of pendulum and number of auditory stimuli
affected perceived position of the pendulum. With one click and moderate velocities,
it was as if sound had been heard too early (or the pointer was relatively too
late). He found predictable effects of telling the participants to attend to
either the position of the pointer or to the sound of the click. He concluded
that one cannot equally attend to two stimuli at the same time – that attending
to one stimulus delays perception of the other. This applies to Kinnebrook’s
inability to attend to stars and clocks as well as our own inability to attend
equally to stop signs and cell phone conversations.
In
1875, Wundt was appointed to a position at the University
of Leipzig, where he collected a set of apparatus for studying mental
processes and, in 1879, founded the first laboratory of
scientific psychology. There he pursued pioneering questions about
mental structure and function. He asked what thoughts resulted from experience
and provided answers from the verbal reports of his graduate students, highly
trained in providing introspective reports of their experiences of carefully calibrated
stimuli.
Wundt studied the nature of will and attention through observations, such as those obtained from his complication devices and modifications of Donders’s reaction time tasks, and from verbal reports.
It is estimated that Wundt published an average of 2.2 pages per day of his professional life. His laboratory completed many studies of perception (about 50% of the total body of his work), emotion (10%), attention (10%), free associations (10%), and reaction time (20%).
Much of modern scientific psychology is descended from the work in Wundt’s first laboratory. I would like to focus on two early American psychologists who studied under Wundt and brought his approach to the United States. James McKeen Cattell, for his studies of reaction time, and Walter Pillsbury, for his studies of attention. Their work illustrates how early psychologists abstracted and expanded on the two themes suggested by the problems of transit time estimation.
James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944) was the first American, in 1889,
to hold the title Professor of Psychology. He opposed America’s entry into
World War I and was fired from Columbia University 
for
his pacifistic beliefs. He sued, won, and with the settlement, founded the
Psychological Corporation, a test publishing company that made him rich. He was
one of the founders of the American Association of University Professors and
founded the prominent publication, American Men and Women of Science.
As
a young person fresh out of college, Cattell went to Germany to study with
Rudolph Lotze in Göttingen, but Lotze’s death in 1881 prompted Cattell to
travel to Leipzig to study with Wundt. He was
Wundt’s first American PhD student. In Leipzig he learned about experimental
methods in psychology and studied individual differences in reaction
time, a topic that Wundt dismissed as “typically American.” In 1888, he studied
in England with Sir Francis Galton (2 pictures).
Galton
was the first to conduct measurement of human physical and mental capabilities
in large numbers of people. At his Anthropometric
Laboratory in London, he actually got people to pay to participate in
his study! We have been trying to figure out how that worked ever since. People
were measured at several stations and received a record sheet afterward. (Galton’s record sheet, Cattell’s record sheet).
Galton was interested in how intelligence was related to physical
characteristics, and in the heritability of intelligence. He was intrigued with
the notion that intelligence was related to the size of one’s brain and skull,
despite the small size of his own head. Galton, like other empiricists,
believed that thoughts and knowledge 
arose
from the senses. Therefore, the 
more
able one's senses, the more experience one could absorb, and the greater one's
intellectual potential (Hergenhahn, 1997).
The suggestion of eugenics in Galton’s interests was made explicit in his later life.
In
like fashion, Cattell instituted mass testing of mental abilities in undergraduates
at Columbia University. He proposed physical
measures of intelligence based on reaction time. Reaction time, he believed,
was a reliable measure of mental fitness, and he became an expert in
instruments designed to measure reaction time. (Example pictures of Hipp Chronoscope, Cattell Gravity 
Chronometer, and lip 
key to 
study
reaction time to verbal stimuli.)
Further examples of early reaction time studies in trained athletes, animals, and pilot candidates.
Later investigations found no relation between reaction time and other measures of intelligence, such as school performance on basic skills, but the mental measurement movement had been born. the search still continues for reliable and valid measures of intelligence, among a host of other personal qualities.
The
high water mark of the study of attention in early psychology may have come
with the work of Walter Pillsbury. Pillsbury
earned his doctoral degree from one of Wundt’s students, Edward B. Titchener, at Cornell University in New
York. Pillsbury 
developed
three methods for studying attention: the amount of time to complete tasks
requiring varying degrees of attention (e. g. copying geometric figures, memory
span, counting dots, standing still, crossing out letters, reading exam
papers), diminished performance due to decays in attention, which he termed
shortening of the “memory wave,” and task performance in the presence of
different distractions (e.g., comparing two line lengths while trying to identify
an odor).
Here, from Pillsbury’s lab manual, are some examples of attempts to scientifically record attention and instruments used in this pursuit. (Show and explain: Finger steadiness, kymograph, the grip of a “hysteric” person when gong was rung, steadiness in a rifleman and a chart showing his distraction when someone walked through the room, and steadiness when standing).
In
his book, Attention,
Pillsbury covers many contemporary topics in psychology, each cast in the
language of attention. For example, in his chapter on abnormal psychology, he
observes that a common trait of people with mental illness is their inability
to maintain focused attention on a topic or task. In his chapter on child
development, the principle theme of development is the child’s growing capacity
for sustained and focused attention.
These two themes, reaction time research and research on attention, have in some ways expanded over the years. For example, the ability to attend to multiple signals formed the mainstay of workload studies Phil Tolin did for Boeing some years ago, to show that new aircraft could be safely flown by crews of two instead of three. In other ways, these fields have diminished in importance. And modern psychology has drawn in totally new areas. The process of learning, for example, was the backbone of 20th century American psychology and has little to do with this early research. The same could be said for social psychology, psychotherapy, child psychology, and psychopharmacology. They each have their own rich and chaotic histories. The founders of scientific psychology, though, got their beginnings when an assistant astronomer was fired for incompetence, and the hulls of the British fleet were torn apart on the rocks of Scilly.
Thanks for your attention.
Acknowledgements
Robert Mitchell, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Physics, Central Washington University
David I. Shore, PhD, Rotman Research Fellow, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care,Toronto ON
Reference List
Boring, E. G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology. (2nd ed.). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Bringmann, W. G., Lück, H. E., Miller, R., & Early, C. E. (1993). A pictorial history of psychology. Carol Stream, IL: Quintessence Books.
Brittania.com (no date). Anne (1702-1714). Retrieved April 18, 2000 from the World Wide Web. http://www.britannia.com/history/monarchs/mon52.html
Brush, S. G. (1974) Should the history of science be rated X? Science, 183, 1164-1172.
Cattell, J. McK. (1924). The interpretation of intelligence tests. In A. T. Poffenberger (1947), James McKeen Cattell, Man of Science (Vol. 2). Lancaster, PA: The Science Press. pp. 372-380.
Garrett, H. E. (1930). Great experiments in psychology. New York: Century.
Hergenhahn, B. R. (1997). An introduction to the history of psychology. (3rd ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Kirsch, I. (1976). The impetus to scientific psychology: A recurrent pattern. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 12, 120-129.
McDonald, K. (1972). The wreck detectives. London: Harrap.
Mollon, J. D.; Perkins, A. J. (1996). Errors of judgement at Greenwich in 1796. Nature, 380, 101-102
Montclair State University Museum of the History of Psychological Instrumentation. (1998, February 25). Wundt's pendulum apparatus for "complication" studies. Upper Montclair, NJ; Author. Retrieved February 23, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/psychology/museum/x_073.htm
Montclair State University Museum of the History of Psychological Instrumentation. (1998, February 25). Wundt's rotatory apparatus for "complication" studies. Upper Montclair, NJ; Author. Retrieved February 23, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/psychology/museum/x_075.htm
Montclair State University Museum of the History of Reaction Time Research. (1999, February 1). Historical background and origins of reaction time research. Upper Montclair, NJ; Author. Retrieved February 23, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/psychology/museum/mrt.html
National Maritime Museum (UK). (February 8, 2000). Longitude gallery. London: Author. Retrieved March 2, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/cmr/long_index.html
University of St Andrews, Scotland. (2000. March 22). Nevil Maskelyne. Retrieved February 20, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Maskelyne.html
Pillsbury, W. B. (1908). Attention. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.; New York: Macmillan.
Poffenberger, A. T. (Ed.) (1947). James McKeen Cattell, Man of Science (Vol. 2). Lancaster, PA: The Science Press.
Popplestone, J. A., & McPherson, M. W. (1994). An illustrated history of American psychology. Madison, WI and Dubuque, IL: Brown and Benchmark.
Rowe, F. B. (1983). Whatever became of poor Kinnebrook? American Psychologist, 38, 851-852.
Sanford, E. C. (1888). Personal Equation: I. American Journal of Psychology, 2, 1-38.
Sobel, D. (1995). Longitude. New York: Penguin.
University of Toronto Brass Instrument Psychology Museum. (1998, October 23). Hipp chronoscope. Toronto, ON: Author. Retrieved February 23, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/museum/hippchron.htm
University of Toronto Brass Instrument Psychology Museum. (2000, February 8). Aesthesiometric compasses. Toronto, ON: Author. Retrieved February 23, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/museum/aesthe.htm
University of Toronto Brass Instrument Psychology Museum. (2000, February 8). Fall chronometer, gravity chronometer. Toronto, ON: Author. Retrieved February 23, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/museum/fallchronometer.htm
University of Toronto Brass Instrument Psychology Museum. (2000, February 8). Vertical kymograph. Retrieved February 23, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/museum/verticalkym.htm
Wundt, W. (1977). Lectures on human and animal psychology. (J. E. Crichton and E. B. Titchener, trans.) University Publications of America, Washington, DC (Original work, 1894. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.).
Zusne, L. (1984). Biographical dictionary of psychology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.