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In 1714, Parliament offered a bounty of £20,000 to the first person who devised a reliable way to determine one's longitude while at sea - an 18th century X-Prize. Latitude had been licked hundreds of years before with astrolabes and quadrants, but longitude stubbornly remained knowable only through dead reckoning or by swallowing your pride, heaving anchor, and asking the locals where the devil you were.1
The story of the race to come up with a method and claim the prize is a gripping one, filled with memorable personalities. The British - whose fondness for recalling the days of their naval domination of the world is rivaled only by America's propensity for re-telling World War II - have produced countless scholarly works on the matter. In the late 90s, the story was the subject of popular science writer Dava Sobel's award-winning first book, Longitude, which was then the basis for a popular film.
There are some personalities in the accounts of the chase for the "Public Award" that jump off the page: Nevil Maskelyne the Royal Astronomer, John Harrison (who ultimately won the prize), and Harrison's competitor Jeremy Thacker.
But here's the thing: Jeremy Thacker never existed. Worse still: Jeremy Thacker was the invention of someone who was having a little fun with Parliament.
The biographer and editor Pat Rogers writes in the Times of London that "Thacker never existed and his proposal now emerges as a hoax." The pamphlet that "Thacker" wrote proposing his own method for determining longitude (and cutting down those of his rivals) is full of in-jokes and satire making light of the contest and all of the psuedo-academics falling all over themselves to win it. These are jokes that we of the 20th and 21st centuries don't get anymore, as we're too far removed from the context. Imagine a future civilization reading the Onion as a straight news source, and you've got a fair idea of what occurred here.
Rogers calls Thacker a "hoax", but most of his contemporary readers would have seen his pamphlet for the satire it was. It's us, living in Thacker's distant future who got hoaxed. Despite the fact that "(e)verything about the pamphlet should have raised a warning flag", writes Rogers, "without a single exception historians of science have taken Thacker at his word, and graded his work as a brave near miss among an array of doomed projects." Oops.
Web culture has given us a term that is still more accurate: Thacker is a troll. So take heart, Rick Astley. You might secure an unironic place in history yet.
1. The oft-cited story in the linked article (while hilarious) is most likely apocryphal. There are mentions of the name "Yucatan" in Spanish sources that pre-date the Hernandez de Cordoba expedition.
