Christiaan Huygens – A family affair - Proeven van Vroeger

I. Introduction: Louis XIV’s Gifts – Badges of Honor
My Father notifies me that, at his latest audience, he has demanded the Privilege from the
King, who has accorded it quickly enough, and if he [Constantijn Sr.] is not forced to leave too
early I hope that he will be accelerating the certificate there. 1
Christiaan Huygens to Robert Moray – Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. V, No 1345 – March 6, 1665
It was on 15 February 1675 that Christiaan Huygens Jr. (Born The Hague, April 14,
1629, died July 8, 1695), the forty-five-year old natural philosopher who was one of the
founders of the Royal French Académie des Sciences and its second highest paid member, at the
height of his international fame, received a privilege for his horologium oscillatorum (a spring
watch) at the hands of Louis XIV’s (1638 – 1715; effective reign 1661 – 1715 2 ) first minister,
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619 – 1683). The privilege entailed a monopoly on the production and
distribution of Christiaan Jr.’s horologium oscillatorum throughout the French Kingdom for a
comfortable period of twenty years. It had taken exactly ten days for Huygens to procure this
remarkable privilege. 3 Despite the astonishing swiftness of Colbert’s decision – for these
requests could take months and involve bitter disputes between competing parties – the fact is
not that surprising, considering Christiaan Jr.’s central position at the Académie, his loyalty to
the crown, and the greatness of his reputation at the time.
More striking, even, was the privilege that Christiaan Huygens Jr. had received from
the same hands almost ten years before in 1665 for his pendulum clock. It is remarkable that
Christiaan Huygens Jr., only six years after the publication of the work that introduced him to
a Europe-wide intellectual and courtly public – Systema Saturnium (1659) – received such a
token of the French King’s appreciation. Privileges for books were quite normal at that time,
but patenting of scientific instruments – according to the available records – was a rather new
phenomenon. Though a privilege was sometimes called a patent (named after the “letter
patent,” the document that contained the privilege), it was something different than our
1 “Mon Pere me mande qu’il a demandè a sa derniere audience le Privilege au Roy, qui l’avait accordè
aussi tost, et s’il n’est contraint trop tost a partir j’espere qu’il en sera expedier la depesche.” My
translation.
2 With Louis XIII’s (born 1601) death in 1643 Louis XIV rose to the throne. However, he would not
reign France effectively until the death of the prime minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin (born 1602) in
1661.
3 BIAGIOLI, M. (2006a) From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe.
History of Science, 44, 139-213., p143
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