The Córdoba Observatory and the History of the ‘Personal Equation’ (1871–1886)

[...]says Schaffer, among others, with the incorporation of new instruments, astronomers in the large observatories organized chronometric systems to monitor subordinate observers with the intention of eliminating the 'personal equation'.10 In this respect, Schaffer notes that the study of the political economy of the great nineteenth-century observatories pinpoints the material and social bases of an influential set of values associated with the technology necessary for exercising "moral control" over individual behaviour.\n These were consequences of Bessel's arguments, although the problem would reappear only decades later under the title 'personal equation' (Hoffman writes), when rather than a response to an urgent problem, it was a reaction to the mess generated by this 'work style' that alternated different observers for the same series of observations, although Bessel had always advised against doing this.