William Herschel

“ A notice of him in a Bristol paper says: "Died, March 15, 1821, at Hanover, Alexander Herschel, Esqr., well known to the public of Bath and Bristol as a performer and elegant musician; and who for forty-seven years was the admiration of the frequenters of concerts and theatres of both [Pg 16] those cities as principal violoncello. To the extraordinary merits of Mr. Herschel was united considerable acquirement in the superior branches of mechanics and philosophy, and his affinity to his brother, Sir William Herschel, was not less in science than in blood." ”

“ The life of Sir William Herschel affords another remarkable illustration of the force of perseverance in another branch of science. His father was a poor German musician, who brought up his four sons to the same calling. William came over to England to seek his fortune, and he joined the band of the Durham Militia, in which he played the oboe. ”

“ The lot of Caroline Herschel was not destined to be that of a public singer; it was to be the lot of a woman of science at a time when few of her sex could aspire to that honourable rank. Had William Herschel succeeded in turning out his sister as a public singer, or in placing her on the throne vacated by Miss Linley, would his race for bread not have become a race for riches instead of a race for fame? She herself had hopes of becoming a prima donna in the music world. ”

“ Of the others, two—a brother and a sister—lived to distinguish themselves by their intellectual power; and all true lovers of science will regard with reverence the memories of William and Caroline Herschel.
Frederick William Herschel was born on the 15th of November 1738. Like his father, he displayed an innate musical ability, which was sedulously cultivated and constantly developed; while his general mental training was left to the care of the master of the garrison-school. Those who are gifted with a love and a capacity for music sometimes show to little advantage in other pursuits ”

“ With his new instrument, on March 4th, 1774, he observed the Nebula in Orion; and a record of this beginning of his astronomical work is still preserved by the Royal Society.
William Herschel was now, as to age, in mezzo cammin. He had numbered just so many years as had Dante when he began the “Divina Commedia.” But he had not, like Dante, been thrown off the rails16 of life. The rush of a successful professional career was irresistibly carrying him along. Almost any other man would have had all his faculties absorbed in it. Herschel’s were only stimulated by the occupations which it brought. ”

“ And thus closes the wonderful story of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, the story of the fairy prince of science coming to the sleeping princess of the heavens to awake her and all her company from the sleep of ages on the one hand, and, on the other, the story of the despised household drudge, Cinderella, taking a place, a deserved place, among the laurelled benefactors of humanity. Future ages are certain to witness many histories of men and women, of fairy princes and ragged Cinderellas, uniting perseverance to genius, prosaic detail to lofty imaginings. ”

“ Long after, it is said, when Herschel had distinguished himself by the discovery of the planet Uranus, a pardon for this high military offence was duly handed to him by the king in person on the occasion of his first presentation. George III. was not a particularly wise or brilliant man; but even he had sense enough to perceive that William Herschel could serve the country far better by mapping out the stars of heaven than by playing the oboe to the royal regiment of Hanoverian Guards. ”

“ William Herschel, when Caroline joined him at120 Bath, was just feeling his way towards telescope-making. The fancy did not please her. The beginnings of great things are usually a disturbance and an anxiety. They imply a draft upon the future which may never be honoured, and they often play sad havoc with the present. ”

“ Four distinct times in his life did Herschel thus pass the whole visible heavens under review; and each survey occupied him several years. He discovered double stars, variable stars, nebulæ, and comets; and Mr. William Herschel, of Bath, the amateur astronomer, was gradually emerging from his obscurity, and becoming a known man.
Tuesday, the 13th of March, 1781, is a date memorable in the annals of astronomy. "On this night," he writes to the Royal Society, "in examining the small stars near η Geminorum, I perceived one visibly larger than the rest. ”

“ Pecuniary matters compelled him to spend a year at the Cape of Good Hope, and on his return to England in 1822 he was elected president of the astronomical society, succeeding Sir William Herschel. He also exerted himself to found the royal Asiatic society, of which he declined the presidency, but became its most active member ”

“ She was no mere mechanical assistant. A wound-up automaton would have ill served William Herschel’s turn. He wanted “a being to execute his commands with the quickness of lightning”; and his commands were various. For he was making, not following precedents, and fresh exigencies continually arose. Under these novel circumstances, his sister displayed incredible zeal, promptitude, and versatility. She123 would throw down her pen to run to the clock, to fetch and carry instruments, to measure the ground between the lamp-micrometer and the observer’s eye ”

“ It is in astronomy as in another field of exploration. The footsteps of the pioneer settler in a new land are soon effaced by the tread of his successors. They settle, flourish, improve on the spot which he painfully toiled to attain. But though he has laboured, and others have entered into his labour, to the pioneer belongs the honour and the fame. So it is with William Herschel. Sir John Herschel traversed the whole field opened by his father, besides a new one of his own. He worked on his father's lines with appliances such as had not been within his father's reach. ”

“ Most certainly the man who, by patient effort and ingenious contrivance, advances the boundaries of human knowledge, if he is not a genius, deserves something better from his fellows than thus to be lightly esteemed for long-continued and successful labours. If Herschel had done nothing but invent a sounding-line to fathom the depths of space, and reveal worlds of light in countless profusion, he would have deserved well of humanity. ”

“ The second son, Alexander Stewart Herschel (1836-1907) , Professor at Durham College, devoted considerable attention to meteoric astronomy, while the younger son, Colonel John Herschel, in his earlier days undertook a spectroscopic examination of southern nebulæ. The names of a grand-daughter and of a great grandson of Sir William Herschel—Miss Francesca Herschel and Rev. J. C. W. Herschel—appear on the roll of Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society, to testify that the family is still distinguished by love of the oldest of the sciences. ”

“ It was the proudest delight of her childhood as well as of her mature years to render him whatever service she could; no man of science was ever provided with a more capable or energetic helper than William Herschel found in this remarkable woman. ”

“ Despite the opposition of her mother and the ridicule of her brother Jacob, the plan materialised. In the autumn of 1772 William Herschel arrived in Hanover, and at the close of a fortnight's stay, set off for England along with Caroline. They arrived in Bath on 28th August, 1772, and Caroline was at once installed as her brother's housekeeper. She received instruction in English and arithmetic as well as lessons in music. Already, too, a new interest had crept into Herschel's life. ”

“ William Herschel was the next to leave the band of the Guard, and, however sincerely we may rejoice at an event which left that great man free to become an astronomer and an Englishman, it must be confessed that he did not stand on the order of his going, or waste his time in preliminaries. ”

“ We make acquaintance with a very original mind; we learn to admire a very warm-hearted woman, full of prejudices and oddities, but. with an absence of selfishness as charming as it is uncommon. But we cannot help regretting that the authoress did not extend her plan, and that the opportunity has been lost of making us better acquainted with Sir William Herschel. No life of that great astronomer has been written, and we should have been well pleased if the publication of the present memoir had been made the occasion of remedying the defect. ”

“ Miss Herschel said; "we are over-full as it is. The days lost in the removal threw us back, but," she said, drawing a book with a marble-paper cover from her capacious pocket, "I will run my eye over the lists, and try to arrange it, William."
But Mr. Herschel had left the room; he returned in a few minutes to say:
"Lina, the men will be here as soon as it is light to-morrow about the furnace; and, Lina, I shall be glad to have the micrometer lamp and the fire in my room."
"Yes, William;" and the question of singing-lessons for Griselda Mainwaring, or anyone else, was for the time forgotten. ”

“ Even the clergy, unless they had livings, were not exempted."
At Hamburg, William Herschel was joined by his brother Jacob, and they embarked together for England. Arriving in London, they were greatly assisted by the friends whom they had made on the occasion of their previous visit. Nevertheless, they seem to have had a hard struggle. William Herschel had not half a guinea in his possession when he arrived in London. He went into a music shop and asked if he could be of any use in copying music. ”

“ These helpers and sustainers, men or women, have all the same quality in common—absolute devotion and viunwavering faith in the individual or in the cause. Seeking nothing for themselves, thinking nothing of themselves, they have all an intense power of sympathy, a noble love of giving themselves for the service of others, which enables them to transfuse the force of their own personality into the object to which they dedicate their powers.
Of this noble company of unknown helpers Caroline Herschel was one.
She stood beside her brother, William Herschel, sharing his labours, helping his life. ”

“ A music master and a director of concerts they could understand and appreciate as an inferior creature; but a man who pottered about reflectors and refractors, and looked at the moon from a back garden or a street, when the rest of the world had gone to bed, was beyond their comprehension, or probably came in for their pity. And yet it was on a street, and late at night, that the genius of Herschel was discovered by an inhabitant of Bath, a perfect stranger to him and his scientific pursuits. So curious is the romance of the discovery that it is best told in Herschel's own words. ”

“ Everywhere men were sowing the seeds of a harvest of progress and blessing, mixed and disfigured with many a root of bitterness. But among the purest and freest from vice of all the harvests reaped from the seedbed then tilled and sown, was that of William Herschel in his laborious study of the stars. ”

“ In the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1780, are two papers of his. The title of the first is, Astronomical Observations on the Periodical Star in Collo Ceti, by Mr. William Herschel, of Bath. This was communicated to the Society by Dr. William Watson, Jr., and was read May 11, 1780, at the same time as the other paper on the mountains of the moon. It is to be noted that Herschel was at this time plain "Mr. William Herschel, of Bath." It was only in 1786 that he became "Dr. ”

“ Sir John Herschel remembers his father saying, 'If that hypothesis were true, and if the planet destroyed were as large as the earth, there must have been at least thirty-thousand such fragments,' but always as an hypothesis—he was never heard to declare any degree of conviction that it was so."
For us, the value of this sympathetic account of a day in Herschel's life is in its conception of the simplicity, the modesty, the "boyish earnestness," the elevation of thought and speech of the old philosopher ”

“ For five years he held the same office of master of the mint, which more than a century before had belonged to Sir Isaac Newton; his friends also offered to propose him as president of the Royal Society and again as member of parliament for the university of Cambridge, but neither position was desired by him.
In private life Sir John Herschel was a firm and most active friend; he had no jealousies; he avoided all scientific feuds; he gladly lent a helping hand to those who consulted him in scientific difficulties ”

“ As a study of the height to which the efforts of one man may go, it is almost without a parallel. The philosopher who will add to it to-day, will have his facts and his methods ready to his hands. Herschel presents the almost unique example of an eager observer marshaling the multitude of single instances, which he himself has laboriously gathered, into a compact and philosophic whole. ”

“ In concluding this condensed account of Herschel's scientific labors, it behoves us to remember that there was nothing due to accident in his long life. He was born with the faculties which fitted him for the gigantic labors which he undertook, and he had the firm basis of energy and principle which kept him steadily to his work.
As a practical astronomer he remains without an equal. In profound philosophy he has few superiors. ”

“ Herschel is a delightful man; so unassuming with his great knowledge, so willing to dispense it to the ignorant, and so cheerful and easy in his general manners, that, were he no genius, it would be, impossible not to remark him as a pleasing and sensible man. ”