William Herschel: Occupation, Contribution, Biography
Frederick William Herschel was a German-British astronomer and composer who became one of the first ‘proficient’ astronomers.
Who is William Herschel?
William Herschel was one of the first astronomers who discovered Uranus and infrared radiation. He collaborated with Caroline Herschel and concentrated solely on astronomy.
William Herschel was born 15 November 1738, the anglicized form of Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel. At nineteen he immigrated to Britain in 1757, arriving as a musician trained by his father Isaak Herschel, who worked in the military band of Hanover. In England he taught music, worked as a conductor, and was installed as organist of a wealthy church in Bath in 1766, composing 24 symphonies while performing as a soloist.
Parallel to music, Herschel constructed his first large telescope in 1774, cast and polished his own mirrors, and by 1789 had built a 12-metre-long reflector. These instruments enabled him to found sidereal astronomy for the systematic observation of stars and nebulae beyond the solar system, and in 1781 he became the first person in well over 2,000 years to add a new planet to the cosmos: the planet Uranus, originally named Georgium Sidus. Recognition followed quickly; King George III appointed William Herschel as private astronomer in 1782, and he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Honours continued throughout his career: William Herschel was appointed a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1813, served as the first President of the Royal Astronomical Society when it was founded in 1820, and was knighted in the Royal Guelphic Order. His legacy endures in craters on Mars and Mimas, the 2000 Herschel asteroid, the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory launched 14 May 2009.
What was discovered by William Herschel?
William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus on 13 March 1781 while performing a survey of the night sky in the constellation Gemini. At first he thought the object was a comet; later he correctly identified it as a distant planet and originally named it Georgium Sidus. This discovery doubled the size of the known solar system, because Uranus is the first planet discovered since antiquity.
In addition to Uranus, William Herschel discovered Oberon and Titania, two moons of Uranus, in 1787, and Mimas and Enceladus, two moons of Saturn, in 1789. He catalogued over 800 confirmed double or multiple star systems and observed the motion of binary stars. He also discovered over 2,400 objects that he defined as nebulae, increasing the known dimensions of the Milky Way. William Herschel determined the rotation period of Mars and noted that the Martian polar caps vary seasonally.
Did William Herschel discover a moon?
Sir William Herschel discovered Saturn’s moon Mimas and its neighbour Enceladus. These two satellites, together with two later-attributed “Herschel’s Moons” that were supposedly found by William Herschel, were never confirmed and never found again.
Thus the secure tally of moons whose discovery is credited to Herschel stands at two: Mimas and Enceladus.
What is William Herschel’s theory of stars?
William Herschel theorized that stars originally were scattered throughout infinite space, and that attractive forces gradually organized them into more fragmented and tightly packed clusters. In Herschel’s cosmogony the universe is a vast three-dimensional space where stars exist at varying distances.
Using star gauging he assumed that all stars had the same intrinsic luminosity and that differences in apparent brightness are an index only of differences in distances, so the fainter a star appears, the farther away it is. By counting stars he deduced that the Sun is located near the center of the Milky Way, while he also assumed that the space within the Milky Way is more-or-less uniformly filled with stars out to a sharp boundary beyond which there is nothing.
William Herschel hypothesized that nebulae are composed of stars and represent different stages of the evolution and death of stars. After learning of Michell’s paper he believed that Newtonian gravity operates among the stars, and in 1802 he announced the hypothesis that some double stars are binary sidereal systems orbiting under mutual gravitational attraction, a hypothesis he confirmed in 1803 through observations that they actually revolved about each other rather than occurring by chance.
What type of radiation did William Herschel discover?
William Herschel discovered infrared radiation. Infrared radiation is a form of light beyond red light.Herschel conducted an experiment measuring the difference in temperature between the colors in the visible spectrum. He placed thermometers within each color of the visible spectrum. His experiment marked the first time that someone demonstrated that there were types of light that we cannot see with our eyes.
What are William and Caroline Herschel astronomy works?
William Herschel built his own reflecting telescopes with the help of Caroline, who assisted him grinding telescope mirrors and carrying out calculations on astronomical data. Between 1784 and 1820 he mapped the sky in a systematic sequence: first he published On the Construction of the Heavens in 1784; then came Catalogue of One Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars in 1786, Catalogue of a Second Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars in 1789, and finally the consolidated catalogues of nebulae in 1802 and 1820, listing a combined total of about 5,000 objects.
Caroline Herschel aided every observing campaign, copying catalogues for William and taking notes while he observed at the telescope. She also conducted her own searches; beginning in 1783 with the small Newtonian reflector telescope William Herschel built for her, she discovered eight comets between 1786 and 1797, five of which were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. After William’s death Caroline Herschel completed the cataloguing of 2,500 nebulae and many star clusters and re-organised William’s catalogues into one extensive book.
In parallel she prepared reference works for other astronomers: in 1798 she presented to the Royal Society an index to John Flamsteed’s observations together with a list of the errata in that publication, adding 560 stars omitted from the British Catalogue. For this sustained programme of observation and computation King George III appointed her as the first female astronomer and paid her an annual salary of £50 starting in 1787, making Caroline Herschel the first woman to receive a government salary for scientific work.
The Royal Astronomical Society elected her a member in 1828 and later awarded her a Gold Medal, sealing the joint legacy of William and Caroline Herschel whose discoveries are honoured today in the Herschel Museum of Astronomy.
What is Sir William Herschel biography?
Sir William Herschel was born on 15 November 1738 and lived until 1822. William Herschel received the Copley Medal in November 1781.
Who was in William Herschel’s family?
William Herschel was the fourth of ten children born to Isaac Herschel and Anna Ilse Moritzen. His father was an oboist in the Hanover Military Band, and William followed him into that band.
Among his siblings were Jakob, Dietrich, Alexander, Maria Dorothea and Franz Johann, but the best-known are Alexander and Caroline Herschel. Alexander Herschel helped William build the strong telescopes with which he surveyed the sky, while Caroline Herschel became his regular assistant and later a celebrated astronomer in her own right.
William Herschel later became father to John Herschel, who inherited the family talents for both music and astronomy. The line continued with grandsons: Alexander Stewart Herschel, making the Herschel family a famous Anglo-German dynasty of astronomers that lived from the 18th to the 20th century.
Where did William Herschel grow up?
He grew up in Hanover, then an independent Electorate within the Holy Roman Empire.
What was Sir William Herschel’s education?
William Herschel attended the Garrison school and proved to be a good student. He learned Italian, Latin, and Greek, and earned a salary that helped pay for lessons in French. He received private instruction from Alexander Rogers and later took lessons from a local mirror-builder to learn the difficult art of making telescopes. William Herschel taught himself the basics of astronomy. He received doctorates from the universities of Edinburgh in 1786 and Glasgow in 1792.
Who did William Herschel marry?
William Herschel married widow Mary Pitt, née Baldwin, on 8 May 1788 at St Laurence’s Church, Upton in Slough.
Who is John Frederick William Herschel?
Sir John Frederick William Herschel was an English polymath and astronomer who succeeded Sir William Herschel in stellar and nebular observation and discovery; he was also a chemist and attended St John’s College, Cambridge.
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, born 7 March 1792 in Slough, was the only child of Sir William Herschel and Mary Baldwin. Heir to the greatest observational astronomer of the eighteenth century, he studied mathematics at St John’s College, Cambridge, graduated in 1816, and submitted his first mathematical paper to the Royal Society in 1812; the following year he was elected a fellow of that Society. Active as a mathematician, inventor and experimental photographer, he carried the Herschel name southward in the 1830s to reobserve and extend the double-star and nebular catalogues begun by his father and his aunt Caroline Herschel. During this southern voyage he compiled catalogues of nebulae that ultimately listed 5,000 objects, and he pioneered astronomical spectrophotometry by measuring stellar spectra with prisms and temperature-measuring equipment.
In London he was a founder of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1820 and served twice as its President; the Society awarded him its Gold Medal in 1826 and again in 1836. The Royal Society added further honours: the Copley Medal (1821, 1847), the Royal Medal (1836, 1840) and the Smith’s Prize (1813), while the French Academy of Sciences bestowed the Lalande Medal in 1825. Knighted in 1831 and created 1st Baronet, he coined the word “photography,” invented the blueprint, and first applied the terms “positive” and “negative” to photographic images. He died 11 May 1871 at Collingwood, Kent, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Who is Sir William James Herschel?
Sir William James Herschel, 2nd Baronet was a British ICS officer and magistrate in colonial India in the 1850s and 1860s, who used fingerprints and handprints on contracts for identification purposes, and is one of the first Europeans to recognize their value.
Sir William James Herschel was the grandson of astronomer William Herschel and the son of John Herschel. He was born in Slough on 9 January 1833 and later lived at Warfield in Berkshire.
He joined the East India Company and was posted to Bengal in 1853, beginning a long career in the Indian Civil Service. He served as Magistrate and Collector in the Jungipoor district, overseeing criminal courts, prisons, registration of deeds, and payment of government pensions.
On 28 July 1858 he began demanding fingerprints alongside signatures on civil contracts, replacing signatures with handprints or fingerprints. He continued this practice when he was appointed Magistrate of Hooghly, West Bengal, in 1877, introducing the taking of fingerprints of pensioners to prevent fraudulent claims.
He died on 24 October 1917.
What was the cause of William Herschel’s death?
William Herschel died on 25 August 1822 after a lengthy illness. He died at Observatory House, Windsor Road, Slough, Buckinghamshire, aged 84.
What are some William Herschel quotes?
Some William Herschel quotes are provided in the list below.
- “I have looked farther into space than ever a human being did before me.”
- “The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience.”
- “I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the Earth.”
- “The phenomena of nature are to be viewed with the eye of reason and experience.”
- “The undevout astronomer must be mad.”
- “I have tried to upgrade telescopes and practiced continually to see with them.”
- “God’s universe was characterized by order and planning.”
- “I have looked farther into space than ever a human being did before me.”
