Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel was quite a piece of work. He was born in November 1738 and lived for almost 84 years in either his hometown of Hanover, Germany or London, England. His Dad was a professional oboist (you don’t hear that every day!) and Wilhelm followed in his musical footsteps. It’s complicated, but Wilhelm eventually ended up moving to London at the age of 19, quickly learning English, and changing his name to William.
William not only played the oboe, like the old man, but also the harpsicord and violin. As time went on, he picked up the organ and became the organist of the fashionable Octagon Chapel in Bath. He wrote 24 symphonies in 4 years—18 for a small orchestra and 6 for a large orchestra. He also penned 14 concertos, 6 sonatas, 12 solo pieces for the violin, 24 capriccios, and something called an andante for two basset horns, two oboes, two horns, and two bassoons (not exactly party music). That isn’t the extent of his output but since we haven’t come here to talk about the guy’s musical prowess, that’s all I’m mentioning.
At this point in his life, William started doing some voracious reading and immersed himself in a variety of topics including physics, mathematics, optics, mechanics, and astronomy. The guess is that because his musical career was soaring, he was beginning to rub elbows with some pretty elegant people, and he wanted to fit in intellectually. He found his studying of astronomy particularly fascinating and read up on all of the progress that had been made in the field.
Merely reading about astronomy made him hungry, so he made himself a telescope. I don’t mean that he ordered the kit and put it together himself on the weekend, he actually took lessons from a guy who made mirrors, and he gathered the tools and learned the techniques he’d need to make a working telescope of his own.
Made his own mirrors!
By May 1773, William had completed his first spectrum telescope and had started watching the sky from the back garden of his house. He was hooked. By March of the next year he had started keeping notes on what he saw and was able to make several important discoveries about the properties of stars in their relation to each other. In 1779, he began a systematic search of the skies.
Current thought is that William and his assistants were able to make and sell about 60 telescopes—including one for the King of Spain. Eventually, he was able to find the financial backing for an attempt to build a 12m telescope with a diameter of 1.26m and that had to be cast in iron. The mirror blanks each weighed 1000 lbs (roughly 450kg), and the first few buckled under their own weight. That got fixed. Needless to say, once the project was finished, it came in late and over-budget, but it was a marvel to the average person and caused quite a stir in society. The optics of this enormous telescope were never quite as clear as William would have preferred but they were good enough for him to discover 2 previously unknown moons that circled Saturn, so it wasn’t all just hype and nonsense.
His favourite telescope was half the size of this big one but suited his purposes better. In fact, in March 1781, 24 years after he arrived in London as a young oboist, William Herschel used it to discover the planet Uranus. He named it the Georgian Star in an attempt to brown nose King George III. However, the English king was in hot water with the rest of Europe at the time and they refused to call the new planet the Georgian Star. Instead, they called it Herschel after William. It was almost 70 years later that the planet’s name would be changed to Uranus, after the Greek god of the skies.
In hindsight, calling it Herschel would have earned the planet a great deal more respect among legions of grade school children, but how were they to know that back then?
Let’s see, on the heels of discovering a major planet, William was appointed to the position of The King’s Astronomer and went on to identify over 800 confirmed double or multiple star systems (of which I have no understanding). Aided by his theorizing and recorded observations, he was able to lay the groundwork for modern binary star astronomy. His personal cataloging system is still used today by astronomers to number and place stars.
Oh, and then in 1788, William charted and numbered the stars in the Milky Way (I know, right?) and was the first person to realize that it was an unbarred spiral galaxy—not a fully rounded shape, as was formerly believed. He figured out the real shape of the Milky Way BY COUNTING THE STARS and plotting their positions! Clearly, he couldn’t have guessed at that time, even using his favourite telescope, that there are between 100 – 400 billion stars and at least that same number of planets within the Milky Way (or so we currently believe…), but he was able to see enough of them to figure out that the galaxy was disc shaped. That information alone was groundbreaking news to the scientific community.
Not one to sit quietly on his laurels, by the early 1800s William went on to discover the existence of infrared radiation. He was able to realize that each colour had its own temperature by passing light through a prism and measuring the individual colours’ temperatures using a thermometer. He then began to suspect that he was dealing with a colour spectrum that perhaps he couldn’t even see and from THAT figured out the reality of infrared. Like….?
And who was the guy who discovered that coral was not a rock or a plant but an animal–a marine invertebrate? Yep, the musician/astrologer William Herschel. Just STOP it!
Personally, I find Fredrick William Herschel completely exhausting, but it is through minds like his—curious minds that insist on finding out the answers to unasked questions—that our civilization has regularly leapt forward in our understanding of who and where we are.
It’s also reassuring to know that those sorts of minds are continuing to pursue The Big Questions on our behalf, leaving the rest of us free to go back to trying to guess today’s Wordle in three tries.
