Caroline Herschel - Transcript
When we cast our minds back to great scientists then certain names will always come up; Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Faraday, or more recently perhaps Stephen Hawking. And maybe we’ll think of the astronomer William Herschel, but do we remember his little sister Caroline?
Caroline Herschel was not only one half of a dynamic partnership, but a great scientific figure in her own right, an inspirational woman and role model for all time. Her catalogue of nebulae and star clusters formed the basis of the New General Catalogue which is still used by astronomers today.
But her story might have been so very different. Listen on to hear about the tiny woman, whose life story would take her from scullery maid to stargazer.
Caroline Lucretia Herschel was born in Hanover, Germany on 16 March 1750. She was the eighth child and youngest daughter of Isaac, a Jewish musician and his wife Anna who was Christian.
Her father was an oboist in the band of the Hanoverian army and when she was a young child, he and Caroline’s much older brothers were frequently away.
At the age of six one winter’s day, Caroline was sent alone to meet her father and brother William at the Parade ground, as they had been away for several months, but she couldn’t find them. She returned home frozen to find that they were already there, but soon realised that no-one had missed her.
“There was no-one who cared anything about me” she later recalled. But then she notes that her adored brother William, twelve years her senior, spotted her, threw down his knife and fork and ran to her crouching down with her which “made me forget all my grievances.” She would be devoted to William all her life.
At the age of three Caroline had contracted smallpox which left her scarred and then at ten years old she was struck down with typhus fever. She survived this too, but her growth was stunted and as a result she grew to be only to 4 feet 3 inches tall.
Her mother, who was illiterate, believed that a woman’s duty was to stay at home and serve the menfolk. She also felt that following the effects of Caroline’s illness, no suitor could possibly find her attractive, so decided instead that her daughter should become the household drudge. Caroline learned how to knit so she could make stockings and ruffles for the family and took on the role of an unpaid servant in the family home.
Her attentive father however recognised her potential and wished her to be educated. When her mother wasn’t around he would give her lessons with her older brothers and taught her to play the violin.
Later in life Caroline would recall a happy memory when her father, who was fascinated with astronomy, took her out with him to stare at the night sky.
In 1767 the death of their father meant that Caroline’s education was at an end and from then on she was permitted to study only millinery and dressmaking.
Caroline wrote: “the first twenty two years of my life had been sacrificed to the service of my family under the utmost self-privation without the least prospect or hope of future reward.”
But her luck was about to change.
A few years earlier at the age of nineteen, William had been sent to England in order to escape the punishing demands of life in the military and he worked as a musician and composer. He became an organist and music teacher in Bath, which is where today the Herschel Museum of Astronomy is situated.
William decided to ask Caroline to join him in Bath and she needed no persuading. Perhaps he felt that her household skills would come in handy, but he was also organising oratorios and thought she might be useful to him as a singer.
Their mother was not best pleased to lose her unpaid servant, so William gave her an annuity which would pay for a new housemaid and so it was that released from servitude, Caroline made her way to a new country and a new life.
After a stormy crossing, and various adventures on the way, Caroline arrived in Bath, terrified, and poorly educated. With only a flimsy grasp of the English language, she was desperately homesick.
William’s first job was to train his sister’s voice and she undertook two or three singing lessons a day. She also had English lessons and arithmetic in order to learn book keeping.
Incredibly Caroline, who must have been a natural talent, was soon transformed into a beautiful soprano, singing lead roles in works such as the Messiah, Samson and Judas Maccabaeus, though despite making a name for herself and being in demand, she refused to work with any other conductor than her brother.
A magnificent career as a musician might have been hers for the taking, but it wasn’t to be, for very soon William had developed a new passion.
He had become obsessed with astronomy and his every available moment was spent reading and learning how to make telescopes by visiting opticians shops in London.
The type of powerful Newtonian reflecting telescope he wanted, which would enable him to look deeper into space, wasn’t available, so he concluded he would just have to build one himself.
Producing it required hours and hours of grinding and polishing and he became so obsessed that sometimes, Caroline would feed him, in order to keep his strength up, by popping bits of food into his mouth, as he polished like a man possessed.
William soon began to make a name for himself in the field of astronomy and he did not let a lack of formal education stand in his way.
In 1781 William discovered the planet Uranus, which made his name overnight and with which he has always been associated. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and awarded the Copley Medal. The planet was originally known as George’s Star after the King, George III and in May 1782 William was invited by the King to Buckingham House, in order to converse with him about his findings.
The King was fascinated by science and keen to observe the planets through William’s telescope, which was set up at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
The Royal Astronomer, Neville Maskelyne soon discovered that William’s telescope was more powerful than any he owned at the observatory.
The King agreed to award William a salary of £200, which would enable him to give up music for good and devote himself to astronomy. His only responsibility to the King was to show the royal family the stars whenever they requested it. In order to be close to the royal family at Windsor, he moved his family to the nearby town of Datchet.
William needed Caroline by his side, but his assumption that she, a talented singer, should without question, give up a career in music through which she would have gained her independence and to retrain in astronomy, a science about which she knew next to nothing, must have been met with some resentment.
“I did nothing for my brother” she wrote in her memoir ‘but what a well-trained puppy dog would have done, that is to say, I did what he commanded me.”
She goes on to write “I found I was to be trained as an assistant Astronomer, and by way of encouragement a telescope adapted for sweeping… was given to me. I was to sweep for comets.”
In order to do this, Caroline needed William to teach her and as he was so immersed in his work, she had to snatch moments where she could. She wanted to be useful, but her education had been limited and she felt she had a lot to learn.
She would write down questions for her brother and then bombard him with them at breakfast, hastily jotting down notes in what she called her “commonplace book”. And in this way she gradually built up the knowledge of algebra and mathematical formulae she needed, in order to perform the calculations she needed at work.
With the telescope William had made for her, she swept the skies, moving the telescope slowly from side to side looking for comets and nebulae. Having swept slowly sideways, she would then alter the height of the telescope and sweep slowly back in the other direction. This was painstaking work.
Caroline’s lonely and uncomfortable labours could only be carried out with relatively cloudless skies and she would become used to working well into cold, clear winter nights.
During these early days she recorded at least fourteen previously unknown nebulae, but her work was soon interrupted.
William needed her to record the observations he was making with a new telescope, the most powerful he had yet constructed. It was huge and at over 20 ft long, he needed to climb up to a gallery in order to reach the eyepiece and record his observations.
Work with such an enormous telescope could be dangerous and Caroline wrote of “a pretty long list of accidents which were near proving fatal to my brother as well as myself”.
The work was demanding. William might make numerous observations every minute and Caroline would need to record each of these, often in freezing conditions. In front of her she kept a copy of the Atlas Coelestis by Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, which was the most complete record of the night sky available at the time and this enabled her to accurately place her brother’s observations.
William’s achievements were only possible with his sister’s help. She would meticulously note down his observations along with the precise times they had been seen, then copy up her notes and carry out her calculations. When she had later written up her findings, her work was printed by the Royal Society, but, it should be noted, that they were published in William’s name, not her own.
For the next twenty years, William and Caroline would systematically scan the night skies, recording with minute detail, their observations. Together they increased the number of known nebulae from one hundred to around two thousand, five hundred and their work resulted in the publication of the Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars. This would be expanded later by William’s brilliant son John Herschel, who would build upon their findings.
It was in 1786 that Caroline made the observation that would meant her name would go down in history. By this time the pair had moved to Slough and with money tight, William was obliged to make telescopes to supplement his income.
Whilst he was away in Gottingen, presenting one of his telescopes as a gift from the King, Caroline carried on studiously studying and recording.
On 1 August of that year she noted down that she had seen “an object which I believe will prove tomorrow night to be a comet”. Indeed at 1 o’clock the following morning she confirmed her finding and became the first woman in history to discover a comet.
In her excitement she wrote to fellow astronomers to announce her discovery and was widely praised for her “assiduity in the business of astronomy, and for the love for so celebrated and deserving a brother”.
The letter she sent to the Royal Society in which she outlined her findings was printed in their publication Philosophical Transactions and may be considered the first original paper to form part of a scientific research programme conducted by a woman.
It is interesting that William added a note to the later stating that as weather conditions were hazy, Caroline may have been mistaken! A touch of sibling rivalry perhaps!
Caroline went on to discover another seven comets, six of which bear her name and her contribution was recognised in 1787 when she was awarded a royal pension of £50 per annum, which made her the first woman to be paid for scientific services. She was overjoyed.
“In October” she records, “I received £12.10, being the first quarterly payment of my salary, and the first money I ever in all my lifetime thought myself to be at liberty to spend to my own liking”
And yet only the following year Caroline’s life was to change.
At the age of fifty, William married his neighbour, a widow, Mary Baldwin. She had been left a comfortable fortune which allowed William the freedom to pursue his career, free from money worries. The two would go on to have one child together, the aforementioned scholar and polymath John.
But it must have been a huge blow for Caroline. For years she had shared her life with her brother, not only as his partner at work, but as his housekeeper and closest friend. Her position had been usurped and forced to move out of William’s house, she took lodgings nearby and it would appear that understandably there may have been tensions at this time.
Caroline wrote a diary for most of her life, but it is interesting that none exist from this period. It is suggested that she may have destroyed them, not wanting to be reminded of a painful time when she harboured resentment towards her brother and his new wife, though she must surely have welcomed not having to be his housekeeper anymore!
Despite this her devotion was undimmed and she continued to work passionately recording the night’s sky. In William’s position as ‘Astronomer to the King’, the two moved in high circles and Caroline was popular with royalty.
In 1816 William’s health began to fail and he persuaded his son John to abandon his studies at Cambridge and to continue his work in astronomy. One senses that William was a man to whom it was hard to say no. He died on 25 August 1822 at the age of eighty three.
Caroline was distraught. The brother, whom she loved above all others, was dead and she felt entirely alone. She decided to return to Hanover. By now she was 70 years of age, what was to be her purpose?
Life in Hanover came as a shock. She found that no-one there appeared to care much for the stars in fact she struggled to see them out of her window at all, as her eyes were failing and the roofs were so high. She found she was missing her old life and friends in England.
However, with a legacy William had left her in his will, she was able establish herself in Hanover enjoying trips to the theatre. It would appear that she had gained celebrity status in her new home and she continued to keep her connections to royalty.
But she wanted still to be useful and at the age of seventy five took it upon herself to rearrange the catalogue of William’s observations, in order that her nephew John would find it easier to re-examine the 2500 nebulae her brother had recorded.
On a visit to his aunt, John found “that she runs about the town with me and skips up her two flights of stairs…as the day advances she gains life and is quite fresh and funny at ten or eleven pm and sings old rhymes, nay, even dances to the great delight of all who see her”
She presented the results of her work to the Astronomical Society and in 1828 Caroline was awarded the society’s Gold Medal for “her recent reduction, to January, 1800, of the Nebulae discovered by her illustrious brother, which may be considered as the completion of a series of exertions probably unparalleled either in magnitude or importance in the annals of astronomical labour’.
In 1835 she was made an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society along with Mary Sommerville, the brilliant Scottish astronomer, who had been inspired by the Herschels after visiting their telescope in 1822.
On being elected an honorary member of the Irish Royal Academy in 1838 she said, in her usual self-deprecating manner, that she was surprised she was so honoured when she hadn’t discovered a comet in years!
Caroline lived to a very old age, but by her early nineties she found she was too weak to write. In 1847 she was delighted to receive a copy of her nephew John’s recent work “Results of Astronomical Observations made at the Cape of Good Hope” which she saw as a completion of her brother’s work.
Caroline died on 9 January 1848 at the age of 97. She was buried in Hanover alongside her parents, with at her own request an almanac used by her father and with a lock of her brother William’s hair. Her gravestone reads “The eyes of her who is glorified here below, turned to the starry heavens”.
Caroline Herschel’s achievements are numerous. She was the first woman to discover a comet and went on to discover several more. She was the first woman to be paid for her work in science and was celebrated and awarded throughout Europe, but she had never seeked fame for herself.
It would appear through her writing that Caroline was a sunny and happy character and what strikes me is her humility. Her pride in her brilliant brother and willingness for him to take all the glory, whilst she modestly brushed off praise that came her way.
She wrote “You set too great a value on what I have done, and by saying too much is saying too little of my brother, for he did it all. I was a mere tool which he had the trouble of sharpening and to adapt for the purpose he wanted it, for lack of a better. A little praise is very comfortable, and I feel confident of having deserved it for my patience and perseverance, but none for great abilities or knowledge.
Together William and Caroline were a formidable duo and yet there can be little doubt that she did not just facilitate William’s extraordinary work, but became a respected scientist herself, with her own discoveries and the catalogues that she helped to prepare and re-catalogue, which are still used by astronomers today.
In 2010 in honour of her work, the Royal Society named Caroline Herschel as one of the ten most influential female scientists in British history.