John stepped out of his father's shadow to become a great scientist in his own right, as Mike Edmunds recounts in the second of his Brief Lives, celebrating the founders and history of the Royal Astronomical Society.
At 27 years old in January 1820, John Herschel was the second youngest of the founders of the RAS. He would become one of the greatest, and certainly best-known, British scientists of the 19th century. That he was born at all must have come as quite a surprise to his father William, who had married the widow of a friend comparatively late in life and was 53 when John appeared in March 1792. By the time John reached Cambridge University in 1809, his promise as a mathematician was beginning to show. Most academics today would be delighted and not-a-little threatened to discover that their undergraduates had formed an “Analytical Society” and translated new mathematical work from abroad. But that is what John and others did, including his contemporary Charles Babbage, who would also become a founder of the RAS. John graduated with the highest honours in 1812 and had become distinguished enough to be elected to the Royal Society the very next year. His mathematical skill would win him that society's prestigious Copley medal in 1821. He was not, however, destined to sail easily into an academic career.
What a difference a life makes: a portrait of John as a younger man and an 1861 photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron when he was 69. (RAS/SPL)
President and hero
In what might have been a combination of rebellion and self-doubt, John decided in 1814 to study for the Law. The fancy had passed by the summer of 1815 and he became reconciled to continuing, extending and where possible completing the astronomical work and catalogues of his famous father. This he did with enormous success, eventually serving three times as RAS President and picking up two Gold Medals. William had worked only on the northern sky but, in 1833–38, John took telescopes and his young and growing family (he had married, by all accounts very happily, in 1829) to Cape Province in South Africa to work on the relatively unexplored southern skies. There is a delightful account of those fruitful years that shows his youthful energy and his delight in the natural world – including adventurous travels and botanizing – in the collection of letters and papers Herschel at the Cape (Evans & Deeming 1969). He returned to Britain as a scientific hero.
Throughout his life he had wide interests, contributing to the wave theory of light, devising a major fixing process in the development of photography, encouraging the correct use of statistics, and writing a book (the Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which is a rather dry read today but was very popular in 1830) and was claimed to be a significant influence by no less a figure than Charles Darwin. A quote from the discourse – “The immediate object we propose to ourselves in physical theories is the analysis of phenomena, and the knowledge of the hidden processes of Nature in their production” – echoes John's lifelong restless and questing spirit.
He became a great favourite with his aunt Caroline until her death in 1848. His own fame and popularity must have weighed him down in later life. He seemed to have an exaggerated sense of duty – it is hard otherwise to understand why he accepted onerous duties like the post of Master of the Mint (1850–55). Photographs of him in later life certainly show the effects of strain, overwork and the illness – gout and bronchitis – that lead to his death in 1871. Yet he never abandoned his wide intellectual activity, even publishing a translation of the Iliad in English hexameters in 1866.
It is perhaps pointless to try to compare the quality and quantity of John's work with that of his father. The palm of 19th-century lasting scientific influence in Britain must surely rest with Charles Darwin – although a case could be made for Maxwell. Darwin records in his autobiography of hearing by a round about route that John thought the Origin of Species was “the law of higgledy-piggledy”. A rare misjudgement. The bones of both Darwin and John Herschel now rest in Westminster Abbey.
THE RAS BICENTENARY
In 2020, the RAS celebrates 200 years since its founding as “the Astronomical Society of London”. It began at a meeting on 20 January 1820, with 14 men aged 24 to 65. Who were they? What was their astronomical world like? Why start a society then? This series of short articles running up to 2020 aims to sketch both the men and their times.
