CHAPTER VII
THE GREAT TELESCOPE
There is reason to believe that the discoverer of the telescope was Roger Bacon, who in the thirteenth century also invented gunpowder, and was rewarded with the curses of the Church, the reproaches of his fellow-friars, and the terror of the ignorant as a wonder-worker by the aid of evil arts. His discovery of how to see to a greater distance than the eye can reach, was a seed that died in the ground, and did not come to life again till the world was more than three centuries older. A spectacle-maker of Leyden, Lippershey, working among lenses, as the glasses of spectacles are called, chanced to place two of them so that, in looking through, he saw a distant church spire as if it were close at hand. He made the story public in 1609. Galileo, who happened to be then in Venice, between which and Holland the East India traffic still continued, and gave rise to a considerable commerce, heard the story, probably from some merchant, and, instead of turning it into ridicule as many would have done, set himself to find out if he could not do what a humble spectacle-maker on the other side of Europe had already done. He was successful. He brought the moon and the planets so much nearer to the earth that astronomy took its place among the sciences. Professors, monks, and friars were as bitter revilers of Galileo as they had been of Roger Bacon. The sleep of ages of ignorance was so rudely broken by the magical little tube he put together, that, as they rubbed their eyes and saw the old world of thought dissolving out of view, they cursed the disturber of their graveyard peace.
Galileo's first telescope magnified three diameters or nine times: his last magnified thirty-three diameters. He could not go farther with the glass lenses then in use. At thirty-eight diameters the colours, developed in the passage of rays of light through glass, or by what is called refraction, put an effectual stop to progress. Newton began where Galileo stopped. He analysed a beam of sunlight into its component colours as they are seen in the rainbow, or through a glass prism. He came to the conclusion that "refraction could not be produced without colour." He was mistaken, and the mistake of a man so eminent led the whole world astray. Acting on this belief, he argued that "no improvement could be expected from the refracting telescope," that is, from an instrument with a glass or lens at the object end of the tube to form an eye that collected and focused the rays of light. Colour, though thus barring the march of advancing science, really indicated the path of progress. But nearly two centuries elapsed before the lost road was regained, and the prism of glass became a more powerful factor in revealing the wonders of distant worlds than the best telescopes. However, progress was not wholly barred. Colours were not developed by the reflection of light from a polished surface. If, then, a highly polished mirror were placed in the bottom of a tube, open at the other end, the rays of light could be brought to a focus and directed to an eye-piece, where an observer, with his back to the object, it might be, could see it clearly and distinctly magnified. The mirror required to be of a parabolic form, and might be made of metal or of glass. Newton chose an alloy of tin and copper for the mirror or speculum, but he did not trouble himself about grinding it into the form of a parabola. The second reflecting telescope he made magnified thirty-eight diameters, and was presented to the Royal Society in 1671. Half a century passed before any farther step was taken with either refracting or reflecting telescope. Hadley, the inventor of the sextant, then took the matter up. In 1723 he made one on Newton's pattern, with a mirror of 6 inches aperture, and a focal length of 62 58 inches. Its eye-pieces magnified up to 230 diameters. A report on it was made to the Royal Society, of which the substance was that Newton's telescope "had lain neglected these fifty years," but Hadley had shown "that this noble invention does not consist in bare theory." Strange to say, in that very year an English gentleman had made a refracting telescope, which largely overcame the difficulties arising from colour. His was the first achromatic or colourless telescope: it remained the only one for another fifty years. Although its inventor lived all that time, he neither claimed first honours nor interfered with the patent of the second discoverer, Dollond.
Another half-century thus passed, and little or nothing had been done. Dollond had rediscovered in 1758 the method of counteracting colour in glass lenses, but no one seemed disposed to apply the principle on a large scale. Apparently the way here also was barred against progress. All attempts to manufacture discs of pure flint glass larger than seven inches in diameter failed. Up to that point the achromatic refracting telescope was a great success. For seventy years good specimens of considerable size were exceedingly rare, and even in 1830 a disc of eleven inches and seven-tenths in diameter cost £1000.[1] An obscure musician, considering it probably impracticable to extend the range of Dollond's telescope, or impressed by the name and authority of Newton, was amusing himself, in 1772, if hard and continuous work can be called amusement, with casting and grinding mirrors, with mounting telescopes, and with studying the heavens in Bath, the gayest and idlest city in England. The people who formed the Literary Society of the town, who met to read papers on scientific subjects, and some of whom were members of the Royal Society of London, did not even know him. They were pigmies; a giant was among them, of whose existence and works they were not aware.
The courage of this musician was extraordinary. In the very year in which he removed to Bath, Messier, an eminent French astronomer, warned the Royal Society of London that progress in astronomy could be hoped for only from refractors. His words are: "It were to be wished that astronomers might be accommodated with achromatic telescopes of the most perfect construction, as such are the only instruments whereby a great knowledge of the celestial bodies can be acquired." Herschel cannot well be supposed to have been ignorant of this scientific faith. With the modest boldness of true genius he not only set it aside, but he proved it was entirely wrong. This was at the very beginning of his career. A novice challenged the accuracy of an eminent master and veteran in the art! A novice compelling a veteran to withdraw his prophecies and confess himself in error! Why he thus set aside the refractor and boldly followed to unimagined ends the path of improvement for Newton's reflector he has not told us. Both ways were open; he had perhaps tried both, for he was aware of both; but he preferred the latter.
While still engaged as musical director and teacher at Bath, Herschel formed the design of constructing a 30-feet reflector with a 3-feet mirror. This was about the year 1778, before he was even known to the upper classes of citizens or visitors as an amateur astronomer. The first mirror of this kind which he cast cracked in the cooling. When preparing for a second casting, the furnace, which he had built on purpose in his own house, gave way, the molten metal ran into the fire, overflowed the stone floor, and nearly cost him his life. But his papers in the Philosophical Transactions were making him known, and his discovery of the planet Uranus brought him to the King's notice, and put a stop for a time to the realisation of his cherished idea of a great telescope. From the first he was bent on doing what no other had done before him—carrying out Newton's conception of a great reflector, whether the mirror used were glass or metal, and exploring the heavens with an instrument such as the mind of man had never before imagined. He conceived the idea of a 40-feet reflector, with a 4-feet mirror at the bottom of the tube, cast and polished by himself. His own account of the beginning of this magnificent work is this: "In the year 1783 I finished a very good 20-feet reflector with a large aperture, and mounted it upon the plan of my present telescope. After two years' observation with it, the great advantage of such apertures appeared so clearly to me, that I recurred to my former intention of increasing them still farther; and being now sufficiently provided with experience in the work I wished to undertake, the President of our Royal Society, who is always ready to promote useful undertakings, had the goodness to lay my design before the King. His Majesty was graciously pleased to approve of it, and with his usual liberality to support it with his Royal bounty." There is this to be said on the departure now made, that the great telescope, from the difficulty of handling it, cannot be considered to have altogether answered his expectations, for the 20-feet continued to be his favourite in studying the heavens. But he was full of hope. "By applying ourselves," he wrote in April 1784, "with all our powers to the improvement of telescopes, which I look upon as yet in their infant state, and turning them with assiduity to the study of the heavens, we shall in time obtain some faint knowledge of, and perhaps be able partly to delineate, The Interior Construction of the Universe."
Herschel himself devised and superintended everything about this great telescope. None but "common workmen" were employed, as was also the case with the greater reflector built by Lord Rosse, sixty years later. The woodwork of the stand, and machines for giving the required motions up or down, right or left, were designed, drawn, and overlooked by him in their minutest details. Not a screw bolt was put in—and nothing else was used to obviate the effects of damp getting a lodgment in the woodwork—without his own eye watching or directing the work. The casting of the great mirror was begun while the building of the stand was thus proceeding. He had to remove from Datchet to Clay Hall, and thence, in 1786, to Slough, before the mirror was finished, but apparatus and materials were all transferred from the one house to the other without delaying the work. So rapidly had the work been pushed forward that the stand was ready, and the mirror, "highly polished," was put in the tube in less than a year and a half. "I had the first view through it," Herschel writes, "on Feb. 19, 1787." It was not satisfactory. "By a mismanagement of the person who cast it, it came out thinner on the centre of the back than was intended, and on account of its weakness would not permit a good figure to be given to it." Twelve or fourteen men had been daily employed in grinding or polishing it by hand, for machinery did not come into use for this purpose till 1788. It was labour lost. The work had to be begun anew, and a second mirror was cast Jan. 26, 1788, nearly a twelvemonth after the first peep into the other. Fatality again! "It cracked in cooling." Three weeks after it was recast, and by Oct. 24 it was brought to such "a figure and polish" that he tried it on the planet Saturn. He was so dissatisfied with the result that he "continued to work upon it till Aug. 27, 1789, when it was tried upon the fixed stars, and found to give a pretty sharp image," although "large stars were a little affected with scattered light, owing to many remaining scratches in the mirror."
Four years of hard thinking and continuous labour, of battles with not very intelligent workmen, sometimes forty in number, and of disappointment with himself, if not also with grumbling from his sister Caroline, ended at last. A triumphant tone may be heard in the words which conclude his short history of the progress of the work. They are:—
"Aug. the 28th, 1789.—Having brought the telescope to the parallel of Saturn, I discovered a sixth satellite of that planet, and also saw the spots upon Saturn better than I had ever seen them before, so that I may date the finishing of the 40-feet telescope from that time."
Herschel could now take stock of the "contents of the heavens" as he had never been able to do before. High above the ground, while the tube was coated with ice in winter, or running with streams of moisture in summer, he could dictate through speaking-tubes what his sister was to write down, or how the assistant was to move the telescope. Seated in a little house far below, his sister watched the clock, and entered remarks and measurements with an accuracy and zeal no other assistant could have equalled or surpassed. Brother and sister were in a position to carry out great ideas, and to put into living shape vast imaginations of genius.
The cost of this telescope was far more than Herschel could be expected to meet. Fortunately, the advisers of the King were more reasonable men than those who considered £200 a year remuneration enough for the Royal Astronomer. Chief among them was the Mæcenas of science in those days, Sir Joseph Banks, the companion of Cook, and the President of the Royal Society. Owing to his representations, the King allowed his astronomer £2000 for the construction of the telescope, and afterwards £2000 more to complete it, with £200 a year for necessary repairs, painting, ropes, etc., and men's wages, and £50 a year of pension for Caroline. When Caroline Herschel records these handsome allowances from the King, she expresses no thankfulness, though her own personal expenses for seven years previous had not amounted to more than £8 a year! But she had cause to complain. "I never felt satisfied," she writes in 1827, "with the support your father received towards his undertakings, and far less with the ungracious manner in which it was granted. For the last sum came with a message that more must never be asked for." One of the requests was a small salary for her as assistant to her brother. The sum granted was £50 a year. For nine quarters it was left unpaid! It is perhaps matter of regret that she wrote as she did of the shabbiness of the pension allowed to her brother. She did the King a grave injustice. And she forgot, besides, that while the King paid £4000 for the telescope,[2] and allowed £200 a year for upkeep and wages, the instrument remained her brother's private property. William Herschel shows no trace of the grumbling, cynical spirit of his sister. He knew how handsomely he had been treated. At the same time there is a most amusing raciness about her view of the building of this grand instrument, which it would be a mistake to overlook.
Caroline Herschel had difficulties with servants from her earliest days of housekeeping. No one pleased her; whether because, having been intended for a household drudge herself by her mother and her brother Jacob, she was too exacting when it came to her turn to lord it over others, or from the ignorance and disregard to right of the class servants were drawn from, we cannot tell. But her account of the workmen whom her brother employed on the great telescope paints the employed of those days in colours more black, and more incredible, than we are warranted in receiving without scruple. For some weeks in the summer of 1786 she was left in charge at Slough, while her brother was absent in Hanover on a scientific mission from the King, charged in fact with conveying to the University of Göttingen a 10-feet reflector, constructed by Herschel, and presented by the King for the Observatory, which had already taken high rank in Europe. "There were no less than thirty or forty of my brother's workpeople," she writes, "at work for upwards of three months together, some employed in felling and rooting out trees, some digging and preparing the ground for the bricklayers who were laying the foundation for the telescope, and the carpenter in Slough, with all his men. The smith, meanwhile, was converting a washhouse into a forge, and manufacturing complete sets of tools for the work he was to enter on. . . . In short, the place was a complete workshop for making optical instruments, and it was a pleasure to go into it to see how attentively the men listened to and executed their master's orders."
This is one and a pleasingly picturesque side of the medal, that might have been struck to commemorate the building of the great reflector. But another and an almost incredible other side is presented on the same page of her Memoirs. "I cannot leave this subject," she says, "without regretting, even twenty years after, that so much labour and expense should have been thrown away on a swarm of pilfering workpeople, both men and women, with which Slough, I believe, was particularly infested. For at last everything that could be carried away was gone, and nothing but rubbish left. Even tables for the use of workrooms vanished: one in particular I remember, the drawer of which was filled with slips of experiments made on the rays of light and heat, was lost out of the room in which the women had been ironing. . . . It required my utmost exertion to rescue the manuscripts in hand from destruction by falling into unhallowed hands or being devoured by mice." A nest of savage South Sea islanders, lifting whatever they could carry away from a house within two or three miles of Windsor Castle in the end of last century may be an accurate picture of the ways and manners of English workpeople then, but it is pardonable to receive it with a smile of incredulity, and to imagine other reasons for the alleged pilfering.
Servants seem to have been a cross which Caroline Herschel never could bear with an equal mind. In 1831, when she was eighty-one, she was as hard to satisfy as in 1772, when she was only twenty-two: "The first thing my radical servant did when she came to me was to break the bottle containing the ink of my own making, which was to have lasted me all my lifetime."[3]
The ingenuity of the appliances for ensuring stability and lightening labour in consulting the telescope was a monument to the mechanical genius of Herschel, in keeping with the greatness of the mirror. These appliances are now things of the past, not to be repeated by any future adventurer in the fields of research, but none the less worthy of respectful regard even in this age of engineers. They were not successful in making a cumbrous machine so light and easy to handle as science required, but that is only saying that the necessity for this preceded the discovery of the means of doing it, and that the first attempts were inferior to those made later. The iron tube, at the bottom of which lay the colossal eye that looked heavenwards, was 39 feet 4 inches in length and 4 feet 10 inches in diameter. It was an unwieldy and far from necessary addition to the structure, enough to cause error in observations by its ton-weight and instability. He had also to make arrangements for conveying observers and visitors from the ground to the gallery, 30 feet high or more, to whom ladders would have been difficult or dangerous. A chair-lift was devised, but was never erected. So easy did he find the ladders, and such was his agility at sixty and seventy years of age, that he preferred to reach or leave his post of observation by running up or down them. Among other requirements was a means of communicating readily and at once from his lofty perch both with the recorder of observations, whose duty was, under cover of a roof, to watch the clock, and to enter the measurements or remarks of the observer, as well as with the workman in attendance. A "speaking-pipe," as it was then called, of variable length to suit changes in his position, but 115 feet long at the most, was devised and fitted up. Usually his sister Caroline was the recorder who did the work, all-night work at times.
The mechanical skill shown in the construction of the telescope was proved sixty years after by Herschel's distinguished son. Sir John, in a letter already referred to, dated March 13, 1847: "The woodwork of the telescope being so far decayed as to be dangerous, in the year 1839, I pulled it down (the operation commenced on December 5), and having cleared away the framework, etc., piers were erected on which the tube was placed, that being of iron, and so well preserved, that although not more than one-twentieth of an inch thick, when in the horizontal position it sustained within it all my family, and continues to sustain enclosed within it to this day, not only the heavier of the two reflectors, but also all the more important portions of the machinery, such as being of iron and brass stood in no fear of decay, as well as all such portions of the polishing apparatus as would go into it, to the amount, I presume, of a great many tons, which had, when I last saw it, produced no sign of weakness or sagging down. This great strength and resistance to decay is to be attributed to the peculiar principle of its internal structure, which is, in effect, very similar to that for which, in later times, a patent has been taken out under the name of Corrugated Iron Roofing, etc., but of which the idea was, I have every reason to believe, original with my father at the time of its construction; as was, I am disposed to think, also the system of triangular arrangement adopted in the woodwork, being a perfect system of 'diagonal bracing,' or rather that principle to which the 'diagonal bracing' system owes its strength.
"The other mirror and the rest of the polishing apparatus are on the premises, but in a situation adapted only for preservation, and neither for use nor inspection. The iron grinding tools and polishers are placed underneath the tube, let into the ground, and level with the surface of the gravelled area in which it stands."[4]
The duty of attending to machinery and mirrors, in an observatory such as Herschel's, was not free from danger. Even visitors had to take the risk of an accident in satisfying their curiosity. Piazzi of Palermo, the discoverer of the first asteroid, "did not go home without getting broken shins," Caroline writes. And she adds, "I could give a pretty long list of accidents which were near proving fatal to my brother as well as myself."[5] One of these accidents she does record. It was on December 31, 1783: "The evening had been cloudy, but about ten o'clock a few stars became visible, and in the greatest hurry all was got ready for observing. My brother, at the front of the telescope, directed me to make some alteration in the lateral motion, which was done by machinery, on which the point of support of the tube and mirror rested. At each end of the machine or trough was an iron hook, such as butchers use for hanging their joints upon, and having to run in the dark on ground covered a foot deep with melting snow, I fell on one of these hooks, which entered my right leg above the knee. My brother's call, 'Make haste!' I could only answer by a pitiful cry, 'I am hooked!' He and the workmen were instantly with me, but they could not lift me without leaving two ounces of my flesh behind. . . . At the end of six weeks I began to have some fears about my poor limb. . . . I had, however, the comfort to know that my brother was no loser through this accident, for the remainder of the night was cloudy." The compensation she urges, in extenuation of the accident, by its drollery almost makes us forget its gravity. Once also when her "brother was elevated fifteen feet or more on a temporary cross-beam instead of a safe gallery," a very high wind so shook the apparatus that "he had hardly touched the ground before the whole of it came down." If accidents so serious happened before the heavier and more cumbrous machinery of the 40-feet telescope was erected, we may be certain that Herschel's mechanical skill did not avail to prevent them in the working of the great telescope.
If Herschel had done nothing more for science than build this great telescope he would have amply earned the high eulogium graven on his tombstone at Upton, "The barriers of the heavens he broke through, penetrating as well as exploring their more remote spaces." Nothing to compare with it had been seen before. It was a wonder that the gravest man of science regarded with deepest admiration, and children at school looked on with awe in the pictures of it seen on the pages of books they read. But the spirit of a wholesome rivalry, which it awoke in many bosoms, did more for astronomy than its builder or it ever did. It was the origin of other instruments of the same kind, as grand as itself or even grander. Some men of science, waspishly inclined perhaps, denounced the great telescope as of no use. Both in England and on the Continent this was said, and most unfairly, as everyone who reads Herschel's papers may discover for himself. He has frankly and fully explained in his writings[6] why he preferred to use other and smaller telescopes, and perhaps to use them oftener, but his love for and his pride in this work of his hands is ever and again coming to the front. One instance alone deserves to be quoted as a specimen: "I saw the fourth satellite and the ring of Saturn in the 40-feet speculum without an eye-glass."[7]
But it was seldom that astronomers on the Continent followed the example of William Herschel or gave themselves the trouble he took. Some of them did. Of "Professor Amici, an artist and a man of science of the first rank," his son. Sir John Herschel, writes: "He is the only man who has, since my father, bestowed great pains on the construction of specula, and his 10-foot telescopes with 12-inch mirrors are of very extraordinary perfection." This was true at the time it was written, two years after his father's death. It did not remain true, for Lord Rosse's great 6-feet mirror and 56-feet tube had still to come. And like Herschel, Lord Rosse was his own workman. When visiting him at Birr Castle in 1862, Nassau Senior relates that "the smaller speculum of the great telescope had been broken, and no one except Lord Rosse himself could polish it, which he had not yet had time to do; but we have been able to use the 3-feet reflector."[8] The necessity of this personal labour from the owner himself, hard manual labour, was one great drawback to the value of these magnificent instruments.
Kings and princes and men of science paid handsome sums to Herschel for telescopes made by his own hand. While the great telescope was in progress, George III. presented the Observatory of Göttingen with a reflector, which Herschel took to Hanover along with his brother. He also ordered other 10-feet for himself, and many 7-feet besides had been bespoke; but the finest and costliest was one for the King of Spain, ordered in 1796 and not sent off till October 1801. It cost £3150. Other two for the Prince of Canino brought £2310. But this was telescope-selling, not star-observing. It cost time and trouble, that might have been devoted to better purpose. No wonder that his sister grumbled. She was hindered in her proper work by the packing of the Spanish reflector, "which was done at the barn and rickyard at Upton, her room being all the while filled with the optical apparatus."[9] It was small satisfaction to her that the University of Edinburgh conferred the degree of LL.D. on her brother in 1786. She did not consider that reward at all equal to his merits. She echoed the words of General Komarzewski, spoken by him probably in fun, but received by her in earnest, that Herschel should be honoured as the Duke of Slough. He did not even get a knighthood from his Royal patron. In 1816 he was made a Hanoverian Knight by the Prince Regent; traders, slave-holders, moneyed men of all classes were raised to the peerage, but brain power was then less esteemed for the bestowal of worldly rank.
Before the tube was fitted with the great mirror, many of the visitors who flocked to see William Herschel had the curiosity to walk through it. Among them was the King. Close behind him was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who found it difficult to proceed, till the King turned to give him his hand, saying, "Come, my Lord Bishop, I will show you the way to heaven."
An invitation from Mr. Herschel to walk through the tube, as it lay on the ground, was not uncommon. Miss Burney and the party she was with accepted the invitation. "It held me quite upright," she says, "and without the least inconvenience; so would it have done had I been dressed in feathers and a bell hoop—such is its circumference. Mr. Smelt led the way, walking also upright; and my father followed. After we were gone, the Bishop [of Worcester] and Dr. Douglas were tempted, for its oddity, to make the same promenade."[10] Evidently the Church was not disposed, in those days at least, to look Heaven in the face.
While the greater tube of Lord Rosse's telescope was lying in readiness to receive its greater mirror, visitors were also in the habit of walking through it, sixty years later. The Dean of Ely, a well-known mathematician, and a man of more than the common height, is said to have walked through with his umbrella up. The days of these gigantic tubes are past. The career of Herschel's 40-feet was inaugurated by a concert held within the tube, just as its end was celebrated half a century afterwards. "'God save the King' was sung in it by the whole company, who got up from dinner, and went into the tube, among the rest two Misses Stow, the one a famous pianoforte player, some of the Griesbachs, who accompanied on the oboe, or any instrument they could get hold of, and I," Caroline in her ninetieth year continues, "you will easily imagine, was one of the nimblest and foremost to get in and out of the tube. But now!—lack-a-day!—I can hardly cross the room without help." She was then a giddy girl of only thirty-seven! But when the concert was held in the tube at the end of the great telescope's career, she was in Hanover, never destined again to see the noble work of her "best and dearest of brothers."
On the return of Sir John Herschel from South Africa in 1838, it was found that the woodwork of the great telescope was so decayed that the structure was dangerous. It had stood exposed to wind and weather for more than fifty years, and the discovery of its unsafe condition was made on the centenary of the builder's birth. In the following year it was taken down, and on New Year's Eve[11] a meeting of the Herschel family was held within the iron tube, then lowered on the ground, to celebrate the end of the instrument. Sir John's ballad was sung that night, and is now preserved as a printed broadside among other relics of a famous past in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.
The Herschelian Telescope Song[12]
Requiem of the Forty-feet Reflector at Slough, to be sung on the
New Year's Eve, 1839-40, by Papa, Mama, Madame, and all
the Little Bodies in the tube thereof assembled:—
In the old Telescope's tube we sit,
And the shades of the past around us flit;
His requiem sing we, with shout and with din.
While the old year goes out and the new one comes in.
Chorus of Youths and Virgins.
Merrily, merrily, let us all sing.
And make the old Telescope rattle and ring.
Full fifty years did he laugh at the storm,
And the blast could not shake his majestic form;
Now prone he lies where he once stood high,
And searched the deep heavens with his broad bright eye.
Merrily, merrily, &c.
There are wonders no living wight hath seen.
Which within this hollow have pictured been;
Which mortal record can ne'er recall,
And are known to Him only who makes them all.
Merrily, merrily, &c.
Here watched our father the wintry Night,
And his gaze hath been fed with pre-Adamite light;
While planets above him in mystic[13] dance
Sent down on his toils a propitious glance.
Merrily, merrily, &c.
He has stretched him quietly down at length,
To bask in the starlight his giant strength;
And Time shall here a tough[14] morsel find.
For his steel-devouring teeth to grind.
Merrily, merrily, &c.
He will grind it at last, as grind it he must,
And its brass and its iron shall be clay and dust;
But scathless ages[15] shall roll away.
And nurture its frame in its form's decay.
Merrily, merrily, &c.
A new year dawns and the old year's past,
God send us a happy one like the last,
A little more sun and a little less rain.
To save us from cough and rheumatic pain.
Merrily, merrily, &c.
God grant that its end this group may find
In love and in harmony fondly joined ;
And that some of us fifty years hence, once more,
May make the old Telescope's echoes roar.
Chorus, fortissimo.
Merrily, merrily, let us all sing.
And make the old Telescope rattle and ring.
Where the great telescope raised its eye heavenward, a church has been built to direct men's thoughts to do what brother and sister long did in loving fellowship, "mind the heavens." It was a fitting consecration of the hallowed ground. In speaking of his magnificent work in 1813, Herschel said to Thomas Campbell the poet, "with an air, not of the least pride, but with a greatness and simplicity of expression that struck me with wonder, 'I have looked farther into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars, of which the light takes two millions of years to travel to this globe.'" The Church is a telescope that looks, or should look, even farther into space and time.
While Herschel was giving life and power to the reflecting telescope, Dollond's followers in this country and Fraunhofer in Germany were restoring the refractor to the place from which it had been deposed. In 1825 the finest refractor that, up to that time, the world had ever seen was erected for Struve at the expense of the Russian Government in Dorpat. The tube was 13 feet in length, and the object-glass was 9 Paris inches in diameter. The weight of the whole was about 3000 Russian pounds. Of his first look through it Struve says: "I stood astonished before this beautiful instrument, undetermined which to admire most, the beauty and elegance of the workmanship in its most minute parts, the propriety of its construction, the ingenious mechanism for moving it, or the incomparable optical power of the telescope, and the precision with which objects are defined"[16] He was proud of his assistant. He believed it to be the equal of Herschels 40-feet reflector, and it was certainly far more easy to work. With its help he continued the work Herschel began. It appears, however, that Herschel sometimes used a parabolical glass mirror of 7-feet focal length instead of the metal mirror,[17] avoiding by reflection the colours due to refraction. This should be remembered to his credit.
- ↑ Herschel sometimes used a 312-feet achromatic or refracting telescope and a single eye-lens to confirm apparently the evidence of his 20-feet or 7-feet reflectors.
- ↑ Letter from Sir John Herschel, March 13, 1847: Weld's History of the Royal Society, ii. 193,
- ↑ March 1831, Memoirs, p. 244. Compare this with the "hot-headed old Welshwoman" of 1772, p. 33.
- ↑ Weld, History, etc., ii. 193.
- ↑ See especially, Memoirs, p. 168.
- ↑ Phil. Trans., 1815, p. 295.
- ↑ Phil. Trans., 1791, p. 76 (October 10).
- ↑ Journals, etc., relating to Ireland, ii. 247.
- ↑ Memoirs, p. 110.
- ↑ Letters, iii. 262.
- ↑ Said in the Memoirs to have been at Christmas (p. 810). Different in Arago, Biographies, 171.
- ↑ Weld, History of the Royal Society, ii. 195.
- ↑ ? circular.
- ↑ ? rough,
- ↑ ? rays,
- ↑ Astronom. Trans. ii 94.
- ↑ Phil. Trans.for 1803, p. 228.