Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 25 - Dollond
Chapter XXV.
OFFSPRING OF THE REFUGEES CONNECTED WITH SCIENCE, LAW, THE LEGISLATURE, AND LITERATURE.
Dollond. — Jean Dollond, silk-weaver in Well Street, parish of Stepney, village of Mile End, New Town, near London, appears in the Threadneedle Street register in 1700, as a witness to the baptism of Antoine Cavelier, jun. The sister of the senior Antoine, Susanne Marie Cavelier, was the female witness at that ceremony. She became the wife of Jean Dollond in or before 1704.[1] Their son, Jean, was the celebrated John Dollond, born 10th June 1706. He also became a silk-weaver, and was conscientiously diligent and earnest in his business. Devoting only his leisure hours to study, he became a proficient in mathematics and physics, and in church history and theology, besides attaining to a creditable acquaintance with anatomy and natural history. To assist him in those studies, he courted the learned languages, and mastered Latin and Greek, as well as French, German, and Italian. His industry as a weaver in working hours enabled him to afford a good education to his children. His son, Peter, suggested that he should become an optical instrument maker, and a shop was opened in the name of John Dollond in Vine Court, Spitalfields. Mr. Dollond in course of time devoted himself entirely to the shop, and was thus enabled to enlist his scientific pleasures in the battle of life. He set himself to study the theory of the dispersion of light with a view to the improved construction of telescopes and microscopes. He earned distinction, and is characterised in the Encyclopedia Britannica as “a practical and theoretical optician of the highest celebrity, the discoverer of the laws of the dispersion of light, and the inventor of the achromatic telescope.” As to getting rid of the colours imparted by sunlight to things looked at through a glass lens, Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments had never been completed. Mr. Dollond pursued the investigation. Hitherto every kind of glass had been supposed to be affected alike; but he discovered that a number of different kinds of glass produce a corresponding variety of phenomena. Hence arose his invention of compound object-glasses, which he made according to the theory that the image, afforded by the combined refractions of a convex lens of crown glass and another of flint glass, is colourless (or, in Greek phrase, achromatic) when their focal distances are nearly as 2 to 3. His successive achievements he described in papers which the eminent optician, Mr. James Short, F.R.S., obligingly communicated to the Royal Society from 1753 to 1758. A paper of the year 1758 obtained for Mr. Dollond one of the highest honours of that Society, the Copley Medal. In the year 1761 he was made F.R.S., and also Optician to the king, but his enjoyment of those honours was of brief duration. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says, “Mr. Dollond’s appearance was somewhat stern, and his language was impressive, but his manners were cheerful and affable. He was in the habit of attending regularly, along with his family, the services of the French Protestant Church. He constantly sought his chief amusement in objects connected with the study of those sciences which he had so much contributed to improve. Perhaps he pursued them with an application somewhat too intense, for on 30th November 1761 , as he was reading a new work of Clairaut on the theory of the moon which had occupied his whole attention for several hours, he had an attack of apoplexy which proved fatal.”
It appears that the famous business had been removed to a shop in the Strand. The following letter from Peter Dollond to the Earl of Bute has been preserved:—
“My Lord, — I take the liberty of acquainting your Lordship that my Father, John Dollond, Optician to his Majesty, died suddenly last Sunday Evening.
“And as your Lordship was pleased to honour my late Father by recommending him to his Majesty for that honourable Post, this goodness in your Lordship makes me presume to give your Lordship the trouble of this letter, earnestly requesting that your Lordship will be pleased to recommend me to His Majesty in the same manner. — I am, my Lord, your Lordship’s most obedient and most humble Servant,
“Strand, December ye 2nd 1761.”
“P.S. — I have taken the liberty of inclosing a Certificat that Mr. Short has been so good as to give me."[2]
This request was granted; and the new Royal Optician was an able representative of the former. He was the author of a pamphlet:—
“Some account of the discovery made by the late Mr. John Dollond, F.R.S., which led to the grand improvement of Refracting Telescopes, in order to correct some misrepresentations in foreign publications of that discovery;
With an attempt to account for the mistake in an experiment made by Sir Isaac Newton,
on which experiment the improvement of the Refracting Telescope entirely depended.
By Peter Dollond,
Member of the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia.
London, 1789.”
Peter Dollond was born in 1730; he had a brother, John, and a married sister, Mrs. Huggins. John Dollond was admitted as a partner in 1766, and died in 1804, when his nephew, George Huggins, succeeded him. Peter Dollond died in 1820, and Mr. Huggins then assumed the name of Dollond; and the business still survives with the designation of Dollond & Co., in Ludgate Hill. The above-named George Dollond was eminent as a scientific man; he was a prominent Fellow and Councillor of the Royal Society, and died on 13th May 1852, aged seventy-eight. He, like his uncle Peter, had been a Director of the French Hospital, and a younger George Dollond acceded to that honour in 1853.
Anne, daughter of Peter Dollond, was the wife of the Rev. George Waddington, Vicar of Tuxford, Notts, and mother of the ecclesiastical historian, Very Rev. George Waddington, D.D., Dean of Durham (born 1793, died 1869). and of Right Hon. Horatio Waddington, Under Secretary of State for the Home Department (born 1799, died 1867).
- ↑ I observed and noted in the register of Threadneedle Street the baptisms of some of their children, but not of Jean. The reason was, I have grounds for believing, that on the occasion of Jean’s baptism the surname was spelt Dolon.
- ↑ “Musgrave Collection of Autographs in the British Museum,” vol. iii.