The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (24 page)

At once the pair set to work on the new “hydro-oxygen telescope.” For several weeks they experimented on every aspect of the instrument, until at last they deemed it ready. But even this singularly powerful telescope still brought Sir John’s view of the moon’s surface no closer than forty miles: not close enough to detect life. A much stronger lens would have to be cast, but this would require a great deal of money. So, according to the
Supplement,
John Herschel brought his plan for a new telescope to the Royal Society, where it was enthusiastically approved, with the chairman promising to convey Herschel’s request to the King himself. Informed that the new telescope would require an estimated $70,000 [
sic
] to build, King William IV (popularly known as “the sailor king,” in recognition of his long naval career) wanted to know if it might improve the nation’s navigational abilities. Assured that it would, His Majesty promised whatever funds would be required for the completion of the work.

Several more months of experimentation followed, until finally the perfect combination of materials for the lens—two parts crown glass to one part flint glass—was achieved. The renowned glass house of Hardy and Grant (the latter partner being the brother of the
Supplement’
s correspondent, Dr. Andrew Grant) was hired to oversee the casting of the lens; after the glass produced by the first cast was found to be seriously flawed, the second proved virtually perfect. John Herschel had succeeded in fashioning a truly mammoth lens: twenty-four feet in diameter, six times the size of the one used in his father’s largest telescope. After polishing, the lens weighed more than seven tons and produced a magnifying power of 42,000 times, capable, in Herschel’s estimation, of observing objects on the moon as small as eighteen inches in length. Next came the construction of a suitable microscope and the mechanical framework for the telescope as a whole, undertakings that were quickly completed. The great telescope was at last ready.

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With that Richard Adams Locke ended the first installment of the
Sun’
s moon series, an ingenious amalgam of technical detail and lyrical fancy that Locke, like Herschel working on his prodigious telescope, had crafted down to the smallest detail. The result was a narrative that seemed—to anyone not learned in astronomy and even to some who were—utterly believable.

There really was a Sir John Herschel, of course, and he really was in South Africa, having sailed there from England in 1833 to set up an observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. While in South Africa, Herschel intended to perform a years-long survey of the southern skies, the project to serve as an extension of the surveys his father had earlier made from the Northern Hemisphere. It was, like so much else of his astronomical researches, an act of filial piety—for unlike Richard Adams Locke, as a young man John Herschel had passed up the work that held the most interest for him and had instead returned home to take over the family business: he was an astronomer because his father was.

William Herschel had been an unheralded amateur astronomer (he earned his living as a church organist in the city of Bath) when in 1781, using a telescope he had built himself, he discovered a new planet that came to be known as Uranus, after the Greek god of the skies. The shock of that discovery can hardly be overstated. Since the earliest days of star-gazing, humans had seen only five planets in the skies above the earth; so prevalent was the idea that the solar system ended with Saturn that astronomers had not even tried to search for others. With Herschel’s discovery, a seventh planet had been added, and the solar system was suddenly twice as large as had been thought before. On the basis of that single discovery, King George III appointed Herschel to be the first King’s Astronomer, with an annual stipend of £200 and a generous allowance with which to build more of his own telescopes.

Five years after his celebrated discovery, William Herschel moved with his sister Caroline (also a noted astronomer) from Bath to the town of Slough, near the royal house at Windsor, where over the course of his life he made several other major discoveries, including moons of Saturn and Uranus, infrared radiation, and the motion of the solar system. In 1816

Britain’s Prince Regent, George IV, made him a knight of the Royal Guelphic Order; he would also help found the Astronomical Society of London, which subsequently became the Royal Astronomical Society, the seal

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of which still features an illustration of his famous forty-foot telescope.

(That telescope was also the subject of the first woodcut illustration ever printed in the
Sun,
two weeks after the paper’s founding.) Unlike William, who had grown up poor, his son John was born in 1792 into a world of privilege. John was a shy, lonely boy, with no siblings, few friends, and a distant relationship with his parents. He attended a school in Slough run by a friend of his father’s, while receiving private tutoring from a Scottish mathematician; he quickly showed himself to be a brilliant student, and indeed something of a prodigy. At seventeen he entered St. John’s College of the University of Cambridge (unlike Richard Adams Locke, he actually did attend Cambridge), where he and a classmate translated into English Sylvestre Lacroix’s book on differential calculus, which quickly became the standard textbook of its kind in Great Britain. He also wrote a mathematical paper that won him the Royal Society’s Copley Medal. He would seem to have been a natural mathematician, but in fact his greatest interest was chemistry, and over the course of his life he made several notable contributions to the chemistry of photography, among them the invention of a process for making photographs on glass plates—his first pictures having been made of his father’s forty-foot telescope.

John Herschel did not, however, become either chemist or mathematician. His father, for reasons that remain murky, wanted John to enter the Church (it may have been because he believed that a churchman would have spare time to devote to astronomy), but this was a path that the young man seems never to have seriously contemplated. As a compro-mise John began to study law, though he could manage this pursuit for only eighteen months, at which point he went back to St. John’s to become a math tutor. The following year, 1816, he was elected to a position on the St. John’s faculty; he looked to be headed for a bright academic career, but in the summer of that year he made a decision that would change his life forever.

That summer, John joined his father on a trip to the coast of Devon, where it became clear to him that William, now seventy-eight years old, was in poor health. William Herschel had devoted himself to his work with extraordinary diligence (once, in his younger days, he had sat at his telescope for seventy-two hours straight—and then slept for twenty-six), but he had not begun observing full-time until he was forty-three years old, and much of his research was still uncompleted. As his powers began
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to fail him, William had grown desperate to find a successor, someone whom he might entrust with his astronomical researches. John was pained at seeing his father in such distress, for despite the lack of warmth in their relationship he had always admired his father, and felt keenly the responsibility of being the great man’s son. After a good deal of agonizing, he concluded that there was no recourse but to take the position himself: to move back to Slough and, under his father’s direction, become an astronomer.

So began years of intensive astronomical training, learning the correct techniques for everything from grinding and polishing mirrors to making celestial observations—which culminated, finally, in his assuming his father’s ambitious project of “sweeping” the northern skies: proceeding from zone to zone, cataloguing all of the objects to be seen there, recording new ones and reexamining those observed earlier. William Herschel died in 1822, and for the better part of the next two decades John Herschel’s own work was a tribute to his father’s. From 1825 to 1833 he undertook two monumental tasks—a list of 2,300 nebulae and star clusters, and an immense catalogue of double stars—each of them a review and extension of his father’s earlier observations. It was grueling work, but he pursued it with conviction, rarely giving up even a single night of available viewing; as he wrote in his diary, he regarded the completion of the work “not as a matter of choice or taste, but a sacred duty which I cannot postpone to any consideration.” Where William had loved nothing better than to sit at his telescope hour after hour (his head draped with the black hood that he always wore to block out light and preserve, as he put it, “tranquility of the retina”), John was often bored by the glacial pace of astronomical research, and his diaries are marked by entries such as this one: “Sick of star-gazing—mean to break the telescope and melt the mirrors.” (After he returned from his four years in South Africa he would never again sit behind a telescope. His life as a working astronomer was over at forty-six, an age when his father’s had scarcely begun.) By 1833 Sir John Herschel—like his father, he had been made a knight of the Royal Guelphic Order—was the most famous astronomer in the world, and perhaps the most famous scientist of any kind. (His renown during the nineteenth century has been compared to Einstein’s in the twentieth.) He spoke six languages and enjoyed writing and translating poetry. He had long since shaken off his childhood shyness, and was
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The great astronomer Sir John Herschel, around the time of his South
African expedition.

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

known as something of a raconteur, with a love of stories, riddles, and parlor games such as charades; he was cheerful, disarmingly modest, and interested, apparently, in everything. He cut a dashing figure in British society, with his dark, tousled hair, prominent sideburns, and large, soulful blue eyes. (In later life those pale eyes would seem to grow lighter still, their brilliance intensified by the lines and shadows deepening his face, and he would let his white hair grow long, the combination imparting to him a kind of leonine majesty—an aspect memorably captured in a series of photographic portraits taken by Julia Margaret Cameron.) At the age
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of forty-one, he could easily have turned away from astronomy and devoted himself to work that held a greater interest; still, there was one more astronomical task he felt obliged to complete. His father’s celestial observations, for all of their thoroughness, had been limited to the objects that could be seen from England. Those in the Southern Hemisphere, beyond the range of even his mighty telescope, had eluded him. For years William Herschel had painstakingly swept the northern skies; now, in what he saw as the culmination of his father’s work, John Herschel would do the same with the southern.

In November 1833 the Herschel family—John, his wife Margaret, and their three young children—accompanied by a nursemaid and two assistants (neither of them named Grant), boarded the ship
Mountstuart El-phinstone.
They would arrive in South Africa two months later, after a difficult journey that Herschel passed in typically eclectic fashion, by making observations of everything around him: the temperature of the air and sea, the bird life passing overhead, the optic nerve of a dolphin caught by the sailors, even, when nothing else presented itself, his own pulse rate.

He had brought with him two telescopes, the larger one a twenty-footer, with which he planned to conduct his surveys. Over the next four years he would use those telescopes to catalog 1,707 nebulae and 2,102 double stars, map the Large Cloud of Magellan and the Orion Nebula, reexamine the inner moons of Saturn (not seen since his father had observed them in 1789), estimate the luminosity of nearly two hundred stars, draw and measure Halley’s Comet, and much more. About the only celestial object to which he paid little attention, in fact, was the moon.

John Herschel had been very busy in the year before his expedition to the Cape. There was so much to attend to, from preparing his telescopes (he ground the mirror for the twenty-footer himself) to packing up the family house at Slough. He was also burning the midnight oil to complete his remaining scientific work, including a new book he called
A Treatise on
Astronomy.
Intended for interested laypeople as well as his fellow astronomers, the book provided a lucid exposition of the latest astronomical thinking on a vast array of subjects, from the magnitude of the earth to the motion of the sun and moon, from the physical characteristics of comets to the distribution of the stars in the heavens.

A Treatise on Astronomy
was issued in the United States in 1834. It quickly became one of the most popular astronomical books of the day,