Sir John Herschel: The Preeminent Astronomer who also Invented the Blueprint...and much more!

Sir John Herschel was Victorian England’s scientist, astronomer, pioneer photographer, and mathematician, often considered the equal of Sir Isaac Newton. 

Among many other achievements, He was also a chemist and inventor, experimental photographer who invented the blueprint in 1842, which allowed for the rapid, and accurate, production of an unlimited number of copies of technical drawings.

Herschel originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy. He named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus – the seventh planet, discovered by his father Sir William Herschel. 

He made many contributions to the science of photography when it first emerged in 1839.

A full appreciation of Sir John Herschel and all of his contributions that continue to positively impact us today, however, can be gained with even a cursory review of his life story.

Early life

Sir John Frederick William Herschel was the only child of Mary Pitt and the respected, British astronomer, William Herschel who discovered Uranus. He was born in Slough, Buckinghamshire, England in 1792. 

Music, science and religion were the main household topics and sources of inspiration to the young John Herschel.

An only child, John was educated briefly at Eton, and then privately.

Although his intelligence and talents were obvious, John did not fair well in school. Eventually he was tutored privately until he went to St. John’s College in Cambridge in 1809 in the company of Charles Babbage, mathematician and inventor of the computer, and George Peacock, also a mathematician and later a theologian. 

In 1812, they founded the Analytical Society of Cambridge to introduce continental methods of mathematical calculus into English practice. They did so by replacing the cumbersome symbolism of Newton with the more efficient type invented by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. 

John’s exceptional abilities were quickly recognized: in 1812 he submitted his first mathematical paper to the Royal Society, for which he was elected a fellow the following year. In 1813, he earned first place in the university mathematical examinations. 

He studied shortly at Eton College and St John's College, Cambridge, graduating as Senior Wrangler in 1813–a position which has been described as "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain."

In 1814, a year after graduation, Herschel decided to pursue a career in law. He moved to London to begin his studies.

During a visit home in 1816 Herschel realized the frailty of his father and decided to move home to continue his father’s work, he wrote to a friend,

“I am going under my father’s directions, to take up the series of his observations where he has left them (for he has now pretty well given over regular observing) and continuing his scrutiny of the heavens with powerful telescopes.” 

Astronomy

It was only 18 months later when he became seriously ill, and realized this was not the right decision and he moved back to Cambridge and became a tutor in mathematics. 

He continued his mathematical research and father’s work for several years, but he also devoted his time to other scientific studies.

He left Cambridge in 1816 and started working with his father—a renowned astronomer. 

His father had an observatory, which housed a 40-foot telescope. 

Through his work with his father there, he gained the full benefit of his unrivaled experience in the construction and use of large telescopes. Herschel assisted his father in making observations and building telescopes.

This apprenticeship laid the foundation of John’s subsequent achievements. With his father, he built a reflecting telescope with a mirror 18 inches in diameter, and with a 20-foot focal length. 

In 1820, he was among the founders of the Royal Astronomical Society. In later years, John made important contributions to chemistry and the physics of light and particularly to mathematics, for which he was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1821.

In the same year, accompanied by Charles Babbage, Herschel took a tour of Europe, one of three such excursions he would make in a space of four years. 

Herschel and Babbage spent quite a bit of time in the Alps taking measurements and making observations. During a stopover in Paris, they met the naturalist and world traveler Alexander von Humboldt. Von Humboldt would become a lifelong friend of Herschel, and the two would later work together to improve the new science of photography.

Between 1821 and 1823 he re-examined, with James South, the double stars catalogued by his father. 

His first major astronomy paper was published in 1824, the same year he was elected Secretary of the Royal Society, after his research on double stars. It received honors from the Royal Society, in addition to the Paris Academy Lalande Prize in 1825 and the Gold Medal from the Astronomical Society in 1826.

Discoveries of Herschel include the galaxies NGC 7, NGC 10, NGC 25, and NGC 28.

For his work with his father, he was presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1826–which he won again in 1836.

Herschel married his cousin, Margaret Brodie Stewart, on March 3, 1829 in Edinburgh, and was ultimately the father of 12 children.

Herschel was made a Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order in 1831. 

In addition to astronomy, he had other interests as well.

Natural Philosophy

Herschel's A preliminary discourse on the study of natural philosophy, published early in 1831 as part of Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet cyclop?dia, set out methods of scientific investigation with an orderly relationship between observation and theorizing. He described nature as being governed by laws which were difficult to discern or to state mathematically, and the highest aim of natural philosophy was understanding these laws through inductive reasoning, finding a single unifying explanation for a phenomenon. This became an authoritative statement with wide influence on science, particularly at the University of Cambridge where it inspired the student Charles Darwin with "a burning zeal" to contribute to this work.

Voyage to the Southern Hemisphere

In 1832, his mother died. Difficulties with the Royal Society elders, his mother’s death, and the Royal Observatory’s incomplete research due to lack of accessibility beyond the northern hemisphere, as well as his sense of obligation to complete his father’s work in astronomy-- all led him to consider a journey to the Southern Hemisphere to survey the skies not visible in England. 

That year, he began planning his expedition. The revision and extension of his father’s catalogs, which he carried out at Observatory House, beginning in 1825, was brought to completion and published in 1833. 

In November of 1833, John Herschel and his family set sail for the Cape of Good Hope with a large reflecting telescope for observing faint nebulae, similar in size to William’s favorite instrument. He also possessed a refracting telescope for observing double stars.

The family established their home at Feldhausen, a Dutch farmhouse southeast of Cape Town. 

In addition to his astronomical work, however, this voyage to a far corner of the British empire also gave Herschel an escape from the pressures under which he found himself in London, where he was one of the most sought-after of all British men of science. While in southern Africa, he engaged in a broad variety of scientific pursuits free from a sense of strong obligations to a larger scientific community. It was, he later recalled, probably the happiest time in his life.

John Herschel spent four years of intense scientific activity, the clear southern skies allowing much more rapid progress in observing than was possible in England. 

When the family embarked for home in March of 1838, John had recorded the locations of 68,948 stars and had amassed long catalogs of nebulae and double stars. He had also described many details of the Great Nebula in the constellation Orion, as well as the Magellanic Clouds—actually two galaxies best viewed from the Southern Hemisphere—and had observed Halley’s Comet and the satellites of Saturn. In addition, his descriptions of sunspot activities and his measuring of solar radiation by means of a device he had invented contributed to the development of systematic studies of the Sun as an important part of astrophysics. Upon his return he was made a baronet in 1838 and was lionized by the scientific world.

In an extraordinary departure from astronomy, Herschel combined his talents with those of his wife, Margaret, and between 1834 and 1838 they produced 131 botanical illustrations of fine quality, showing the Cape flora. Herschel used a camera lucida to obtain accurate outlines of the specimens and left the details to his wife.

Even though their portfolio had been intended as a personal record, and despite the lack of floral dissections in the paintings, their accurate rendition makes them more valuable than many contemporary collections. Some 112 of the 132 known flower studies were collected and published as Flora Herscheliana in 1996.

During the 1840s, Herschel worked on Outlines of Astronomy (1849), a book for educated laymen. This very successful science text went through many editions, including Arabic and Chinese. But the bulk of his time was occupied with the Results of Astronomical Observations, Made During the Years 1834–38 at the Cape of Good Hope (1847). This work contains catalogs and charts of southern-sky nebulae and star clusters, a catalog of the relative positions and magnitudes of southern double stars, and his observations on the variations and relative brightness of the stars.

As a result of his seeking public office, Herschel at the end of 1850 was appointed master of the Mint. The strain of the work caused his health to deteriorate; he became depressed, and in 1854 he suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1856 he resigned his post at the Mint. He spent his remaining years working on the catalogs of double stars and of nebulae and star clusters.

In the field of physiology, John Herschel correctly considered astigmatism to be due to irregularity of the cornea and theorised that vision could be improved by the application of some animal jelly contained in a capsule of glass against the cornea. 

Herschel wrote many papers and articles, including entries on meteorology, physical geography and the telescope for the eighth edition of the Encyclop?dia Britannica.

English astronomer Richard Anthony Proctor would say of Sir John Herschel,

“As an astronomer in the true sense of the term, Sir John Herschel stood before all his contemporaries. Nay, he stood almost alone.”

The most significant discovery Herschel made on this voyage was the observation of Halley’s comet. He documented other major forces the comet was being subjected to other than gravity and calculated the one of the forces being from the sun, eventually known as solar wind. Another of his observations was that gas was evaporating from the comet. It would be 1847 when the results of this trip would be published.

Four years later, Herschel returned to England in 1838, was created a baronet, of Slough in the County of Buckingham, and published Results of Astronomical Observations made at the Cape of Good Hope in 1847. In this publication he proposed the names still used today for the seven then-known satellites of Saturn: Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Iapetus.

Photography

One characteristic of Sir John Herschel's life is that it is virtually impossible to logically categorize his achievements in a logical and neatly sequenced pattern. His interests were wide and varied, and frequently overlapped. His continued interest in and ground-breaking contributions to photography is one such example.

As a highly accomplished chemist, Herschel's discovery in 1819 of the solvent power of hyposulfite of soda on the otherwise insoluble salts of silver was the prelude to its use as a fixing agent in photography; and he invented in 1839, independently of Fox Talbot, the process of photography on sensitized paper.

In a letter to his wife on January 22, 1839, a friend briefly commented on Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre’s experiments with the action of light. With a renewed interest, amazingly, Herschel was able to make photographs within a few days of reading the letter. As quickly as February 1, William Henry Fox Talbot visited Herschel. Based on his research in 1819, Herschel solved the problem of fixing that plagued early photographic experimenters. 

Before Bayard published his process, Herschel described a method of achieving direct positive photographs.

That year, he made a photograph on glass—of his father’s telescope—which still exists, and experimented with some color reproduction, noting that rays of different parts of the spectrum tended to impart their own color to a photographic paper.

Herschel coined the term photography that year. Although the word “photography” was used as early as 1932 by Professor Erich Stenger, it was Herschel’s paper that finally gave photography a common nomenclature. In one of his most important papers, “On the Art of Photography; or the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purpose of Pictorial Presentation”, “Photography” is derived from Greek words that mean “light” and “writing”. Herschel was also the first to apply the terms negative and positive to photography.

“By freely sharing this information with the early pioneers, Herschel provided the missing link in all their processes, of how to make images permanent. Herschel, with a volatile, soaring imagination, is an ideal of learning: He set aside nationalism; openly shared knowledge; did not patent his findings; and did not commercially exploit his discoveries” writes photography historian Robert Hirsch.

Herschel made numerous important and enduring contributions to photography. He made improvements in photographic processes, particularly in inventing the cyanotype process, which became known as blueprints, and variations, such as the chrysotype. 

And if all of this wasn't enough, during this period he also translated The Iliad of Homer!

Herschel did not focus his genius on one area of science and therefore, has been overlooked as a significant contributor, when in fact he was. 

In 1842, Herschel began working for the Marischal College in Aberdeen and served as president of the British Association until 1845. These were difficult years for Herschel, he was scientist, not a businessman. 

That same year, Herschel, invented the cyanotype, a photographic process that resulted in a cyan-blue print. The process was used through the 20th century by architects and engineers for the production of blueprints.

Later Years

His remaining years were spent working on his catalogs of double stars and of nebulae and star clusters. In 1850 Herschel was appointed master of the Mint, but he resigned six years later due to poor health, and he had grown weary of working with staff and the Treasury and retired. 

In Herschel's later years, he kept up a lively correspondence with his friends and with the scientific community. But gout and bronchitis eventually took its toll as he entered his late 1870s. Herschel lamented the deaths of his close friends such as George Peacock, and felt that his was soon to follow.

Herschel continued his scientific research until he died on May 11, 1871, at age 79, at his home in Collingwood near Hawkhurst in Kent.

On his death, he was given a national funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey.

Herschel was the personification of nineteenth-century science, particularly in England. In real terms, he made substantial contributions to many fields, beyond his astronomical exploits. Through it all, he always remained a firm believer in the divine.