Lewis Morris Rutherfurd was an American astrophysicist. He served as a trustee of the Columbia University from 1858 until 1884.
Background
Lewis Morris Rutherfurd was born at Morrisania, N. Y. He was the son of Robert Walter and Sabina (Morris) Rutherfurd and a great-grandson of Lewis Morris, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Maj. Walter Rutherfurd, uncle of his grandfather, was a British army officer who served in the French and Indian War, and married Catherine, daughter of James Alexander.
Education
Rutherfurd entered Williams College in the sophomore class at the age of fifteen.
Career
While an undergraduate Rutherfurd assisted in the preparation of lecture experiments in chemistry and physics. After graduation he studied law under William H. Seward and was admitted to the bar in 1837.
He gave up his law practice in 1849 and for the next seven years resided in France, Germany, and Italy. He had already been in the habit of devoting much of his leisure time to the study of chemistry, mechanics, and astronomy, and while in Florence he profited greatly from an intimacy with Amici, who was experimenting on the achromatism of microscope objectives.
On his return to New York in 1856, Rutherfurd built a small observatory in his garden on Second Avenue at Eleventh Street and fitted up a study and machine shop in the house. Here he started his pioneer work in astronomical photography and spectroscopy. His first photographs of the moon were secured in 1858 at about the same time that the experiments of De la Rue were meeting with success. Impatient with the unsatisfactory results obtained in photographing with a visual telescope, he devised a combination of lenses which would convert the instrument into a photographic telescope. This he tried out with reasonable success, in 1860, at a solar eclipse in Labrador.
His first scientific paper, dated July 28, 1862 (American Journal of Science, September 1862), confirmed Clark's discovery of the companion of Sirius and gave a series of measures of position. The laboratory experimentation of Kirchhoff and Bunsen in spectroscopy was attracting great attention. Turning his attention to this field, Rutherfurd followed up the observational work of Fraunhofer and succeeded in observing the general characteristics of the spectra of the sun, moon, and a number of stars.
In his paper, dated December 4, 1862 (Ibid. , January 1863) he attempted, for the first time, a classification of stellar spectra, which agrees essentially with that published later by Secchi. During this investigation he realized that the spectroscope could be used to determine the color curve of a telescope objective and, using this discovery to test his work as it progressed, he succeeded, in 1864, in finishing an objective, 111/4 inches in diameter, designed solely for photography. A 13-inch telescope which could be converted from a visual to a photographic instrument by the addition of a third lens was finished in 1868. With these instruments he made many fine photographs of the sun and moon.
Realizing the value and convenience of obtaining a photographic record of the relative positions of stars, Rutherfurd inaugurated a long program of photographing numerous star fields. The measurement of the plates was carried out on an engine which he devised and built. In the first design the micrometer wire was carried entirely across the plate by a very long screw. Later, however, a glass scale was added, making it necessary to use the screw for measuring short distances only, and thus greatly reducing the errors inherent in the screw. Troubled by the possibility that the photographic film might not stay fixed in position and thus vitiate the measures, Rutherfurd experimented and found that treatment with dilute albumen secured this necessary condition. He is to be credited with overcoming the mechanical difficulties of making an efficient spectroscope of hollow prisms filled with liquid maintained at uniform density. It was with a spectroscope of this type that he secured a photograph of the solar spectrum showing many new lines. He also devised the now well-known method of connecting the prisms so that they all automatically come to the angle of least deviation.
During 1870 he built an engine with which he succeeded in ruling interference gratings, which was superior to all others down to the time of Henry A. Rowland. Rutherfurd was a trustee of Columbia College for more than twenty-five years and took a leading part in establishing the department of geodesy and practical astronomy in 1881. In 1883 he made an unconditional gift to the college of his entire observatory equipment, following this gift in 1890 with that of all his negatives and twenty folio volumes of plate measures. The work of measurement and reduction was later carried on by John K. Rees and Harold Jacoby.
Achievements
Works
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Connections
On July 22, 1841, Rutherfurd married Margaret Stuyvesant Chanler, by whom he had seven children.