Saturn and Its System: Containing Discussions of the Motions (real and Apparent) and Telescopic Appearance of the Planet Saturn, Its Satellites, and Rings; ... To which are Appended Notes on Chaldæan
Essays on Astronomy: A Series of Papers on Planets and Meteors, the Sun and Sun-surrounding Space, Stars and Star Cloudlets; and a Dissertation on the ... of the Life and Works of Sir John Herschel
Science Byways: A Series of Familiar Dissertations on Life in Other Worlds; Comets and the Sun; the North Pole; Rain; Danger from Lightning; Growth and ... an Essay Entitled Money for Science
Our Place Among Infinities: A Series of Essays, Contrasting Our Little Abode in Space and Time With the Infinities Around Us, the Jewish Sabbath and Astrology
A Star Atlas for Students and Observers, Showing 6000 Stars and 1500 Double Stars, Nebulae, &c. in Twelve Maps on the Equidistant Projection: With Index Maps on the Stereographic Projection
The Universe and the Coming Transits: Presenting Researches Into and New Views Respecting the Constitution of the Heavens: Together with an ... of the Coming Transits of Venus
Richard Anthony Proctor was an American astronomer initially from Great Britain. He is best known for his 1867 map of Mars, one of the earliest such maps. He also published more than 15 books and treatises between 1865 and 1888, with his most ambitious work, Old and New Astronomy, left unfinished at the time of his death (it was published in 1892).
Background
Richard Anthony Proctor was born at Chelsea on the 23rd of March 1837. Proctor was the youngest son of William Proctor, a well-to-do solicitor. Richard’s mother, whose maiden name was Mary Pyke, belonged to an old Somersetshire family. His father’s death in 1850, followed by a protracted lawsuit, left the family in difficult circumstances.
Education
Proctor attended King's College London and then St. John’s College, Cambridge (1856), where he studied theology and mathematics. He graduated in 1860 as 23rd wrangler.
In 1860 Proctor began to study for the bar, but the death in 1863 of the first of his many children turned him toward astronomy and mathematics as distractions. His first article was on colors in double stars (Cornhill Magazine for 1865); and his first book, privately published, was Saturn and His System (1865).
With the failure in 1866 of a New Zealand bank in which his money was invested, Proctor turned to a precarious and badly paid literary career. His popular articles were frequently rejected, and his early books barely met their printing costs. His best-selling Half Hours With the Telescope (London, 1868), written for a fee of £25, reached twenty editions by the time of his death. One of his most widely read works was Myths and Marvels of Astronomy (1877), an entertaining collection of astronomical lore.
Proctor taught mathematics for some time at a private military school in Woolwich. After 1873 he went on several lecture tours of America and Australasia.
Proctor long served as an officer of the Royal Astronomical Society, contributing many articles to its Monthly Notices. He founded (1881) the London scientific weekly Knowledge and Illustrated Scientific News, to which he contributed articles under a number of pseudonyms. In all he published nearly sixty books, none of them of much astronomical moment but many of them acknowledged by later astronomers as having introduced them to the subject.
Proctor’s most original scientific work related to Venus and Mars, of which he drew the best maps then available, and to the Galaxy. As a means of determining the size of the astronomical unit, the transit of Venus of 8 December 1874 was to be used. The astronomer royal. Sir George Airy, had announced approximate data in 1857; and Proctor, after calculating more precise circumstances of the transit and urging the use of a method originated by Halley, found himself severely - and for the most part wrongly - criticized by Airy.
Proctor wrote a series of articles on the rotation of Mars and deduced an extremely accurate period of rotation (24h37m22.735s), utilizing a drawing of the planet made by Robert Hooke in 1666. This is second higher than the estimate subsequently made by F. Kaiser from observations made during seventeen nights of the opposition of 1862, and from their comparison with the observations of many earlier astronomers.
In 1870 Proctor charted the directions and proper motions of about 1,600 stars, as determined by E. J. Stone and Rev. R. Main, and found the phenomenon that he called “star drift,” whereby large groups of stars share a proper motion vector in space. The Taurus stream, between Aldebaran and the Pleiades, was the most important group. Had Proctor continued these researches, he might well have reached important conclusions concerning the structure of the Galaxy and associated clusters. (The next significant study of the problem was made by L. Boss.)
Proctor was helped by his abilities as a draftsman, and his charts of the distribution of nebulae indicated clearly to him the tendency of all but the gaseous nebulae to avoid the plane of the Milky Way. He wrongly concluded that since it is unlikely that such an arrangement is accidental, all must be part of a single system (1869). A paper by Cleveland Abbe published two years earlier used the same evidence as grounds for the opposite conclusion, but not for sixty years did something akin to Abbe’s ideas prevail.
Quotations:
"Astronomy... is of all others the science which seems to present to us the most striking instance of waste in nature."
"From youth to middle, and often to past middle, age, most men are apt to be too closely engaged in the struggle of life to pay due attention to the strength of the body. They may take daily what they consider a sufficient amount of exercise; but the exercise is not calculated to keep the various limbs and muscles, still less the internal organs, in proper working order. Amid the ordinary concerns of life, the man may appear strong, even stalwart. But when the occasion arises for some special muscular exercise or taxing the action of some organ, he finds out his weakness."
"As an astronomer in the true sense of the term, Sir John Herschel stood before all his contemporaries. Nay, he stood almost alone."
"The whole system has been long since swept away, and its records merely remain as illustrations of perverted ingenuity."
Membership
Proctor was elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1866.
Royal Astronomical Society
,
United Kingdom
1866 - 1888
Personality
As a child, he was a remarkable reader, never seriously taking up a book without reading it right through from the first page to the last - a practice which, by the way, he has long since dropped.
Later in life, Proctor acquired an immense popular reputation by virtue of his lucid presentation, both in books and in lectures. He was familiar not only with what was visible through the telescopes of the time but also with astronomy in a literary context. As an astronomer, he was prone to speculation, and frequently he was wildly mistaken.
During his literary career, besides astronomy, Proctor also wrote on a great variety of subjects, including chess and whist.
Interests
chess, whist
Connections
Proctor was married two times. The first time he was married in 1860 as an undergrad. His first wife died in 1879, and in 1881 he married an American widow, Mrs. Robert J. Crawley, and settled at St. Joseph, Missouri, her hometown. He moved to Orange Lake, Florida, in 1887 but died the following year in New York City, perhaps of yellow fever, on his way to England on business.
Mary Proctor, his daughter by his first marriage, became an astronomer, a successful lecturer, and writer.