Background
Wilhelm Wolff Beer was born in Berlin, Prussia on January 4, 1797, to the family of a banker. His brother was the poet Michael Beer; and his half-brother was the composer Jacob Meyer Beer, better known under the name of Meyerbeer.
Wilhelm Wolff Beer (4 January 1797 – 27 March 1850) was a banker and astronomer from Berlin, Prussia, and the brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer.
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Amalie Malka Liebmann Meyer Beer (Wulff)
https://www.amazon.com/kosmischen-individuellen-Verh%C3%A4ltnissen-vergleichende-Selenographie/dp/B009UAEYF8/?tag=2022091-20
1837
https://www.amazon.com/Beitr%C3%A4ge-physischen-Kenntniss-himmlischen-Sonnensysteme/dp/B009ZMPXQK/?tag=2022091-20
1839
(Wilhelm Wolff Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler's map of th...)
Wilhelm Wolff Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler's map of the Moon produced in the 1830s.
Wilhelm Wolff Beer was born in Berlin, Prussia on January 4, 1797, to the family of a banker. His brother was the poet Michael Beer; and his half-brother was the composer Jacob Meyer Beer, better known under the name of Meyerbeer.
Wilhelm Beer and his brothers received a modern and liberal education.
Wilhelm, at the age of sixteen, volunteered for the military and served in the campaigns of 1813 and 1815 against Napoleon. Shortly afterwards, he left the army and joined his father’s banking house, succeeding him in 1826.
Beer pursued astronomy as a hobby and together with his friend, Johann Heinrich von Madler, built a private observatory in the garden of his villa. They observed Mars during the oppositions of 1828, 1832, 1835, and 1837 and published their results. Beer’s name was used for one of the markings of the planet.
When Madler was invited to head an observatory at the University of Darport, Beer drifted away from astronomy and became involved in politics. In 1845 he was elected to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies and subsequently published his political ideas in several pamphlets.
Beer’s place in the history of astronomy is inseparably connected with the contributions that he and Madler made between 1830 and 1840 to selenography and solar system studies in general. Their first joint work was Physikalische Beobachtungen des Mars in der Erdnahe (1830), and their chef-d'oeuvre was Mappa selenographica totam lunae hemisphaeram visibilem complectens (1836). This map, based on its author’s observations made at Beer’s private observatory with a Fraunhofer refractor of only 9.4-centimeter free aperture, constitutes a milestone in the development of selenographical literature. It was the first map to be divided into four quadrants (corresponding to a diameter of 97.5 centimeters for the apparent lunar disk) and contained a remarkably faithful representation of the moon’s face as it is visible through a 4-inch refractor. Its topographic structure was based on the positions of 105 fundamental points measured micrometrically by Beer and Madler (and related to the previous measurements by Wilhelm Lohrmann).
Moreover, an accompanying volume, Der Mond nach seinen kosmischen und individuellen Verhältnissen, oder allgemeine vergleichende Selenographie (1837), contains the results of micrometric measurements of the diameters of 148 lunar craters and of the relative altitudes of 830 lunar mountains, determined by the shadow method. This book also contains a reduced version (to 32 centimeters) of the original map of 1836.
One more book appeared under the joint authorship of Beer and Mädler - Beiträge zur physischen Kenntniss der himmlichen Körper im Sonnensystem (1839) - before Mädler left Berlin to accept the professorship of astronomy and directorship of the astronomical observatory in Dorpat (now Tartu), Estonia.
His departure ended the ten-year partnership with Beer. For the remainder of his life Beer was unimportant in the history of astronomy, and one may suspect that, in his selenographical work with Mädler, he largely played the role of a Maecenas. His name remains inseparably connected, however, with the best map of the moon produced in the first half of the nineteenth century, a map that remained unsurpassed until the publication of the famous Charte der Gebirge des Mondes by J. F. J. Schmidt in 1878.
One of his more important Beer's contributions to astronomy was a map of the Moon (Mappa Selenographica) he compiled in collaboration with Madler from 1834 to 1836, as well as a companion descriptive volume (Der Mond), describing the surface features. Beer’s map was a great improvement on any that had been done previously and entailed years of painstaking measurements. These showed the Moon to be a world very unlike the Earth and contradicted the pro-selenite claims of Gruithuisen and William Herschel (see life on the Moon). Beer and Mädler's map remained the best available for several decades and helped persuade most professional astronomers that the Moon is uninhabited. The two also collaborated in the production of the first systematic chart of the surface of Mars.
Another Beer's achievement was in helping with the establishment of a railway system in Prussia, and in active promotion of the Jewish community in Berlin.
A mountain on the Moon is named in the honor of Wilhelm Beer.
In collaboration with Johann H. Mädler, Beer produced, in 1830, the first accurate map of the Moon (Mappa Selenographica) and a companion descriptive volume (Der Mond), describing the surface features.
