(
This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
The Scientific Papers of Sir William Huggins, K. C. B., O. M (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Scientific Papers of Sir William Huggins...)
Excerpt from The Scientific Papers of Sir William Huggins, K. C. B., O. M
These original Observations, notwithstanding the serious drawbacks and limitations which must be present in pioneering work, will have in their collected form, we are told, all the interest of a nascent science, since they led directly to, and indeed themselves formed a not inconsiderable part Of the foundations of, a new branch of Astronomy, which extends the chemistry and physics of the earth to the heavenly bodies, and under the new name of Astrophysics, is to-day zealously cultivated in all the principal Observatories of the world.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
The Royal Society; Or, Science in the State and in the Schools
(Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)
Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. This means that we have checked every single page in every title, making it highly unlikely that any material imperfections such as poor picture quality, blurred or missing text - remain. When our staff observed such imperfections in the original work, these have either been repaired, or the title has been excluded from the Leopold Classic Library catalogue. As part of our on-going commitment to delivering value to the reader, within the book we have also provided you with a link to a website, where you may download a digital version of this work for free. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience. If you would like to learn more about the Leopold Classic Library collection please visit our website at www.leopoldclassiclibrary.com
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Sir William Huggins was an English astronomer best known for his pioneering work in astronomical spectroscopy together with his wife Margaret Lindsay Huggins.
Background
William Huggins was born at Cornhill, Middlesex, in 1824.
Huggins was the second and only surviving child (the first had died in infancy) of William Thomas Huggins, a silk mercer and linen draper in Grace-church Street in the City of London.
His mother, the former Lucy Miller, was a native of Peterborough.
He removed with his parents to Tulse Hill—now a part of greater London, but then situated in the country—and in the new surroundings astronomy prevailed over microscopy as his major interest.
Huggins remained at Tulse Hill for the remainder of his life, setting up an observatory equipped with instruments, partly purchased by himself and partly lent by the Royal Society, and here the whole of his astronomical researches were carried out.
His father died shortly after the removal to Tulse Hill, but his mother survived until 1868; he felt her loss keenly.
Education
He was precocious and, after a short period of attendace at a small nearby school and instruction at home under the curate of the parish, he entered the City of London School at its opening early in 1837.
An attack of smallpox, from which he fully recovered, led to his removal from the school shortly afterward, his eductation being continued by private tutors at home.
At about (1842) family circumstances led to a regretful decision to abandon his intention of going to Cambridge for a university education, and he took over the responsibility for his father’s business.
It at once occurred to him that this method could be applied to the stars; and he confided his idea to his friend W. A. Miller, professor of chemistry at King’s College, London, who, although somewhat dubious, agreed to collaborate with him.
Huggins built a private observatory at 90 Upper Tulse Hill, London, from where he and his wife carried out extensive observations of the spectral emission lines and absorption lines of various celestial objects.
Career
A gift of a microscope led to early concentration on physiology, and although at about the age of eighteen he bought his first telescope—for £15—his location in the City of London was too unsuitable for celestial observations to allow astronomy to claim much of his attention.
A not unimportant factor in this choice was his sensitive nature, which made experiments on animals distasteful to him.
They designed a spectroscope consisting of two dense flint glass prisms which they attached to Huggins’ eight-inch telescope, and observations of stellar spectra were begun.
The same idea had occurred to Rutherford in America, but quite independently.
In order to interpret the stellar spectra it was necessary to obtain better knowledge than that which then existed of the spectra of terrestrial elements; and maps of twenty-four such spectra were prepared by Huggins, with the use of a more powerful spectroscope containing six prisms.
The nature of the nebulae was then quite unknown: “a shining fluid of a nature unknown to us, ” which was William Herschel’s description of a nebula, had remained all that could safely be said on the matter.
The fact that an increasing number of them had, after Herschel’s time, been resolved into star clusters as more powerful telescopes became available, had led to the conjecture that all were of this character and would be so observable with instruments of sufficient resolving power.
It occurred to Huggins to attempt a verification of this by observation with the spectroscope.
He accordingly directed his instrument toward a planetary nebula in the constellation Draco and observed not, as he expected, a mixture of stellar spectra but a few isolated bright lines.
Other nebulae were examined; some showed similar spectra and others spectra generally resembling those of stars.
It became clear that these objects, up to then regarded as identical in nature, belonged to two classes: some were clusters of stars, which would be seen as such with greater telescopic power, while others were uniformly gaseous.
The bright lines observed in the gaseous nebulae, however, presented a puzzle.
Hydrogen was readily identifiable, but there were other lines corresponding to nothing known on the earth; and a new element, provisionally called “nebulium, ” was postulated.
It was not until 1927 that it was discovered by Ira S. Bowen that nebulium was ionized oxygen and nitrogen. Huggins followed up this work by spectroscopic observations of comets and of a nova, or new star, which appeared in the constellation Corona Borealis in 1866.
He showed that the radiations of three comets gave spectra containing bands coincident in position with those obtainable from a candle flame in the laboratory, and concluded that they arose from carbon or its compounds.
Huggins was more attracted by the fainter than by the brighter celestial objects and gave little attention to the sun. It was accordingly his younger contemporary Norman Lockyer who discovered how to make spectroscopic observations of the solar prominences in full sunlight.
He did not reach a full understanding of the effect of this change on stellar observations, for he thought that it would make a receding star appear redder, aces in the laboratory—would indicate the velocity of the star along the line of sight, the so-called radial velocity.
Huggins at once perceived the possibility of applying the knowledge he had obtained of the laboratory spectra of elements to the determination of such velocities.
He consulted Clerk Maxwell on the theory of the matter; and after various delays in securing a sufficiently powerful spectroscope he succeeded, in 1868, in obtaining a value for the radial velocity of Sirius of 29. 4 miles a second away from the sun—a figure which later, with better instruments, he amended to between 18 and 22 miles a second.
This is now known to be too large, although the direction is right; but it must be remembered that only visual observations were then possible and that the attainable accuracy of measurement fell short of that which we now regard as essential for this work.
The principle had been established, however, of introducing into astronomy one of the most fruitful sources of knowledge we possess concerning the structure and evolution of the universe.
Although, as has been said, these observations were visual, Huggins had not overlooked the desirability of photographing stellar spectra; and as early as 1863 he attempted to photograph the spectrum of Sirius, the apparently brightest star in the sky. But the result was poor, and he realized that the time for this refinement had not come. Satisfactory results were not obtained until 1872, by Draper; and Huggins was not slow to follow them up by extensive photographic observations of the spectra of stars bright enough for this type of examination.
He also sought to apply spectroscopic photography to the detection of the solar corona in full sunlight and at first thought he had succeeded, but this hope was not confirmed. Nevertheless, he devoted his Bakerian lecture to the Royal Society in 1885 to the subject “The Corona of the Sun. ” Pursuing his studies of the nebulae, Huggins came into conflict with Lockyer, another pioneer in spectroscopic astronomy.
Lockyer had formed an imposing hypothesis of celestial evolution, known as the meteoritic hypothesis, a vital piece of evidence for which lay in the supposed identification of the “nebulium” green line with the head of a band, or fluting, observed in the spectrum of a magnesium spark in the laboratory. Not only was it doubtful whether, even under the admittedly unfavorable conditions of observation of nebular spectra, an extended band could appear so like a single sharp line, but also there was a slight discrepancy between the wavelength measurements of the radiations from the two sources.
Huggins refused to admit their identity, and later knowledge has fully justified his skepticism.
A comparison of Huggins and Lockyer, so similar in time, place, and scientific objectives and so different in character, is inevitable.
To Lockyer, observational knowledge was merely a means to an end—the understanding of the whole course of nature. To Huggins it was an end in itself—ultimately to lead to understanding, of course, but, at the present, the beginning of a new and apparently limitless means of inquiry, to be gathered by patience and strict accuracy, uninfluenced by theoretical expectation or desire.
At that time the chemical elements were regarded as eternally unchangeable; and while Lockyer, by his “dissociation hypothesis, ” simply brushed aside this obstacle, to Huggins it appeared insurmountable.
As a contrast to Lockyer’s sweeping meteoritic hypothesis, which sought to comprehend the whole universe in time and space, the following summing up by Huggins of his life’s work, published in 1899 in the first of his two volumes on the work at his observatory, may be cited: In retrospect a decision between these contrasting attitudes passes into insignificance beside the recognition that the contribution of each to later progress was essential and beyond the reach of the other.
Achievements
Huggins’ pioneer work in astrophysics brought him many honors.
Presumably it was the intellectual element in his musical talent that led to his contributing to the Royal Society in 1883 a paper on the proportional thickness of the strings of the violin—apparently his only publication, apart from one or two early papers on microscopical work, that was not astronomical in character.
In 1891 he was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1897 he was created a K. C. B. and in 1902 awarded the O. M. , one of the original members of the Order of Merit, which had just been instituted.
In 1891 he was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1897 he was created a K. C. B. and in 1902 awarded the O. M. , one of the original members of the Order of Merit, which had just been instituted.
Numerous universities conferred honorary degrees on him.
(Excerpt from The Scientific Papers of Sir William Huggins...)
Religion
Huggins had been brought up as a Calvinist but had never responded to this form of religion, and his views on such matters are perhaps best indicated by his wife’s description of him as a “Christian unattached. ”
Views
Visits to the Continent, where his knowledge of languages stood him in good stead, helped to preserve the balance of his interests.
Membership
Huggins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1865.
He was a member and a president of the Royal Astronomical Society during the two sessions 1876–1878.
In 1852 Huggins joined the Royal Microscopical Society.
Interests
He was an expert pike fisherman. He was an able violinist—according to his wife, “always rather an intellectual than a perfervid player”—and owned a fine Stradivarius instrument.
Writers
He was an admirer of Izaak Walton.
Connections
In 1875 he married Margaret Lindsay Murray, of Dublin, who, although twenty-six years his junior, was an ideal partner for the next thirty-five years, taking an active part in the astronomical observations; her name is associated with his in the authoriship of some of his cheif publications.
