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William Herschel, Bath, and the Philosophical Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

Roy Porter
Roy Porter*
Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London

Extract

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Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a Bathonian, opens his comedy, The Rivals, with a social sneer. Fag, the stylish apostle of bon ton, meets his fellow servant Thomas, a clodhopping yokel, and exclaims: “Why Thomas … But who the deuce thought of seeing you in Bath?”. One might ask the same of William Herschel, the Hanoverian bandsman’s son, who, having discovered Uranus, was to pass the last forty years of his life as a Crown pensionary, living just outside Windsor. How did Herschel come to spend his formative scientific years in Bath, resort of the giddy and the gay? How did he come to discover Uranus there?

Type
History of the Discovery of Uranus
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 60: Uranus and the Outer Planets , 1982 , pp. 23 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

References

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