ABSTRACT
The results of this strife were several. Airy reluctantly took some astronomical physics into the Royal Observatory by taking over the daily sunspot observations made at the BAAS’s Kew Observatory. Pritchard seized his opportunity to establish photographic research at his new observatory at Oxford. Lockyer secured some Treasury funds for his privately-owned SPO at Kensington. There were two other relevant consequences of the Devonshire Commission. First, by the chance of local circumstances not being precisely dealt with by the Commission, the terms it imposed upon the universities for transferring some income from colleges to their university favoured Cambridge more than Oxford. This more flexible and prompter funding empowered Cambridge University to take initiatives and create posts for science which nurtured an ethos and independence for the sciences there within which their Observatory could thrive (5.8 below). Second, specialization in pure research had been given some impetus in 1876 when the government increased to £5,000 its annual grant disbursed by the Royal Society to assist individuals whose research the Society identified as worthy of support.14 But the first beneficiaries of these government funds for astrophysics had been William Huggins and Norman Lockyer a decade earlier, and although the amounts were small it had been those examples, and jealousy of their achievements, that had triggered the debate. Their establishing private observatories which soon gained a trickle of state funding is also highly relevant. After very slowly accruing a vested interest and having to justify it to critics, the government between 1908 and 1913 transferred both observatories to Cambridge. This at last augmented that University’s capability to a level comparable to that of the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory of 1879. 5.5 Huggins, and Lockyer’s Solar Physics Observatory The initiatives of Huggins and Lockyer indicate the advantage of a fresh start in equipment and research, and the expertise that had to be rapidly acquired to take up astrophysics. Between 1862 and 1908 the work of William Huggins (1824-1910) established him as the founder of stellar astrophysics in Britain who justified his government grants, and on retirement clearly recommended that his work be continued at a university. Almost simultaneously, Norman Lockyer in 1862 at his private observatory opened a new era in solar physics while struggling to rise beyond a poorly salaried career with the War Office. After a daunting struggle for funds and opportunity which lasted more than a decade and a half, he was the obvious candidate to benefit from government moves to establish a new centre in South Kensington for scientific education (the Normal School of Science, which later became Imperial College); he obtained a state-funded post in astronomy there and directed the Solar Physics Observatory (SPO) which became de facto Britain’s state observatory for astrophysics from 1879 to 1913. Neither of these enterprising amateurs had a university education. Huggins used to be portrayed as a lone pioneer. However, there was a broader base to their achievements. Barbara Becker has revealed that Huggins was dependent initially upon
support from a friendly professor of chemistry, and then from his expert photographer wife, in order to adapt and continue a long run of successful research.15 Professor Jack Meadows’s biography of Lockyer reveals his reliance first upon another professor of chemistry, and then upon his brilliant young assistant Alfred Fowler whose early research was published under Lockyer’s name.16 Huggins’s and Lockyer’s initiatives offer insights into the material and intellectual requirements of the new science in the period 1860s to 1900. They provide comparable experiences that indicate the steps that a university professor would have had to take in order to adopt some branch of astrophysics. The difference was that while a small amount of government money was available as Royal Society research grants to assist these private individuals, other than for eclipse expeditions there was hardly a penny of government money available to university professors – they had to find benefactors. Not least, the eventual absorption of both observatories by Cambridge Observatory is significant in explaining that University’s changing role in the professionalization of astronomy. Huggins, of independent means, had built an observatory at his home in Tulse Hill, London, in 1856, and in 1858 re-equipped it with an 8" Clark-Cooke refractor. In January 1862 his research interests were stimulated by hearing his neighbour William A. Miller (1817-70), Professor of Chemistry at King’s College, London, lecture on spectroscopy and on Kirchhoff’s work.17 Miller has been recognized in the history of chemistry as one of the founders of chemical physics. Huggins then played the key role in the successful transplanting of the spectroscope from the chemist’s laboratory into the domain of the astronomer. This involved major changes in the traditional equipment, organization and practices in an observatory. Huggins and Miller together designed a spectroscope and had it made by John Browning. In 1863 Huggins in his laboratory mapped the spectra of metals that he heated, and developed methods and expertise in comparative spectroscopy that gained the respect of, and enabled him to forge alliances with, prominent men of science. For this work Huggins also depended upon Browning’s colleague William Ladd for the supply and maintenance of high performance batteries to drive his induction coils. In 1864 Huggins solved the mystery of the nature of the nebulae; he was elected to the Royal Society, and he and Miller were awarded the RAS gold medal in 1867. Huggins then applied the Doppler principle to the study of the radial velocity of stars. For that delicate work he relied on close collaboration with James Clerk Maxwell, whose expertise and public statements validated Huggins’s interpretations based on linking precision measurement in the laboratory to celestial spectroscopy. Huggins then began to classify the stars by their chemical spectra and colour. His work so impressed the Royal Society that in 1870 at the instigation of T.R. Robinson, director of Armagh Observatory, they added to a bequest and made £2,000 available to Huggins to re-equip his observatory with a 15" refractor and 18" Cassegrain reflector by Howard Grubb (see Chapter 2); Huggins spent £500 of his own adapting the dome in order to house the new instrument. With his laboratory and batteries he had a much more powerfully equipped observatory than Pritchard would achieve in
Fig. 5.1 Huggins’s telescope and spectroscope: transferred in 1913 to Cambridge The photograph of the venerable Grand Amateur taken in the 1890s at his Tulse Hill Observatory shows the spectroscope attached to the 15" Grubb refractor purchased by the Royal Society for loan to Huggins. 1875. But Barbara Becker has noted that he was no longer independent. He was ‘directly answerable to criticisms of his choice of observational problems, his methods, even his diligence in the use of these coveted instruments’.18 Before the
new instruments were delivered he unexpectedly lost his friend Miller in 1870. Huggins worked alone for a while, but needing an expert assistant, and being of a frugal nature, he decided to marry in September 1875 Margaret Lindsay Murray (1848-1915), whom he first met within the astronomy network. She worked virtually without public recognition as his skilled scientific colleague until after a particularly difficult observation she was named as co-author of a paper in 1889, a benchmark in their work. It is no coincidence that in December 1876 Huggins published his first paper on spectral photography. Barbara Becker has shown that the photographic expertise, a vital and evolving role in their research, was Margaret’s. Margaret Huggins took ‘the initiative whenever photography was employed’, and her skill ‘made possible an important shift in the observatory’s research agenda’.19 She planned and implemented the Observatory’s shift from visual methods to spectroscopic astrophotography. Huggins was thereby enabled to achieve international renown by successfully applying spectral analysis and chemical identification to the stars and nebulae throughout a long career until 1908. When he could no longer observe regularly himself, he recommended that all his instruments and equipment, the most useful and valuable part of it paid for by public grants, should be given to Cambridge to augment Hugh Newall’s observatory there. Norman Lockyer had for five years been an impecunious junior clerk in the War Office when in 1862, at the age of 26, he persuaded Thomas Cooke of York to lend him a 6¼" equatorial which he erected in his Wimbledon garden, an instrument which he later purchased.20 The nature of solar prominences and sunspots was still unclear, and there was a lively controversy as to the nature of the solar surface.21 Lockyer purchased a small spectroscope, investigated sunspots, and explored the solar envelope. A government grant in 1867 via the Royal Society enabled him to obtain an improved Browning spectroscope, and this led to his spectacular codiscovery (with Jules Janssen of the Paris Observatory) in late 1868 of the solar chromosphere. Needing laboratory research facilities and expertise in order to identify the origin and chemical signature of the spectral lines he observed, he fortunately obtained the immediate co-operation of Edward Frankland (1825-99), Professor of Chemistry at the Royal College of Chemistry then located in Oxford Street. Lockyer’s discovery of the chromosphere led to his next discovery, with Frankland, of a new element in the solar atmosphere that he named helium, and his realization that the spectral lines varied with temperature and pressure. These researches secured his election to the Royal Society in 1869. However, his preference to publish his results in that Society’s journals – probably influenced by his wish to build relationships there with an eye on future government grants – alienated some members of the RAS. In 1872 a second small government grant enabled Lockyer to set up a laboratory in his house, and to engage an assistant. Lockyer aspired to be a full-time independent astronomer, but, lacking private means, government patronage was indispensable. Through the influence of friends he was seconded in 1870 to be Secretary to the Devonshire Commission. This Royal Commission was the first to assess government-controlled institutions concerned with scientific and technical education, and these were principally located in South
Kensington, a large site intended for the development of science museums and other facilities in order to capitalize on the success of and profits available from the Great Exhibition of 1851. There the Royal School of Mines and the Department of Education’s adjacent Science and Art Department, which taught teachers, were in 1873 joined by the Royal College of Chemistry. The intention was to form a science college, museum and other departments, all governed by a council of professors. In 1881 at T.H. Huxley’s suggestion, adopted by the Commission, the sciences were freed from the mining curriculum, and the government established the awkwardly named Normal School of Science (intended to imply comparable status to the famed École Normale Supérieure in Paris) specifically to instruct teachers of science and to grant them diplomas; the name of this institution proved unpopular, and in 1890 it was renamed the Royal College of Science. The Commission had noted the English peculiarity of private investigators including Lockyer, Huggins, and De La Rue being ‘altogether disconnected with teaching’.22 Leading scientists were urging the Commission to set up at least one observatory in Britain, and preferably another in India, devoted to astronomical physics since it was believed that studying the Sun would throw light on terrestrial physics, including meteorology which bore upon famines, and magnetism that would bear upon navigation as well. When the Commission’s first report on the Science School at South Kensington recommended the establishment there of a Solar Physics Committee and a new state-funded Solar Physics Observatory (SPO) – the latter not implemented until 1878 – it engendered resentment not least because some recognized that Lockyer would seek appointment there.23 The conflict of interests in Lockyer’s various roles and his high profile as editor of the new science journal Nature made him a focus of controversy. Hence factions in the RAS Council had denied Lockyer their gold medal in 1872, and did so again in 1876. William Noble, an RAS council member, formed The Society for Opposing the Endowment of Research and constantly attacked Lockyer through articles in the journal English Mechanic. By 1873 Lockyer’s career was in crisis; his post at the War Office had no future, his secondment to the Commission had little longer to run, and he had no academic qualifications to assist in gaining a post in astronomical research. In 1873 he was encouraged to develop his solar physics work at South Kensington in conjunction with the newly appointed Committee, and he drew upon their small account to move his Cooke refractor from his home into wood and canvas shelters in the garden behind the Science and Art Department, where with Frankland’s help his instruments were installed in a small room which the Department offered to Lockyer for laboratory work.24 A sapper (army engineer) was detailed to be his part-time photographic assistant. Those sparse assets, and access to Frankland and to his laboratory nearby, were the extent of this first British government astrophysical facility. In 1875 Lockyer was officially transferred from the War Office payroll to that of the Science and Art Department. There he was in change of solar physics work, which comprised the analysis of photographic plates taken daily by a sapper in India, but as yet he had no research allowance.
