Robert Holford Macdowall Bosanquet

Robert Holford Macdowall Bosanquet (born July 31, 1841 in Rock Hall near Alnwick , Northumberland , † August 7, 1912 in Castello Zamorra, Tenerife ) was a British astronomer and music theorist.

Bosanquet was the son of a minister, attended Eton College and Oxford University ( Balliol College ), where he received top grades in physics and mathematics. Although he initially embarked on a legal career at Lincoln's Inn in London, he then taught mostly as a tutor (occasionally as an examiner) for natural sciences in Oxford, where he was later a Fellow of St. John's College . He was later a professor at the Royal College of Music . From 1890 he settled in Tenerife for health reasons and only returned to England in the summer. He never married and died in his home in Tenerife.

Between 1875 and 1890 he published numerous scientific articles, mostly in Philosophical Magazine. For example, he invented generalized keyboards for unusual tone systems and was a recognized authority on organ building . He left two of his home organs, specially designed according to new principles, to the South Kensington Museum ; today they are in the Science Museum in South Kensington. One of the instruments has 48 keys per octave (based on a tone system by Hermann von Helmholtz ), the other 84. He also dealt with electrodynamics, working theoretically and experimentally and inventing a new kind of polariscope . In astronomy, for example, he published on orbit determination and Babylonian astronomy (in collaboration with Archibald Henry Sayce ).

In 1871 he became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and in 1890 the Royal Society .

He was the brother of Admiral Day Bosanquet and the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet .

Fonts

• An Elementary Treatise on Musical Intervals and Temperament , London, Macmillan, 1876

Web links

• Publications by RHM Bosanquet in the Astrophysics Data System
• Obituary in the Monthly Notices Royal Astron. Society 1913