William Henry Smyth

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William Henry Smyth

William Henry Smyth (born January 21, 1788 in Westminster , London , † September 9, 1865 in Cardiff , Wales ) was an Admiral in the Royal Navy and a British astronomer .

Life

The only son of the American Joseph Smyth and his wife Georgiana Caroline Pitt Pilkington, William Henry Smith was born in England. Without having met his father, he grew up with half-siblings Augustus and Phoebe Earle.

He escaped for 15 years and began his career as a seaman on a merchant ship of the East India Company . When the ship was placed under the Royal Navy for military use, Smith switched to the Navy and gained experience on various canon-equipped sailors in Indian, Chinese and Australian waters. During the Napoleonic Wars he served in the Mediterranean from 1810-1821 , where he achieved the rank of admiral . In 1815 he married Eliza Anne Warington , called "Annarella", the only daughter of Thomas Warington, the British Vice Consul from Naples. She became his companion and assistant in all of his later scientific work.

During an assignment to determine navigable waters, he met the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in Palermo in 1817 and visited his observatory . This aroused his interest in astronomy .

So he took leave of the Navy in 1825 and founded a private observatory in Bedford , England, which was equipped with a telescope with an opening width of 15 cm from Tully. He used it to observe a large number of deep sky objects over two decades , and in 1844 he published his observations under the title Cycle of Celestial Objects . This brought him the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1845 and at the same time the chairmanship of the society.

The first volume of his work was on astronomy in general, but the second volume contained the discoveries of 1,604 new binary stars and nebulae and became known as the Bedford Catalog ; it served in professional circles as a standard work for the following years. No observer before him had compiled such a detailed catalog of faint objects.

In 1826 Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was its Vice-President 1836-1837, 1846-1847, 1856-1857. In 1837 he became a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences .

In 1839 he had completed his observations and was retiring in Cardiff . His observatory was dismantled, his telescope sold to John Lee and moved to a new observatory in Hartwell House . Smyth still had the opportunity to use it, however, as his home at St. John's Lodge in Stone was not far from it, and was able to conduct further astronomical observations until 1859. The telescope is now in the Science Museum in London .

In 1847, Smith was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Smyth suffered a heart attack in early September 1865 and initially appeared to be recovering. On September 8th, he showed his grandson Arthur Smyth Flower the planet Jupiter through a telescope . A few hours later, on the morning of September 9th, he died at the age of 78 in his home at St. John's Lodge in Cardiff, Welsh . He was buried in the cemetery in Stone, Buckinghamshire near Aylesbury .

family

His mother, Georgina Caroline Pitt Pilkington, was a granddaughter of the Irish writers Matthew and Laetitia Pilkington.

William had three sons: Charles Piazzi Smyth , Sir Warington Wilkinson Smyth, and General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth . Of his daughters, Henrietta Grace Smyth married the mathematics professor Baden Powell and was the mother of Robert Baden-Powell , while Georgiana Rosetta Smyth married Sir William Henry Flower .

Trivia

The lunar sea Mare Smythii , one of the smaller MARIA, which is characterized by a gravity anomaly , was named after him. Likewise, Cape Smyth in the Antarctic got its name from Sturge Island.

Works

Web links

Commons : William Henry Smyth  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter S. Académie des sciences, accessed on March 3, 2020 (French).
  2. ^ William Henry Smyth. Short biography, In: The Messier Catalog (accessed August 3, 2018).
personal data
SURNAME Smyth, William Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1788
PLACE OF BIRTH Westminster , London
DATE OF DEATH September 9, 1865
Place of death Cardiff , Wales