Abstract
In addition to everything else he was doing, William Herschel continued to crank out telescopes. He constructed five 10-foot telescopes on the express command of George III, and began to receive orders for seven-foot refl ectors similar to the one he had used to discover the “Georgian,” eventually producing two hundred of this model alone, on a commercial basis, many to royalty and foreign dignitaries and wealthy amateurs, but at least a few to observatories (Radcliff e, Armagh, Greenwich, Dorpat) or to serious individual astronomers (such as Johann Schroeter at Lilienthal, in Hanover, and Giuseppe Piazzi in Sicily). Th e income he obtained this way enabled him to make “expensive experiments for polishing mirrors by machinery.”
While a child, Tennyson said to his brother, who suff ered from shyness: “Fred, think of Herschel’s great star-patches, and you will soon get over that.”
—Hallam Lord Tennyson, quoted in Michael Crowe, Modern Theories of the Universe
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References
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The house belonged to Mary’s mother, Mrs. Baldwin.
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Sheehan, W., Conselice, C.J. (2015). Chimneys and Tubules of the Galaxy. In: Galactic Encounters. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85347-5_4
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