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The Second Reign (1873–1877)

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Le Verrier—Magnificent and Detestable Astronomer

Part of the book series: Astrophysics and Space Science Library ((ASSL,volume 397))

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Abstract

The death of Delaunay plunged the Minister of Public Instruction into confusion. Who should replace him? None of the astronomers at the Observatory were eager to take on the responsibility. Finally, it was the president of the Republic, Adolphe Thiers, who decided the matter. Thiers had maintained contact with Le Verrier, and decided to bring him back. The latter was therefore nominated director on 13 February 1873, 6 months after the drowning of Delaunay. His family didn’t seem to be in a hurry to move back to the Observatory, fearing, no doubt, a cold reception there. Though several astronomers, including Wolf, had hoped for his return, Le Verrier never forgave them for having signed the infamous manifesto of 1870 which ended in his dismissal, and in the end Wolf and Le Verrier would no longer be friends.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Interview of Gaillot by Bigourdan in 1888: see BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(3), folder AP.

  2. 2.

    Journal officiel de la République française, 15 February 1873.

  3. 3.

    BOP, Ms 1072 (33).

  4. 4.

    Remember that the Association scientifique, an abbreviation for the Association for the advancement of Astronomy and Meteorology, had been created by Le Verrier in 1864 for lobbying in favor of his projects, and was very successful in this regard.

  5. 5.

    This affirmation perplexes us. We could not find such notes in the Observatory archives, only interviews by Bigourdan of diverse survivors of the Observatory and of its councils in1888-1889 (BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(3), folder AP). These interviews are not anonymous and the opinions they relate look generally objective. They have never been published before the extracts given in this book.

  6. 6.

    These minutes are preserved integrally in BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(4), folder AA.

  7. 7.

    Journal officiel of 10 December 1872, cited by Bigourdan (1933), pp. A.65–A.68.

  8. 8.

    *CRAS 75 (1872), pp. 1721–1729.

  9. 9.

    The Bureau of longitudes still exists, but the ephemerides are now prepared by a common laboratory with the Paris Observatory, the Institute of celestial mechanics and calculation of the ephemerides (IMCCE). Its internet server provides for free the positions of planets and satellites for any epoch.

  10. 10.

    BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(3), folder X.

  11. 11.

    The instrument will often be presented as able to “measure large angular distances.” However, position measurements cannot be as precise with it as with meridian instruments.

  12. 12.

    Note the permanence of the ancient units even amongst scientists, while their use was forbidden in principle since 20 years for the benefit of the metric system.

  13. 13.

    For a complete history of the coudé equatorials, see Lequeux, J.: °J. Astron. Hist. Herit. 14, 191–202 (2011).

  14. 14.

    There is a detailed description of this instrument in + La Nature, 4e année, 1er semestre (1876), pp. 39–43. But this paper, written before the reception of the reflector, was overoptimistic about the quality of the mirror!

  15. 15.

    BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(4), folder AR.

  16. 16.

    BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(4), folder AE.

  17. 17.

    Report by Le Verrier to the Observatory council on 13 April 1877: BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(4), folder AC.

  18. 18.

    BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(4), folder AE.

  19. 19.

    Mouchez, E.: Rapport annuel sur l’état de l’Observatoire de Paris, année 1880. Gauthier-Villars, Paris (1881).

  20. 20.

    Baillaud, B.: Rapport annuel sur l’état de l’Observatoire de Paris en 1912, pp. 56–58. Gauthier-Villars, Paris (1913).

  21. 21.

    Esclangon, E.: Rapport annuel sur l’état de l’Observatoire de Paris en 1930. Gauthier-Villars, Paris (1931).

  22. 22.

    Esclangon, E.: Rapport annuel sur l’état de l’Observatoire de Paris en 1937. Gauthier-Villars, Paris (1938).

  23. 23.

    Véron, P.: Préhistoire de l’Observatoire de Haute Provence, Colloque Observatoires et patrimoine astronomique français, Nantes, accessible by http://www.obs-hp.fr/www/histoire/pre-histoire_ohp.pdf (2001).

  24. 24.

    There was some talk of replacing this disk, using 12,500 francs remaining in the budget for the lens, by another one supplied by Charles Feil, who was the only one able to supply flint glass in France at the time. Feil in 1875 produced several flint disks, but the best of them broke during the annealing process.

  25. 25.

    Mouchez, E.: Rapport annuel sur l’état de l’Observatoire de Paris. Gauthier-Villars (BOP), Paris (1879).

  26. 26.

    The informations here are from the Rapports annuels de l’Observatoire de Paris.

  27. 27.

    Dollfus, A.: La grande lunette de Meudon. CNRS Éditions, Paris (2006). See also Launay (2008), pp. 134–137.

  28. 28.

    See for a description Wolf, C.: Le cercle méridien de l’Observatoire de Paris, + La Nature, 5e année, 2e trimestre, pp. 406–410, (1877).

  29. 29.

    In the paper cited in the preceding note, Wolf writes: “A simple look at the great meridian circle of the Observatory, at the equatorial of the West tower, at the great reflecting telescope and at the new instrument given by M. Bischoffsheim, all constructed in the workshops of our celebrated artist, M. Eichens, shows the revolution that occurred in the construction processes. Instead of instruments made of pieces of laminated brass, assembled by simple screws or even by tin welding, these are refractor bodies made of cast iron bolted on cast iron and steel axes, whose aspect is strong and elegant; brass circles cast as a single piece and protected from distortion by many crossed beams. This is the art of the engineer applied to the construction of astronomical instruments, with the strength provided by the choice of metals and the thickness of the parts, and with the precision allowed by the machine-tools. This revolution started in England around 1847, by the illustrious director of the Greenwich Observatory M. Airy.”

  30. 30.

    Lalande, J.: Histoire céleste française, contenant les observations faites par plusieurs astronomes français. Paris, Imprimerie de la République. Accessible by http://books.google.fr/ (1801).

  31. 31.

    *CRAS 65 (1867), pp. 873–876.

  32. 32.

    The Paris Observatory, which already missed this measurement at the time of Arago (see Lequeux 2008, pp. 275–279), did not distinguish itself in this very important domain during the reign of Le Verrier. But then little was done elsewhere either. After 1854, there was essentially no parallax determination until the measurements of David Gill in Scotland, then at the Cape of Good Hope, who used a heliometer as Bessel did in 1838.

  33. 33.

    See Dumont (2007), pp. 231–232.

  34. 34.

    BOP, Documents divers sur l’Observatoire de Paris, 1854–1872, cote 3567(4), folder AA.

  35. 35.

    Observations of stars for large catalogues are usually done by zones of declination.

  36. 36.

    This project was a follow-up of the Bonner Durchmusterung, a catalog containing about 300,000 stars observed with a meridian circle, begun under Friedrich Argelander. The catalog was extended after the death of Argelander by Eduard Schönfeld, and for the Southern hemisphere by the Cordoba Durchmusterung under the direction of J.M. Thome. The total number of observed stars is about a million, down to magnitude 9.5 or 10. Argelander and two assistants made all the observations in Bonn between 1852 and 1857 with a small meridian circle with an aperture of 7.6 cm. This catalog has been extensively used, but the positions are not very accurate so that Argelander wanted to have it superseded by a more precise one. For a biography of Argelander, see °Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 36 (1876), pp. 151–155.

  37. 37.

    Twenty observatories were supposed to participate in the project. Actually they were less: Poulkova, Kassan (Kazan), Dorpat (now Tartu), Nikolaïeff (Ukrain), Helsingfors (now Helsinki), Christiana (now Oslo), Leipzig, Leiden, Cambridge (UK), Cambridge (USA), Chicago, Berlin. No French observatory in the list.

  38. 38.

    These were bright stars whose position was measured with the highest possible precision; they serve as references in order to measure the zenith distance and the time of meridian passage of the other stars of the catalogue.

  39. 39.

    Mouchez, E.: Rapport annuel sur l’État de l’Observatoire de Paris [for 1878], pp. 3–4. Gauthier-Villars, Paris (1879). He writes: “This considerable work began in 1854 [actually in 1857]. To be useful, it should have been organized following a methodic plan, well studied in advance and actively pursued.… Unfortunately this work, much too neglected, was conducted with an insufficient personnel and too often left to chance.”

  40. 40.

    See Lamy (2008).

  41. 41.

    *Philosophical Transactions 29 (1716), pp. 454–465. For a very detailed study of the passages of Venus, see http://www.imcce.fr/vt2004, and Arlot (2004).

  42. 42.

    We recall that the parallax of the Sun is the angle under which the equatorial radius of the Earth would be seen from the center of the Sun. The present value 8.″79415, corresponds to a mean distance of the Earth to the Sun (the astronomical unit) of 149.6 million kilometers.

  43. 43.

    For the observations at Nagasaki, see Flammarion, C.: Le passage de Vénus, résultats des expéditions françaises, + La Nature, 1er semestre 1875, pp. 356–358, (1875).

  44. 44.

    *Hofmann, A.W.: Biographie de Jean-Baptiste Dumas, pp. 68–69. Bureau du Moniteur scientifique, Paris (1880).

  45. 45.

    *CRAS 79 (1874), pp. 1361–1365.

  46. 46.

    *CRAS 80 (1875), pp. 290–291.

  47. 47.

    A very clear summary of the chronology of Le Verrier’s works on the dynamics of the Solar system is presented by him in *CRAS 79 (1874), pp. 1421–1427.

  48. 48.

    Discours prononcés à l’occasion de la cérémonie d’inauguration de la statue de Le Verrier (1889), pp. 25–34.

  49. 49.

    °Ann. OP, Mémoires, 10 (1874), pp. 1–304 and additions pp. 1–67.

  50. 50.

    Cited by Levert et al. (1977), p. 168.

  51. 51.

    Archives de l’Académie des sciences, file Tresca.

  52. 52.

    These publications are in °Ann. OP, Mémoires, 11, 12 (1876; the entire volumes), 13 (1976), pp. 1–228 and 130, 14 (1877) 1st part pp. A.1–A.92 and A.1–A.163, and 2nd part pp. 1–70 and 1–96.

  53. 53.

    There is an excellent account of the work of Le Verrier in +Gaillot (1880), in which very clear details are given on his work of the motions of the major planets.

  54. 54.

    Newcomb, S.: An Investigation of the Orbit of Neptune with General Tables of its Motion. Smithsonian Institution, Washington (1866).

  55. 55.

    Newcomb, S.: An Investigation of the Orbit of Uranus with General Tables of its Motion. Smithsonian Institution, Washington (1873). See also Newcomb, S.: Theory of the motion of planet Uranus. In: Annual report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1872. (1875).

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    James Lequeux

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Lequeux, J. (2013). The Second Reign (1873–1877). In: Le Verrier—Magnificent and Detestable Astronomer. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 397. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5565-3_7

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