Abstract
Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel would become one of the greatest figures JL in the history of astronomy, but in 1760, he was an impoverished musician who didn’t have the funds to return to England from a trip to Genoa, Italy. Desperate to get home, he gave a bizarre impromptu recital—a maestro playing a harp, holding a horn, and having a second horn attached to his shoulder. It may be hard to picture Herschel playing all three instruments in such a pose, but the people of Genoa came in droves, and he made his way back to England.
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References
C. A. Lubbock, The Herschel Chronicle (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 15.
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 66.
Ibid., 66.
W. Herschel announced his discovery at the end of March 1781 to the Bath Literary and Philosophical Society. This “Account of a Comet” appears in The Scientific Papers of Sir William Herschel, J. L. E. Dreyer, ed. (London: The Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, 1912), 1: 30–38.
W. G. Hoyt, Planets X and Pluto (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980), p. 12.
Charles Messier to William Herschel, in Lubbock, 86.
Lubbock, p. 95.
W. Herschel to C. Herschel, July 3, 1782. See also “America’s Last King and His Observatory” in J. Ashbrook, The Astronomical Scrapbook (Cambridge, MA.: Sky Publishing Corp., 1984), 17.
Lubbock, 246.
N. A. Mackenzie, “He Broke through the Barriers of the Skies,” Sky and Telescope 8, no. 5 (1949), 119. The title is a translation of the words on Herschel’s tombstone, Coelorum perrupit claustra. See also; Lubbock, p. 177.
P. M. Millman, “The Herschel Dynasty” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 74 (1980), 211.
Hoyt, 15.
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© 1994 David H. Levy
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Levy, D.H. (1994). Comet or Planet?. In: The Quest for Comets. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5998-0_4
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