August 26, 2024 • 33 mins
Johannes Hevelius and his second wife and collaborator, Elisabetha were the 17th-century's astronomy power couple. For one, they had a personal observatory that was considered one of the most important in all Europe.
Research:
- Ashworth, Dr. William B., Jr. “Elizabeth Hevelius.” Linda Hall Library. Dec. 22, 2017. https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/elisabeth-hevelius/
- Bernardi, G. (2016). Elisabetha Catherina Koopman Hevelius (1647–1693). In: The Unforgotten Sisters. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26127-0_11
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Johannes Hevelius". Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 Mar. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Hevelius
- Cartwright, Mark. “Johannes Hevelius.” World History Encyclopedia. Oct. 6, 2023. https://www.worldhistory.org/Johannes_Hevelius/
- Laundau, Elizabeth. “The 17th-Century Astronomer Who Made the First Atlas of the Moon.” Smithsonian. Dec. 27, 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/17th-century-astronomer-who-made-first-atlas-moon-180971103/
- O’Connor, J.J. and E.F. Robertson. “Johannes Hevelius.” MacTutor. School of Mathematics and Statistics
University of St Andrews, Scotland. December 2008. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hevelius_Johannes/ - O’Connor, J.J. and E.F. Robertson. “Catherina Elisabetha Koopman Hevelius.” MacTutor. School of Mathematics and Statistics
University of St Andrews, Scotland. December 2008. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hevelius_Koopman/ - Waniszewska C. “Johannes Hevelius: Polish Seventeenth-Century Brewer and Astronomer.” International Astronomical Union Colloquium. 1988;98:26-27. doi:10.1017/S0252921100092083
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I'm gonna do
a little bit of administrative work up top. Let's do it.
Which is exciting administrative work, which is that I have
(00:22):
a book coming out. Yeah. My other podcast, which is
called Criminalia, involves cocktails that go alongside historical true crime stories.
And we have a book called Killer Cocktails coming out
October fifteenth, which features abridged stories that you may have
heard on the show, as well as about half of
them are brand new tales and cocktails. Every cocktail has
(00:45):
a mocktail version. One chapter of the book the Mocktails
of the Star, and the cocktail part is kind of
secondary because it's about imposters. So I hope if that
sounds interesting to you, you will check it out. You
can buy it pretty much every where books are sold. Again,
that is Killer Cocktails, And I wrote that with my
co host on Criminalium, Marie Tramarky. I hope you get it,
(01:07):
and if you do, I hope you enjoy it. Now
to the business at hand, it's astronomy time. Yeah, this
one started out in kind of a kooky way because
I have been wanting to do for a minute an
episode of several sort of obscure women in astronomy history,
(01:30):
because there are a lot and a lot of them.
Because they were women, there's maybe not always as much
documentation as men that were working at the same time, right,
But one of those that I came across is Elizabethajavelius,
and then as I was looking at her, it became
very much about her and her husband because they worked
alongside each other. So this one is also a love story.
(01:54):
It does, I will tell you upfront, come with an
age difference that's so big that it's a little dicey.
If it happened today, I think a lot of criticism
would happen. But it features the work of seventeenth century
Polish astronomer Johanna Savelius and his second wife and close collaborator,
elizabethas So that is who we are talking about today.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Johanna Savalias was born in Danzig, Poland. That's how it's known.
In German today, it is more often known as its
Polish name of Gadax, and he was born on January
twenty eighth sixteen eleven. You will see his last name
spelled in a variety of ways, although it's believed that
Johannes was the first to use the form Hevelius, which
(02:40):
has roots in Latin, instead of one of the German
or Polish variations on the family name. Hevelius's father, Abraham,
was a wealthy man and his mother was Cordelia Hecker.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah. She was also from a pretty comfortable family and
when Johanns was seven he started school and that went
well for a while, but when he was thirteen, problems
brought on by the Thirty Years' War caused his school
to close, and at that point Johannes was sent to
another village to continue his education where the schools were
still running normally. This village, Gon Deelch, was populated mostly
(03:17):
by Polish speakers, whereas growing up in danteg at the time,
young Havilias had encountered mostly German speakers. This gave the
boy a high degree of proficiency in both languages.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
His father believed he was destined to follow in the
family business, which was brewing, and initially that is how
things went. He started working on a law degree at
the age of nineteen, and that's something that would be
valuable in business. And then in sixteen thirty four, at
the age of twenty three, he returned home. He had
(03:50):
spent some time at the University of Leyden in Holland,
and in London and in Paris. While he had been
in law school, a solar eclipse had captured shared an
interest in astronomy, which he'd actually had in childhood. He
continued his legal education, but he also made time to
study other interests. As he traveled, Hevelius connected with various
(04:13):
scientists and philosophers of Europe, and he kept up correspondence
with a lot of them for years afterward. This was,
of course, an incredible time to be a young, smart,
curious person who also had family money in Europe. The
telescope had been invented at the beginning of the century,
and Galileo had been observing the heavens through a telescope
(04:34):
for just a little more than two decades, and all
of this was really exciting to Johannes, maybe a bit
too exciting, because as he was planning to tour Italy
and meet some astronomers there, his family told him, even
though he had not finished his education and did not
get his law degree, that it was time to pack
it up and come home. Once he was home, his
(04:55):
parents decided he was ready to start his career running
the family brewery, but that was not his only job.
The Hevelius family owned a lot of businesses and he
oversaw those as well, so he was running a stable
in several townhouses as well. He also got married to
a young woman named Katrina Rabeshka on March twenty first,
(05:17):
sixteen thirty eight. Then he joined the Brewers Guild in
sixteen thirty nine. So there's another man that we need
to discuss briefly because he had a significant impact on Johannes,
and that is Peter Krueger. Krueger had been one of
Hevelius's teachers when he was still a young kid, and
Krueger had also been hired to do some private tutoring
(05:38):
with Johannes, and then as Johannes grew up, the two
men had become friends. Krueger was the person who had
first taught Johannes about astronomy, and when the teacher was
in his final days and Hevelius visited him, Krueger told
him that he felt that Johannes should pursue work not
in business, but in studying the heavens. This deathbed talk
(06:02):
clearly left a strong impression on Helius. Because he took
it to heart, he started making plans to build his
own observatory. Another solar eclipse on June one, sixteen thirty nine,
also influenced this decision. Watching the eclipse, Helius became completely
certain that he wanted to study the heavens. Construction of
(06:24):
his observatory took place in sixteen forty one, and this
was a project that was possible because of the Helius
family wealth, both in terms of financing the work and
in having a suitable spot to build in the first place.
Johannes owned three townhouses that sat in a row in Danzig,
and he built his observatory across the roofs of all
(06:46):
three of them to maximize his space. When he was done,
Helius called it Star Castle, and despite being outside of
the major hubs of astronomy in France and England, it
was recognized by scientists of the day as both impressive
and important. Yeah, he occupies this really unique space because
anyone else would have had to go out and seek
(07:10):
patronage and funding to get something like that done, and
he managed it on his own. Although to make this
dream work, Hevelius had to cut back on the amount
of time that he spent managing the brewery and the
other businesses, and at this point his wife Katerina really
stepped in to handle them. Johannes also was elected to
fill some leadership positions in Dunzig, first as an alderman
(07:32):
and then as a magistrate. Is how it's put in
one thing. In others, it's like he was more like
a city councilman. But those additional roles once again strained
his schedule and kind of left him without much time
to pursue his scientific interests. We mentioned in our episode
about Thomas Harriet that Harriet drew the first map of
the Moon in the sixteen teens. Roughly thirty years later,
(07:56):
Havelius wanted to draw a much more detailed map.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Of the lunar's surface.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
This also ties into our twenty fourteen episode on the
discovery of longitude, because one of the reasons people were
so eager to learn everything they could about the Moon
was so they could use it as a tool to
calculate longitude.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Yeah, that was a big driver in a lot of
astronomical study at this time. Hevelius started observing the moon
each night and making sketches and then refining those into
his early moon maps. A friend of Hevelius that he
had met when traveling as a young man, Parisian scientist
Pierre Gassendi, was the first colleague that Hevelius sent his
early sketches to for feedback, and gus Anddi was deeply
(08:40):
impressed with Hevelius's work and encouraged him to please keep going.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Spurred by Guessendi's encouragement, Johannes started a laborious process in
which he would draw the moon in detail every night
as he observed it through his telescope, and that he
would make a copper engraving of that drawing the following morning.
He was making all of his own equipment for this work,
including his engraving setup and a mind boggling telescope that
(09:09):
measured one hundred and fifty feet or forty six meters
in length. Hevelius ground all of the lenses himself. When
he had a full five years worth of observations and engravings,
which showed even subtle shifts in the Moon's appearance as
viewed from a fixed point on Earth. He collected forty
of them into one book, which was the first Moon
(09:31):
Atlas Selenographius dive Lune description, which translates to selenography or
a description of the Moon. In sixteen forty seven, Selenographia
was published, and it was immediately recognized as a significant work.
In addition to being far more detailed than any other
illustrations of the Moon, these illustrations were also.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Just simply beautiful. His drawings of the lunar surface are
framed by cherubs, some of w told up banners that
carry the titles and the details of the specific lunar map,
and others which appear to be observing the Moon and
the heavens like tiny astronomers with their own little telescopes
and globes and other tools. And because Helias was completing
(10:14):
every step of this process himself, from note taking to
drawing to illustrating, to the copper plates to printing, there
was no step where someone else could misinterpret information or
accidentally change his data. And this made this not just
an impressive creative and scientific feat, but it also kind
of gave it this patina as a source that people
(10:36):
felt was completely trustworthy in its content. When the book
was presented to Pope Innocent the Tenth, it said that
he proclaimed that it would be an amazing achievement if
Hevelius wasn't a heretic. Helius took an approach to his
moon maps in which he mirrored the way that the
Earth was mapped. He used words that were familiar, like
(10:58):
continents and island and bays, but those really weren't a
one to one in terms of what people already knew
these words to mean, which that created some confusion for
some people. Other astronomers would eventually reclassify the features of
the moon, but for a while, even as those other
astronomers were working, Johanna Savelius's work was the favored source.
(11:21):
He also identified the cyclic oscillation of the moon's position,
known as liberation. In just a moment, we're going to
introduce someone who would become very important to Johanna Savelius's life,
but first we will pause for a sponsor break. The
(11:46):
same year that Selenografia was published, ELIZABETHA. Copeman was born
on January seventeenth. Like Johannas, she was born into a
wealthy family. Her father, Nicholas Copeman, was a successful merchant,
and he and her mother, Johanna Mennings, had moved to
Danzig ten years before their daughter, Elizabetha was born. From
the time she was tiny, Elizabeta was fascinated by astronomy,
(12:10):
and living in Danzig, she of course knew about the
city's famous astronomer, Hevelius. She has said to have visited
Hevelius in his observatory when she was still a young child,
and that during that visit he had promised to show
her the heavens when she was just a bit older.
We're going to come back to Elizabetha in just a bit,
because according to the accounts we have, she did not
(12:32):
forget that promise. Two years after the moon Atlas came out,
Hevelius found himself once again reassessing his responsibilities because his
father died. This left Johannes, who was the only one
of his brothers to survive childhood, to take over all
the various business interests of the family. But he still
(12:52):
had Katerina's help, so he worked in his observatory and
she managed the day to day. But then in March
of sixth steen sixty two, Johannes's wife, Katerina died later
that year. Elizabeta once again visited Hevelius, and she asked
him once again if he would teach her about astronomy.
She was fifteen at that time and Hevelius was fifty one.
(13:16):
In what would be a scandalous match today and was
unusual for the time as well, the payer fell in
love and they married the following year in Saint Catharine's
on February third, sixteen sixty three. So okay, Obviously, that
thirty six year age difference is huge, and it's kind
of unsettling because she was underage. And while all of
(13:36):
the accounts and stories we have kind of suggest that
Elizabetha pursued Hevelius, we don't know if that's true, And
even if it were true, we can't really put a
whole lot of responsibility on her because there's this inherent
power imbalance of a teenager and a mature person, and
that mature person was also famous. Yeah, it's like, even
(13:59):
factoring in people getting married at younger ages.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
That was still unusually young. It was still unusually young,
unusually big age gap between the two of them. Taking
all that into account, though, they did seem to be
pretty well matched intellectually, and they genuinely cared very deeply
for one another. Elizabeta clearly had some hero worship when
it came to her husband, and he found her youth invigorating,
(14:27):
which was compounded by her eagerness to work alongside him.
They had a son early in their marriage who died
as a baby, and then three daughters who all lived
to adulthood. Their oldest daughter, Katerina Elizabetha, was baptized on
February fourteenth, sixteen sixty six. Elizabeta and Johanna's really built
(14:48):
their life together around their shared love of studying the cosmos.
In their time working together, we actually don't have a
clear understanding of a lot of which parts of their
work each of them was responsible for, because they were
both so involved in the work. Sometimes she's listed as
his aide or his assistant, but a lot of other
accounts are like no, she was like just about an
(15:11):
equal collaborator. It is worth noting, though, that Elizabetha was
working on their astronomy projects, but she was also raising
their kids and managing their household. One of the questions
that comes up about Elizabetha is in regard to her
notations of their work and her correspondents writing for the
School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St. Andrew's, Scotland, JJ.
(15:34):
O'Connor and E. F. Robertson point out that ELIZABETHA could
write in Latin, often in the correspondence she sent to
other scientists. That wouldn't have been especially common, especially not
in a young woman, and it's unclear whether she had
this skill before she and Hevelius reconnected when she was fifteen,
(15:56):
or if maybe he taught it to her after they
became a couple. Similarly, she was able to manage the
mathematics of the measurements that her husband took. These may
have been subjects she had studied as an academic outlier,
because she was a curious girl in a wealthy family
and had more access to education than most children did.
(16:16):
But she also might have learned it from Johannes, which
would indicate that she was very smart, because she would
have learned it very rapidly based on how soon she
was using those skills, and during this second marriage, Johannes
gained even more notoriety for his astronomy work. The year
after Johannes and elizabetha married Francis. Louis the fourteenth became
(16:38):
a patron of Hevelius, setting him up with an annual pension.
Jean Baptiste Colbert, who was Louis the fourteenth's finance minister,
had also been giving Johannes money since almost the beginning
of his astronomy efforts. You're wondering why was France so
keen on financing the work of a Polish astronomer that
was all about naval power. As Hevelius worked on his
(17:00):
lunar maps and his star charts, he gave information about
all of that, and particularly star coordinates, to the French,
and they used that information to improve their own navigational charts.
The year after the French king became Hevelius's patron, the
astronomer also became a member of the Royal Society of London,
which was unusual because most members were English. Throughout his
(17:22):
scientific work, Johannes created new instruments for himself, including new telescopes,
and in sixteen seventy three he published a book about
them titled Machina Celestis. The engravings used as illustrations in
the book may be the most telling in terms of
how he saw his young wife. He included an engraving
that featured Johannes on the left, the octant he is
(17:45):
using in the middle, and Elizabetha on the right. Another
engraving has the exact same composition, but instead of an octant,
they're working with a sextant. In both of these images,
the two of them are equal in terms of the composition.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, when you look at them, it very much looks
like the two of them are collaborators. It doesn't look
like he is doing the work and she is in
any way, you know, below him compositionally, or in the background.
In any way, she is essentially next to him with
this apparatus in the middle. In addition to his work
(18:21):
in moon maps, Hevelius also created star maps, and these
maps improved on those that had already been created by
other astronomers that came before him, including Tycho Brahi. This
pursuit shows an interesting divergence away from his lunar mapping
work because he did not believe in using telescopes to
create star maps. He thought that the best way was
(18:44):
to use the naked eye to be able to take
in the sky in a more complete way than the
use of a telescope could offer. Right, if you're looking
through a telescope, you're only seeing the portion that you're
focused at, as if you're looking at the whole thing,
you see it in its entirety. He rather famously debated
other well known astronomers on this matter, though he was
definitely not alone in his position. Robert Hook and John Flamstead,
(19:08):
to English astronomers who have been mentioned here on the
podcast before, both believed that greater accuracy could be achieved
in mapping the stars with the help of telescopes. This
argument apparently began when Hook read Hevelius's book Machina Celestis,
in which the Polish astronomer talked about how he had
observed and recorded various celestial objects. Hook kind of came
(19:30):
in hot with a very forceful critique which was published
by the Royal Society, but Hevelius argued against the points
that in fact that would skew the perception of star positions.
Hevelius was mistaken in this belief, but again he was
not alone. This was a belief held by a lot
of astronomers of the day. In the summer of sixteen
seventy nine, Sir Edmund Halley visited the observatory of the Heliuses.
(19:56):
This was the direct result of Helius complaining to the
Royal Society about Hook's attack. Hallie had been sent to
see how Johannes was doing his work and whether he
couldn't get more accurate coordinates for stars using a telescope
than Havevelius achieved with his own instruments and the naked eye.
Those tests were inconclusive, but Halle became friends with the
(20:18):
couple as a result of having spent time with them.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
One of the charming parts of their friendship is that
Elizabeth to ask Callie if he would get her addressed
from England. He agreed, and when he returned home he
had it custom made in the latest fashion and then sent.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Later that year. He asked for three copies of her
husband's books as reimbursement. There are some variations on this story,
so one aspect of those tests being inconclusive is that
Hevelius really was just so egoized like he They sometimes
mentioned that he had the eye of a lynx, that
(20:55):
he really could better than almost any other astronomer, like
pick things out of this guy and measure things that
he was seeing with the naked eye, whereas other people
would have needed a telescope. But I also wonder if
Halle wasn't like I like these people. Let's just call
it a wash. But the other thing is that there
is some other debate about that whole dress thing, and
(21:20):
that really the money was supposed to be used to
get some scientific stuff for Hevelius, and that Halle spin
it instead on this dress that he knew that ELIZABETHA
would want. It's all very cute in any regard. It
seems like they were all great friends, which I love.
So The arguments, though at the Royal Society over the
best method to measure the heavens, whether with the naked
(21:42):
eye or a telescope, continued for years. Some of the
members went after Hook for criticizing a project of a
magnitude that he himself had never taken on, and he
had kind of a reputation for being a pompous jerk.
So even though he was ultimately correct about telescopes generally
offering better measuring and plotting accuracy, a lot of people
(22:03):
just didn't like him, and so they cited opposite of him.
Some of the members of the Society even resigned amidst
the back and forth that went on there, which Havilius
wasn't even really a part of. At that point, a
big loss was about to befall the Havevlius household, and
we will get to that right after we hear from
the sponsors that keep the show going. On September twenty sixth,
(22:36):
sixteen seventy nine, just a few months after Hallie's visit,
the Havlius Observatory went up in smoke. Literally. The accounts
we have suggest that a candle that was left burning
by a member of the household staff started the fire.
There have even been hints that it may have been
a case of arson. So here is an excerpt from
a letter that was written at the time by a
(22:57):
person named Die Capellis, and it was sent to the
British consul, Peter Weika. Quote, the very noble and famous Hevilius,
feeling himself oppressed with great and unaccustomed troubles, as if
presaging some disaster to himself, withdrew with his much loved spouse,
but to his great misfortune, on the sixteenth September to
a garden not far from the city gate of Danzig,
(23:20):
in order that he might refresh and restore his fatigued
and weary self. He bade his coachman return to the
city with the horses before the gates were closed, and
tell the domestics to guard carefully against fire. The coachman,
when he had unharnessed and stabled the horses, made as
if to go to bed about nine o'clock. And whether
by carelessness, as some think, or with intent and of purpose,
(23:45):
as the very noble Heavilius himself concludes, from the fact
that he never rescued from the flames, four horses of
choice breed and great value, left a burning candle in
the stable and set the whole place of fire. The
fire being started, he passed on tiptoe through the front
house without saying a single word about it. This took
(24:05):
place about half past nine in the evening. After he left,
a hall servant, noticing an unusual smell of smoke, went
hastily to the rear portion of the house, where he
found the house unstable, burning with a steady blaze. The fire,
fanned by a strong southerly wind, creeping further every moment,
catching up everything adjacent before it could be stopped. So
(24:28):
the three front structures of the house quickly began burning.
These Hevelius occupied, and on these he had erected the
famous and incomparable observatory. His museum indeed, was broken open
by friendly hands hastening to assist and save what they
could from the flames, and the bound books were thrown
down from the windows, but not a few, purloined at
(24:49):
the hands of unscrupulous men, never returned to their owner. So,
because the observatory was built on a wooden platform that
straddled all three rooms connected, it was quickly consumed, as
were the houses below it. One important piece of Johannes
and Elizabetha's work was saved by their thirteen year old
(25:09):
daughter Katerina, who was at home at the time. That
was their unfinished fixed star catalog. Much of the rest
of their work was destroyed, though, as the account suggests,
people of the area, recognizing the importance of the observatory,
broke in and they tried to save what they could
from the burning building. Because of that, it's hard to
(25:30):
know if everything burned or if something's just kind of
walked away in the hands of looters. At this point,
and noted later in the letter that Holly just read from.
Only ten copies of the Macinuslestis had been sold, and
all the other copies had burned.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Up, so even in Hevelius's time, this was recognized as
a rare and valuable item. In addition to all the
manuscripts that were in various states of completion, all the
astronomical instrum that Johannas had constructed were also destroyed. For
a while, there was actually a rumor that Johannes had
died in the fire because he hadn't been home and
(26:10):
everybody didn't know that he had gone to the country
to spend time quietly with his wife. There was a
lot of like, where is he, He's not here, he
must have died. And it was actually during all of
that confusion that Halle sent Elizabetta's dress with a note
that he had heard that rumor and he hoped Johannas
was actually okay. Halle and Elizabetha continued to be friends
(26:30):
and correspond after this. Some of it was her asking
for recommendations from Halle on various doctors that might help
her husband's, you know, various ailments as he got older.
Unwilling to just give up their work and without really
access to another observatory. They immediately began rebuilding. Havelius was
(26:51):
sixty eight at this point, so not a young man,
but he felt like he had plenty of work left
to do, and he wanted to finish the star catalog.
He reached out to King Louis the fourteenth of France,
noting in his letter that by chance he had been
somewhat out of sorts the night before the fire, and
suggested to Elizabetta that they spend some time at their
(27:11):
country house so they weren't at the observatory when the
fire broke out. The royal was a patron of Hevelius,
so this letter was a request for funding assistance for
the rebuild project. They did indeed rebuild, and by the
end of sixteen eighty one they were recompiling the information
and illustrations that had been lost. At some point right
(27:33):
around this time of their lives. We don't know specifically
the date or even year. Elizabeta contracted smallpox, and, according
to an account written by johann Bernoulli, who was not
alive when this happened and was relaying the information decades later,
Johannes took care of her throughout her illness. She was
left with scars but did recover, and Johannas did not
(27:55):
contract it. In November of sixteen eighty six, Nui Savelius
was admitted to the hospital for an illness that's unclear
in nature. He lived just three more months and died
on January twenty eighth, sixteen eighty seven. That was his
seventy sixth birthday. In his lifetime, he'd been one of
(28:15):
the first people to observe sunspots and saw planets transiting
the Sun, and he had advanced knowledge of the moon
and the stars significantly. And his Big Star Catalog was
just about complete, as were two other works, but they
had not been published yet, so Elizabetha focused on getting
them ready to be printed. Near the end of the
(28:36):
year that he died, she asked the Royal Society in
London to get help with editing, but she did not
receive it. She did, however, get financial assistance to finish
the work from the King of Poland, Yon the third Sobieski,
so she kept working. Before sixteen eighty seven was over,
the Stillarum Fixarum, the Fixed Star Catalog was published. She
(28:57):
continued to work on preparing and editing the remaining two works,
which took several years. In sixteen ninety, Elizabetha was finally
able to see the rest of the work she and
Johannes had produced together.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Published.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
The first of these was Fir Momentum sobs anam civa
Uranographia et cetera that was a star atlas. It contained
fifty six engraved star maps, each of which spanned two pages.
This book integrated information from the fixed Star Catalog, represented
visually in varying views of the heavens. Eleven new constellations
(29:33):
were shown in the book, seven of which retain their
usage today. Others were incorporated into other larger constellation groupings.
Also in sixteen ninety, Elizabetha managed the publication of Prodromus Astronomier.
This was a companion volume too for Momentum, and it
built on the information in the Fixed Star Catalog and
(29:56):
the star atlas. This book includes information on how the
stars were cataloged, the way the various instruments of the
lab were used in the process, and it lists stars
by their constellation. It's believed that Elizabeta did not just
edit these works, but contributed to them in a significant way.
Her printed signature in them reads Elizabetta, widow of Hevelius.
(30:19):
When Elizabeta died on December twenty second, sixteen ninety three,
three years after she published the last of their work,
she was buried in the same tomb as her late husband.
She was just forty six when she died. Today, not
far from Saint Catharine's, a statue of Johannes Hevelius stands
in Gadansk in the Old Town section of the city
(30:41):
that shows him with long hair and a long twisted mustache,
seated and holding astronomical tools as he looks at the heavens.
His rebuilt observatory lasted a long time, but it is
now gone because, like many other buildings in Gadansk, it
was destroyed during World War II. Because of the Hevalius
families were in brewing, there have been at various times
(31:03):
Havelius named beer festivals that combine the love of beer
with an appreciation for astronomy. I am on board with that,
and there have been a number of beers named for
Johanna Savelias over the years as well.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Yeah, he's like the Samuel Adams of Europe. I think
he's the brewer astronomer. I love that there are are
Someavelias brews. I feel like next time I am in Europe,
I might be looking around to see if I can
find some, even though I'm not a particularly big beer drinker,
but I want one because it's historical. I also have
(31:39):
some listener mail. This is from our listener Brian, and
it tickled me, he writes, Holly and Tracy love your podcast.
Our family tends to save them up for drives of
an hour plus, especially long vacation road trips. Our seven
year old son, who likes the podcast more than he
lets on, will periodically ask us to play an episode
we didn't finish on an earlier I'll ask him if
(32:02):
he likes the podcast, and he will respond with something
like it's more interesting than staring out the window of
the car. I love seven year old logic. I love
all of that. I found your John ven podcast particularly
timely given the increased profile of a certain big fan
of ven Diagrams in the news lately. For pet tax
I've included a couple of photos of our approximately fourteen
(32:23):
year old cat, Benny, who we've had in our family
for about a dozen years. He has become increasingly sweet
in his older years. Oh my goodness, Benny is the
cutest baby maybe on the planet. I have a little
weakness for creamsicle kiddies. He's a little orange baby, and
he just has one of those sweet faces that looks
(32:44):
like it could do no wrong ever, at any time.
Whatever has happened, Benny is faultless in my opinion. If
he would like to write to us and send us
pictures of your very good babies who never do any wrong,
you can do that at History podcast heartradio dot com.
You can also subscribe to the podcast if you haven't
(33:04):
gotten around to that yet. That is very simple to
do on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to
your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I'm gonna do
a little bit of administrative work up top. Let's do it.
Which is exciting administrative work, which is that I have
(00:22):
a book coming out. Yeah. My other podcast, which is
called Criminalia, involves cocktails that go alongside historical true crime stories.
And we have a book called Killer Cocktails coming out
October fifteenth, which features abridged stories that you may have
heard on the show, as well as about half of
them are brand new tales and cocktails. Every cocktail has
(00:45):
a mocktail version. One chapter of the book the Mocktails
of the Star, and the cocktail part is kind of
secondary because it's about imposters. So I hope if that
sounds interesting to you, you will check it out. You
can buy it pretty much every where books are sold. Again,
that is Killer Cocktails, And I wrote that with my
co host on Criminalium, Marie Tramarky. I hope you get it,
(01:07):
and if you do, I hope you enjoy it. Now
to the business at hand, it's astronomy time. Yeah, this
one started out in kind of a kooky way because
I have been wanting to do for a minute an
episode of several sort of obscure women in astronomy history,
(01:30):
because there are a lot and a lot of them.
Because they were women, there's maybe not always as much
documentation as men that were working at the same time, right,
But one of those that I came across is Elizabethajavelius,
and then as I was looking at her, it became
very much about her and her husband because they worked
alongside each other. So this one is also a love story.
(01:54):
It does, I will tell you upfront, come with an
age difference that's so big that it's a little dicey.
If it happened today, I think a lot of criticism
would happen. But it features the work of seventeenth century
Polish astronomer Johanna Savelius and his second wife and close collaborator,
elizabethas So that is who we are talking about today.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Johanna Savalias was born in Danzig, Poland. That's how it's known.
In German today, it is more often known as its
Polish name of Gadax, and he was born on January
twenty eighth sixteen eleven. You will see his last name
spelled in a variety of ways, although it's believed that
Johannes was the first to use the form Hevelius, which
(02:40):
has roots in Latin, instead of one of the German
or Polish variations on the family name. Hevelius's father, Abraham,
was a wealthy man and his mother was Cordelia Hecker.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah. She was also from a pretty comfortable family and
when Johanns was seven he started school and that went
well for a while, but when he was thirteen, problems
brought on by the Thirty Years' War caused his school
to close, and at that point Johannes was sent to
another village to continue his education where the schools were
still running normally. This village, Gon Deelch, was populated mostly
(03:17):
by Polish speakers, whereas growing up in danteg at the time,
young Havilias had encountered mostly German speakers. This gave the
boy a high degree of proficiency in both languages.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
His father believed he was destined to follow in the
family business, which was brewing, and initially that is how
things went. He started working on a law degree at
the age of nineteen, and that's something that would be
valuable in business. And then in sixteen thirty four, at
the age of twenty three, he returned home. He had
(03:50):
spent some time at the University of Leyden in Holland,
and in London and in Paris. While he had been
in law school, a solar eclipse had captured shared an
interest in astronomy, which he'd actually had in childhood. He
continued his legal education, but he also made time to
study other interests. As he traveled, Hevelius connected with various
(04:13):
scientists and philosophers of Europe, and he kept up correspondence
with a lot of them for years afterward. This was,
of course, an incredible time to be a young, smart,
curious person who also had family money in Europe. The
telescope had been invented at the beginning of the century,
and Galileo had been observing the heavens through a telescope
(04:34):
for just a little more than two decades, and all
of this was really exciting to Johannes, maybe a bit
too exciting, because as he was planning to tour Italy
and meet some astronomers there, his family told him, even
though he had not finished his education and did not
get his law degree, that it was time to pack
it up and come home. Once he was home, his
(04:55):
parents decided he was ready to start his career running
the family brewery, but that was not his only job.
The Hevelius family owned a lot of businesses and he
oversaw those as well, so he was running a stable
in several townhouses as well. He also got married to
a young woman named Katrina Rabeshka on March twenty first,
(05:17):
sixteen thirty eight. Then he joined the Brewers Guild in
sixteen thirty nine. So there's another man that we need
to discuss briefly because he had a significant impact on Johannes,
and that is Peter Krueger. Krueger had been one of
Hevelius's teachers when he was still a young kid, and
Krueger had also been hired to do some private tutoring
(05:38):
with Johannes, and then as Johannes grew up, the two
men had become friends. Krueger was the person who had
first taught Johannes about astronomy, and when the teacher was
in his final days and Hevelius visited him, Krueger told
him that he felt that Johannes should pursue work not
in business, but in studying the heavens. This deathbed talk
(06:02):
clearly left a strong impression on Helius. Because he took
it to heart, he started making plans to build his
own observatory. Another solar eclipse on June one, sixteen thirty nine,
also influenced this decision. Watching the eclipse, Helius became completely
certain that he wanted to study the heavens. Construction of
(06:24):
his observatory took place in sixteen forty one, and this
was a project that was possible because of the Helius
family wealth, both in terms of financing the work and
in having a suitable spot to build in the first place.
Johannes owned three townhouses that sat in a row in Danzig,
and he built his observatory across the roofs of all
(06:46):
three of them to maximize his space. When he was done,
Helius called it Star Castle, and despite being outside of
the major hubs of astronomy in France and England, it
was recognized by scientists of the day as both impressive
and important. Yeah, he occupies this really unique space because
anyone else would have had to go out and seek
(07:10):
patronage and funding to get something like that done, and
he managed it on his own. Although to make this
dream work, Hevelius had to cut back on the amount
of time that he spent managing the brewery and the
other businesses, and at this point his wife Katerina really
stepped in to handle them. Johannes also was elected to
fill some leadership positions in Dunzig, first as an alderman
(07:32):
and then as a magistrate. Is how it's put in
one thing. In others, it's like he was more like
a city councilman. But those additional roles once again strained
his schedule and kind of left him without much time
to pursue his scientific interests. We mentioned in our episode
about Thomas Harriet that Harriet drew the first map of
the Moon in the sixteen teens. Roughly thirty years later,
(07:56):
Havelius wanted to draw a much more detailed map.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Of the lunar's surface.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
This also ties into our twenty fourteen episode on the
discovery of longitude, because one of the reasons people were
so eager to learn everything they could about the Moon
was so they could use it as a tool to
calculate longitude.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Yeah, that was a big driver in a lot of
astronomical study at this time. Hevelius started observing the moon
each night and making sketches and then refining those into
his early moon maps. A friend of Hevelius that he
had met when traveling as a young man, Parisian scientist
Pierre Gassendi, was the first colleague that Hevelius sent his
early sketches to for feedback, and gus Anddi was deeply
(08:40):
impressed with Hevelius's work and encouraged him to please keep going.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Spurred by Guessendi's encouragement, Johannes started a laborious process in
which he would draw the moon in detail every night
as he observed it through his telescope, and that he
would make a copper engraving of that drawing the following morning.
He was making all of his own equipment for this work,
including his engraving setup and a mind boggling telescope that
(09:09):
measured one hundred and fifty feet or forty six meters
in length. Hevelius ground all of the lenses himself. When
he had a full five years worth of observations and engravings,
which showed even subtle shifts in the Moon's appearance as
viewed from a fixed point on Earth. He collected forty
of them into one book, which was the first Moon
(09:31):
Atlas Selenographius dive Lune description, which translates to selenography or
a description of the Moon. In sixteen forty seven, Selenographia
was published, and it was immediately recognized as a significant work.
In addition to being far more detailed than any other
illustrations of the Moon, these illustrations were also.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Just simply beautiful. His drawings of the lunar surface are
framed by cherubs, some of w told up banners that
carry the titles and the details of the specific lunar map,
and others which appear to be observing the Moon and
the heavens like tiny astronomers with their own little telescopes
and globes and other tools. And because Helias was completing
(10:14):
every step of this process himself, from note taking to
drawing to illustrating, to the copper plates to printing, there
was no step where someone else could misinterpret information or
accidentally change his data. And this made this not just
an impressive creative and scientific feat, but it also kind
of gave it this patina as a source that people
(10:36):
felt was completely trustworthy in its content. When the book
was presented to Pope Innocent the Tenth, it said that
he proclaimed that it would be an amazing achievement if
Hevelius wasn't a heretic. Helius took an approach to his
moon maps in which he mirrored the way that the
Earth was mapped. He used words that were familiar, like
(10:58):
continents and island and bays, but those really weren't a
one to one in terms of what people already knew
these words to mean, which that created some confusion for
some people. Other astronomers would eventually reclassify the features of
the moon, but for a while, even as those other
astronomers were working, Johanna Savelius's work was the favored source.
(11:21):
He also identified the cyclic oscillation of the moon's position,
known as liberation. In just a moment, we're going to
introduce someone who would become very important to Johanna Savelius's life,
but first we will pause for a sponsor break. The
(11:46):
same year that Selenografia was published, ELIZABETHA. Copeman was born
on January seventeenth. Like Johannas, she was born into a
wealthy family. Her father, Nicholas Copeman, was a successful merchant,
and he and her mother, Johanna Mennings, had moved to
Danzig ten years before their daughter, Elizabetha was born. From
the time she was tiny, Elizabeta was fascinated by astronomy,
(12:10):
and living in Danzig, she of course knew about the
city's famous astronomer, Hevelius. She has said to have visited
Hevelius in his observatory when she was still a young child,
and that during that visit he had promised to show
her the heavens when she was just a bit older.
We're going to come back to Elizabetha in just a bit,
because according to the accounts we have, she did not
(12:32):
forget that promise. Two years after the moon Atlas came out,
Hevelius found himself once again reassessing his responsibilities because his
father died. This left Johannes, who was the only one
of his brothers to survive childhood, to take over all
the various business interests of the family. But he still
(12:52):
had Katerina's help, so he worked in his observatory and
she managed the day to day. But then in March
of sixth steen sixty two, Johannes's wife, Katerina died later
that year. Elizabeta once again visited Hevelius, and she asked
him once again if he would teach her about astronomy.
She was fifteen at that time and Hevelius was fifty one.
(13:16):
In what would be a scandalous match today and was
unusual for the time as well, the payer fell in
love and they married the following year in Saint Catharine's
on February third, sixteen sixty three. So okay, Obviously, that
thirty six year age difference is huge, and it's kind
of unsettling because she was underage. And while all of
(13:36):
the accounts and stories we have kind of suggest that
Elizabetha pursued Hevelius, we don't know if that's true, And
even if it were true, we can't really put a
whole lot of responsibility on her because there's this inherent
power imbalance of a teenager and a mature person, and
that mature person was also famous. Yeah, it's like, even
(13:59):
factoring in people getting married at younger ages.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
That was still unusually young. It was still unusually young,
unusually big age gap between the two of them. Taking
all that into account, though, they did seem to be
pretty well matched intellectually, and they genuinely cared very deeply
for one another. Elizabeta clearly had some hero worship when
it came to her husband, and he found her youth invigorating,
(14:27):
which was compounded by her eagerness to work alongside him.
They had a son early in their marriage who died
as a baby, and then three daughters who all lived
to adulthood. Their oldest daughter, Katerina Elizabetha, was baptized on
February fourteenth, sixteen sixty six. Elizabeta and Johanna's really built
(14:48):
their life together around their shared love of studying the cosmos.
In their time working together, we actually don't have a
clear understanding of a lot of which parts of their
work each of them was responsible for, because they were
both so involved in the work. Sometimes she's listed as
his aide or his assistant, but a lot of other
accounts are like no, she was like just about an
(15:11):
equal collaborator. It is worth noting, though, that Elizabetha was
working on their astronomy projects, but she was also raising
their kids and managing their household. One of the questions
that comes up about Elizabetha is in regard to her
notations of their work and her correspondents writing for the
School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St. Andrew's, Scotland, JJ.
(15:34):
O'Connor and E. F. Robertson point out that ELIZABETHA could
write in Latin, often in the correspondence she sent to
other scientists. That wouldn't have been especially common, especially not
in a young woman, and it's unclear whether she had
this skill before she and Hevelius reconnected when she was fifteen,
(15:56):
or if maybe he taught it to her after they
became a couple. Similarly, she was able to manage the
mathematics of the measurements that her husband took. These may
have been subjects she had studied as an academic outlier,
because she was a curious girl in a wealthy family
and had more access to education than most children did.
(16:16):
But she also might have learned it from Johannes, which
would indicate that she was very smart, because she would
have learned it very rapidly based on how soon she
was using those skills, and during this second marriage, Johannes
gained even more notoriety for his astronomy work. The year
after Johannes and elizabetha married Francis. Louis the fourteenth became
(16:38):
a patron of Hevelius, setting him up with an annual pension.
Jean Baptiste Colbert, who was Louis the fourteenth's finance minister,
had also been giving Johannes money since almost the beginning
of his astronomy efforts. You're wondering why was France so
keen on financing the work of a Polish astronomer that
was all about naval power. As Hevelius worked on his
(17:00):
lunar maps and his star charts, he gave information about
all of that, and particularly star coordinates, to the French,
and they used that information to improve their own navigational charts.
The year after the French king became Hevelius's patron, the
astronomer also became a member of the Royal Society of London,
which was unusual because most members were English. Throughout his
(17:22):
scientific work, Johannes created new instruments for himself, including new telescopes,
and in sixteen seventy three he published a book about
them titled Machina Celestis. The engravings used as illustrations in
the book may be the most telling in terms of
how he saw his young wife. He included an engraving
that featured Johannes on the left, the octant he is
(17:45):
using in the middle, and Elizabetha on the right. Another
engraving has the exact same composition, but instead of an octant,
they're working with a sextant. In both of these images,
the two of them are equal in terms of the composition.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, when you look at them, it very much looks
like the two of them are collaborators. It doesn't look
like he is doing the work and she is in
any way, you know, below him compositionally, or in the background.
In any way, she is essentially next to him with
this apparatus in the middle. In addition to his work
(18:21):
in moon maps, Hevelius also created star maps, and these
maps improved on those that had already been created by
other astronomers that came before him, including Tycho Brahi. This
pursuit shows an interesting divergence away from his lunar mapping
work because he did not believe in using telescopes to
create star maps. He thought that the best way was
(18:44):
to use the naked eye to be able to take
in the sky in a more complete way than the
use of a telescope could offer. Right, if you're looking
through a telescope, you're only seeing the portion that you're
focused at, as if you're looking at the whole thing,
you see it in its entirety. He rather famously debated
other well known astronomers on this matter, though he was
definitely not alone in his position. Robert Hook and John Flamstead,
(19:08):
to English astronomers who have been mentioned here on the
podcast before, both believed that greater accuracy could be achieved
in mapping the stars with the help of telescopes. This
argument apparently began when Hook read Hevelius's book Machina Celestis,
in which the Polish astronomer talked about how he had
observed and recorded various celestial objects. Hook kind of came
(19:30):
in hot with a very forceful critique which was published
by the Royal Society, but Hevelius argued against the points
that in fact that would skew the perception of star positions.
Hevelius was mistaken in this belief, but again he was
not alone. This was a belief held by a lot
of astronomers of the day. In the summer of sixteen
seventy nine, Sir Edmund Halley visited the observatory of the Heliuses.
(19:56):
This was the direct result of Helius complaining to the
Royal Society about Hook's attack. Hallie had been sent to
see how Johannes was doing his work and whether he
couldn't get more accurate coordinates for stars using a telescope
than Havevelius achieved with his own instruments and the naked eye.
Those tests were inconclusive, but Halle became friends with the
(20:18):
couple as a result of having spent time with them.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
One of the charming parts of their friendship is that
Elizabeth to ask Callie if he would get her addressed
from England. He agreed, and when he returned home he
had it custom made in the latest fashion and then sent.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Later that year. He asked for three copies of her
husband's books as reimbursement. There are some variations on this story,
so one aspect of those tests being inconclusive is that
Hevelius really was just so egoized like he They sometimes
mentioned that he had the eye of a lynx, that
(20:55):
he really could better than almost any other astronomer, like
pick things out of this guy and measure things that
he was seeing with the naked eye, whereas other people
would have needed a telescope. But I also wonder if
Halle wasn't like I like these people. Let's just call
it a wash. But the other thing is that there
is some other debate about that whole dress thing, and
(21:20):
that really the money was supposed to be used to
get some scientific stuff for Hevelius, and that Halle spin
it instead on this dress that he knew that ELIZABETHA
would want. It's all very cute in any regard. It
seems like they were all great friends, which I love.
So The arguments, though at the Royal Society over the
best method to measure the heavens, whether with the naked
(21:42):
eye or a telescope, continued for years. Some of the
members went after Hook for criticizing a project of a
magnitude that he himself had never taken on, and he
had kind of a reputation for being a pompous jerk.
So even though he was ultimately correct about telescopes generally
offering better measuring and plotting accuracy, a lot of people
(22:03):
just didn't like him, and so they cited opposite of him.
Some of the members of the Society even resigned amidst
the back and forth that went on there, which Havilius
wasn't even really a part of. At that point, a
big loss was about to befall the Havevlius household, and
we will get to that right after we hear from
the sponsors that keep the show going. On September twenty sixth,
(22:36):
sixteen seventy nine, just a few months after Hallie's visit,
the Havlius Observatory went up in smoke. Literally. The accounts
we have suggest that a candle that was left burning
by a member of the household staff started the fire.
There have even been hints that it may have been
a case of arson. So here is an excerpt from
a letter that was written at the time by a
(22:57):
person named Die Capellis, and it was sent to the
British consul, Peter Weika. Quote, the very noble and famous Hevilius,
feeling himself oppressed with great and unaccustomed troubles, as if
presaging some disaster to himself, withdrew with his much loved spouse,
but to his great misfortune, on the sixteenth September to
a garden not far from the city gate of Danzig,
(23:20):
in order that he might refresh and restore his fatigued
and weary self. He bade his coachman return to the
city with the horses before the gates were closed, and
tell the domestics to guard carefully against fire. The coachman,
when he had unharnessed and stabled the horses, made as
if to go to bed about nine o'clock. And whether
by carelessness, as some think, or with intent and of purpose,
(23:45):
as the very noble Heavilius himself concludes, from the fact
that he never rescued from the flames, four horses of
choice breed and great value, left a burning candle in
the stable and set the whole place of fire. The
fire being started, he passed on tiptoe through the front
house without saying a single word about it. This took
(24:05):
place about half past nine in the evening. After he left,
a hall servant, noticing an unusual smell of smoke, went
hastily to the rear portion of the house, where he
found the house unstable, burning with a steady blaze. The fire,
fanned by a strong southerly wind, creeping further every moment,
catching up everything adjacent before it could be stopped. So
(24:28):
the three front structures of the house quickly began burning.
These Hevelius occupied, and on these he had erected the
famous and incomparable observatory. His museum indeed, was broken open
by friendly hands hastening to assist and save what they
could from the flames, and the bound books were thrown
down from the windows, but not a few, purloined at
(24:49):
the hands of unscrupulous men, never returned to their owner. So,
because the observatory was built on a wooden platform that
straddled all three rooms connected, it was quickly consumed, as
were the houses below it. One important piece of Johannes
and Elizabetha's work was saved by their thirteen year old
(25:09):
daughter Katerina, who was at home at the time. That
was their unfinished fixed star catalog. Much of the rest
of their work was destroyed, though, as the account suggests,
people of the area, recognizing the importance of the observatory,
broke in and they tried to save what they could
from the burning building. Because of that, it's hard to
(25:30):
know if everything burned or if something's just kind of
walked away in the hands of looters. At this point,
and noted later in the letter that Holly just read from.
Only ten copies of the Macinuslestis had been sold, and
all the other copies had burned.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Up, so even in Hevelius's time, this was recognized as
a rare and valuable item. In addition to all the
manuscripts that were in various states of completion, all the
astronomical instrum that Johannas had constructed were also destroyed. For
a while, there was actually a rumor that Johannes had
died in the fire because he hadn't been home and
(26:10):
everybody didn't know that he had gone to the country
to spend time quietly with his wife. There was a
lot of like, where is he, He's not here, he
must have died. And it was actually during all of
that confusion that Halle sent Elizabetta's dress with a note
that he had heard that rumor and he hoped Johannas
was actually okay. Halle and Elizabetha continued to be friends
(26:30):
and correspond after this. Some of it was her asking
for recommendations from Halle on various doctors that might help
her husband's, you know, various ailments as he got older.
Unwilling to just give up their work and without really
access to another observatory. They immediately began rebuilding. Havelius was
(26:51):
sixty eight at this point, so not a young man,
but he felt like he had plenty of work left
to do, and he wanted to finish the star catalog.
He reached out to King Louis the fourteenth of France,
noting in his letter that by chance he had been
somewhat out of sorts the night before the fire, and
suggested to Elizabetta that they spend some time at their
(27:11):
country house so they weren't at the observatory when the
fire broke out. The royal was a patron of Hevelius,
so this letter was a request for funding assistance for
the rebuild project. They did indeed rebuild, and by the
end of sixteen eighty one they were recompiling the information
and illustrations that had been lost. At some point right
(27:33):
around this time of their lives. We don't know specifically
the date or even year. Elizabeta contracted smallpox, and, according
to an account written by johann Bernoulli, who was not
alive when this happened and was relaying the information decades later,
Johannes took care of her throughout her illness. She was
left with scars but did recover, and Johannas did not
(27:55):
contract it. In November of sixteen eighty six, Nui Savelius
was admitted to the hospital for an illness that's unclear
in nature. He lived just three more months and died
on January twenty eighth, sixteen eighty seven. That was his
seventy sixth birthday. In his lifetime, he'd been one of
(28:15):
the first people to observe sunspots and saw planets transiting
the Sun, and he had advanced knowledge of the moon
and the stars significantly. And his Big Star Catalog was
just about complete, as were two other works, but they
had not been published yet, so Elizabetha focused on getting
them ready to be printed. Near the end of the
(28:36):
year that he died, she asked the Royal Society in
London to get help with editing, but she did not
receive it. She did, however, get financial assistance to finish
the work from the King of Poland, Yon the third Sobieski,
so she kept working. Before sixteen eighty seven was over,
the Stillarum Fixarum, the Fixed Star Catalog was published. She
(28:57):
continued to work on preparing and editing the remaining two works,
which took several years. In sixteen ninety, Elizabetha was finally
able to see the rest of the work she and
Johannes had produced together.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Published.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
The first of these was Fir Momentum sobs anam civa
Uranographia et cetera that was a star atlas. It contained
fifty six engraved star maps, each of which spanned two pages.
This book integrated information from the fixed Star Catalog, represented
visually in varying views of the heavens. Eleven new constellations
(29:33):
were shown in the book, seven of which retain their
usage today. Others were incorporated into other larger constellation groupings.
Also in sixteen ninety, Elizabetha managed the publication of Prodromus Astronomier.
This was a companion volume too for Momentum, and it
built on the information in the Fixed Star Catalog and
(29:56):
the star atlas. This book includes information on how the
stars were cataloged, the way the various instruments of the
lab were used in the process, and it lists stars
by their constellation. It's believed that Elizabeta did not just
edit these works, but contributed to them in a significant way.
Her printed signature in them reads Elizabetta, widow of Hevelius.
(30:19):
When Elizabeta died on December twenty second, sixteen ninety three,
three years after she published the last of their work,
she was buried in the same tomb as her late husband.
She was just forty six when she died. Today, not
far from Saint Catharine's, a statue of Johannes Hevelius stands
in Gadansk in the Old Town section of the city
(30:41):
that shows him with long hair and a long twisted mustache,
seated and holding astronomical tools as he looks at the heavens.
His rebuilt observatory lasted a long time, but it is
now gone because, like many other buildings in Gadansk, it
was destroyed during World War II. Because of the Hevalius
families were in brewing, there have been at various times
(31:03):
Havelius named beer festivals that combine the love of beer
with an appreciation for astronomy. I am on board with that,
and there have been a number of beers named for
Johanna Savelias over the years as well.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Yeah, he's like the Samuel Adams of Europe. I think
he's the brewer astronomer. I love that there are are
Someavelias brews. I feel like next time I am in Europe,
I might be looking around to see if I can
find some, even though I'm not a particularly big beer drinker,
but I want one because it's historical. I also have
(31:39):
some listener mail. This is from our listener Brian, and
it tickled me, he writes, Holly and Tracy love your podcast.
Our family tends to save them up for drives of
an hour plus, especially long vacation road trips. Our seven
year old son, who likes the podcast more than he
lets on, will periodically ask us to play an episode
we didn't finish on an earlier I'll ask him if
(32:02):
he likes the podcast, and he will respond with something
like it's more interesting than staring out the window of
the car. I love seven year old logic. I love
all of that. I found your John ven podcast particularly
timely given the increased profile of a certain big fan
of ven Diagrams in the news lately. For pet tax
I've included a couple of photos of our approximately fourteen
(32:23):
year old cat, Benny, who we've had in our family
for about a dozen years. He has become increasingly sweet
in his older years. Oh my goodness, Benny is the
cutest baby maybe on the planet. I have a little
weakness for creamsicle kiddies. He's a little orange baby, and
he just has one of those sweet faces that looks
(32:44):
like it could do no wrong ever, at any time.
Whatever has happened, Benny is faultless in my opinion. If
he would like to write to us and send us
pictures of your very good babies who never do any wrong,
you can do that at History podcast heartradio dot com.
You can also subscribe to the podcast if you haven't
(33:04):
gotten around to that yet. That is very simple to
do on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to
your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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