March 16, 2019 • 28 mins
Today we revisit a 2014 episode about Caroline Herschel, who managed to break the barrier of women in scientific fields far earlier than you might suspect, in part because of her association with her brother, and in equal measure due to her steadfast dedication to her work.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey listeners, Happy Saturday. Today is Caroline Herschel's birthday, so
this seems like the perfect time to share our episode
about her. From Caroline Herschel is recognized as the first
woman to discover a comet, which we talked about in
this episode, but we also wanted to take just a
moment to recognize another woman, Maria Kirsch, also known as
(00:23):
Maria Winkleman, who discovered a comment in seventeen o two,
and that was decades before Herschel's first comment discovery, but
she's not often named as the first woman to discover
a comment, both because her husband initially took the credit
for it and because two other male astronomers had made
the same discovery just a few hours before in Rome.
(00:44):
So happy birthday, Caroline Herschel, and Happy Saturday, everybody. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frying and I'm Tray Wilson. Uh and today is
(01:07):
for me a whoa Astronomy Day because I love astronomy.
I love talking about space and all things astronomical, so
it's a special in my wheelhouse one. But also uh,
we're talking about a woman astronomer who really managed to
break the barrier of women in scientific fields way earlier
than you might anticipate. Uh, in part because she was
(01:30):
working alongside her brother and that sort of gave her
entree into the to the world of science and astronomy
and an equal measure though it was due to her
really steadfast dedication to her work. She was a very
no nonsense woman and completely focused uh. And as a consequence,
she had achieved a great deal. So we are talking
about Caroline Lucretia Herschel, who was born on March sixteenth
(01:54):
of seventeen fifty and she was born in Hanover, Germany.
Her parents were Anna ills Mortsen and i Isaac Herschel,
and when Caroline was born, the Herschels were already in
their eighteenth year of marriage, so they had already had
a pretty large family. They ended up having a total
of ten children, and Caroline was the eighth of them,
although four of their children did not live pastor early childhood,
(02:15):
and according to family records, the Herschel family line had
actually come from Moravia, where they left due to their
Protestant beliefs and ended up settling in Saxony. Isaac was
a musician and he played in a military regiment. He
educated his sons in music whenever he was home, and
it was during these lessons that Caroline's older brother, Williams,
(02:37):
started to show some natural gifts for music. He was
not only musically talented, but he was also extremely smart
and very quick to learn in other areas of study. Also, Yeah,
and one thing I feel like I should point out
I didn't include it in the notes when I say
that he was Isaac was able to educate his children
when he was home. Being a military musician in this
(03:00):
context is not uh as much of an easy ride
as you may think. These men had to travel with
the troops. They were in the trenches with the troops.
They were really part of a functioning, active military. It
wasn't like they just showed up to play trumpet before
things happened. So he really was traveling a lot. And
(03:22):
while William was urged into a musical career because of
his natural proclivity that exhibited itself very early on, Caroline
really felt when she looked back at their childhood, and
she mentions it in her memoirs and in letters that
if he had been allowed to pursue other interests other
than music, his genius and astronomy really would have been
revealed much earlier, and in her memoirs she mentions that
(03:45):
while her father Isaac was indeed devoted to music, he
too was also interested in the stars. And here's a
quick excerpt from one of her memories from childhood. She says,
my father was a great admirer of astronomy and had
some knowledge of that science. For I remember his taking
me on a clear frosty night into the street to
make me acquainted with several of the most beautiful constellations
(04:07):
after we had been gazing at a comment which was
then visible. And I well remember with what delight he
used to assist my brother William in his various contrivances
in the pursuit of his philosophical studies, among which was
a neatly turned four inch globe upon which the equator
and ecliptic were engraved by my brother. Caroline was also
very attached to her brother William, who was twelve years
(04:30):
older than she was, from the time she was really
very young. Yeah, she speaks of him so lovingly and
with great adoration. Uh. In her memoirs, it's it's easy
for me to identify with because my siblings are all
much older than me, and I look at them and
prettating my oldest sister almost as a parent figure. And
it's a very similar relationship that she had with William,
(04:51):
especially because Isaac traveled so much. Uh And while Isaac
wanted his children to learn music and French and philosophy,
particularly all of his children his wife uh and I
had a really much more strict and sensible path in
mind for Caroline. When she was quite young, it became
Caroline's job to knit all of the socks and stockings
(05:12):
for her brothers, and as the male siblings of the
family pursued their musical careers, Caroline learned how to care
for a home. She really did not get the benefit
of kind of the more philosophical education. In seventeen sixty one,
Caroline got really severe typhus fever and it nearly killed her.
Even after she got better, it took a really long
(05:34):
time for her to regain her strength, and she recounted
having to crawl up and downstairs on all fours for
months because she was too weak to walk up and
down them. Uh So this illness also pretty significantly stunted
Caroline's growth. She was extremely diminutive even when she was
in her adulthood and not growing anymore. She was less
(05:54):
than five ft tall, uh, and you know, it left
her not particularly pleasing to the eye in their opinion,
And so her parents sort of came to this conclusion
that she was never really going to have any marriage prospects,
and so she should hope for a career as a
scullery made like that. That was they were trying to
be very practical. It sounds really rough for a parent
to do, particularly and to the modern era, where you know,
(06:17):
children are encouraged to really follow their dreams and pursue
their heart's desires um. But in this instance, this meant
that Caroline's mother Anna basically doubled down on her insistence
that her daughter really needed to stick to learning useful
skills and leave the life of the mind to her brothers.
In the early seventeen sixties, Caroline's brother William traveled to
(06:38):
England to pursue work as a music teacher in organist
after he deserted his position with the Hannovarian Guards. Even
while he spent time in various towns traveling far away people.
The family was really hoping that he would come back
to Hanover to settle down, and he didn't make an
appearance back in Germany in seventeen sixty four, but it
(06:59):
was more than anything else, just to tell the family
that he was not coming back to live. He was
moving to England permanently, and Caroline's memoir details this is
a time of joyful reunion, but also sadness that she
was too busy with scullery work, uh and with her
first communion to really see him, and this bittersweet knowledge
(07:20):
that they all shared that it would likely be quite
some time before anyone in the family was going to
see him again. And in this particular part of her memoir,
she is really extremely clear and does not hide the
fact that he is her very favorite brother. She calls
him her dearest brother. So when William left, and as
we mentioned, it conflicted with her first communion, she was
(07:43):
really heartbroken that her goodbye was cut short, and so
she wrote this about his departure, it's effect on my
shattered nerves. I will not attempt to describe nor what
I felt for days and weeks after. I wish it
were possible to say what I wished to say without
feeling a new that feverish wretchedness which accompanied my walk
(08:04):
in the afternoon with some of my school companions and
my black silk dress and bouquet of artificial flowers, the
same which had served my sister on her bridal day.
I could think of nothing that on my return I
should find nobody but my disconsolate father and mother. So sad. Uh.
She really just adored her brother, and you know, he
(08:24):
was like a ray of sunshine when he came home,
and knowing that he was gone really broke her heart.
And the following August, their father, Isaac, had a seizure
which left his right side almost entirely paralyzed, and so
his inability to play or teach music at the level
that he once had, which had been his great joy,
and the various problems several of his children were having
(08:46):
in their lives. You know, again, Caroline was one of many,
and there were a number of struggles happening in the family,
and the fact that he had kind of as a
consequence of being uh left with this paralysis. He couldn't
do this thing that they had been doing, which was
teaching Caroline on the sly from her mother. Uh. You know,
when her mother was not around, he would secretly be like, common,
(09:07):
will teach you a little bit of music. Uh. And
they just couldn't pull that off anymore with his infirm state,
and all of this sort of conspired to leave this
once boisterous man really quite depressed and suffering in his
final several years. He ended up dying on March seventeen
sixty seven. While her father's attempts to offer her instruction
(09:28):
were cut short, Caroline did get some lessons from the
daughter of a family who lived in the same house
as the Herschels. When she was a teenager. Her friend
died of consumption, which shut yet another door for education
for Caroline, and she just really abhorred the thought of
life as a maid. She really really wanted intellectual and
creative stimulation. So she was trying to figure out how
(09:52):
she could get a slightly higher position like that of
a governess quote, where the want of a knowledge of
French would be no object action. Yeah, she knew she
was not stupid and that she was fairly bright, but
that she hadn't had all the educational opportunities that would
really prepare her for a much better position than I made.
But she was just trying to think sort of practically
(10:13):
about Okay, what could I do that's better than this? Uh,
And she did at one point managed to convince her
mother and her brother's after her father had died, that
she should be sent for a short time to a
school to learn millinery and sewing, and she describes this
as a very happy time, although her brothers were very
clear that they were sending her just so she could
(10:34):
make things for herself, that this was not going to
be a professional um stepping stone at all. Once she
returned home, however, from this short time away where she
was learning new things and meeting new people, she really
(10:57):
just fell back into the same patterns of you know,
constant chore wors in schedule and drudgery that she so despised.
That changed when the family got a letter from William
in the fall of seventeen seventy one. In this letter,
he proposed that Caroline come to live with him and
service as housekeeper and also as a singer to accompany
him in concerts. He proposed a two year trial and
(11:19):
said that if it didn't work out, he would send
her back, and Caroline was so super excited by this
prospect that even before it was all approved by her
mother and the rest of the family, she started to
practice singing in secret um so that William had actually
asked another of their brothers who was musically skilled, to
(11:41):
tutor her. But there were some siblings skirmishes that really
made that fall apart. Her brother kind of made fun
of her and she didn't like it, so she just
practiced on her own. And she also just in trying
to lay the groundwork so that they would have no
excuse to keep her. She knitted enough socks and stocking
so the whole family would be covered for at least
two years. She was really trying to make it as
(12:03):
easy as possible to make her case to go. In
the end, when William went to Germany to get Caroline,
he also gave their mother a small annuity which she
could use to hire some help to replace Caroline's work
around the house. Yeah, I mean they were in effect
losing a maid as well, So I feel like I
should note that while Caroline hated this idea of being
(12:24):
a maid in this life that her mother had planned
for her, she did not seem to hate her mother. Um.
She when She talks in her journals about leaving Hanover.
She refers to her her mother as her dear mother,
and you know the difficulty of leaving her so uh
she hated the ideas that her mother had. She did
(12:45):
not relish the plans that had been made on her behalf,
but she really didn't seem to hold them as a
negative against her relationship with her mother, particularly, So Caroline
and Williams set out for England together and and Caroline's
uh Med bours. She describes this trip at great length
and with lots of details, and she talks about all
(13:06):
the stages of the journey and all the trials and
discomfort that they often encountered because travel was extremely difficult.
Um Williams Jourtle, on the other hand, just says, August sixteen,
seventeen seventy two, set off on my return to England
and company with my sister. That just cracked me up
when I found it in her in her memoir, It
(13:27):
was it's so funny. So once Caroline and William got
to England, Caroline did indeed learn to sing, and she
developed her soprano voice so she could accompany her organist
brother and performances She also took two or three lessons
a day from her brother, because remember, at this point
he was pretty successful music teacher. But that was not
the only thing that William was up to in Bath.
(13:48):
While he was successful in music, he had already turned
his interest to science. He had astronomy students as well
as music students, and he had been writing scientific papers
for the Bath Philosophical Society. Uh, there's part of me
that wonders if this is not why he was like,
I'm never coming back to Germany, Like he knew he
would be kind of locked into the music career there,
(14:10):
and he had already started to toy with this really
significant career change, and Caroline arrived in the midst of
William kind of making this transition in his life. And
so for her, going from a life of repetition and
predictability and menial duties to one of assisting her whirlwind
brother was a huge change for this woman who was
(14:30):
only twenty two at the time. So she was suddenly
responsible for the budget of the household and taking care
of trips to the market, and she performed with her
brother as a featured singer often, and she apparently also
had a lot of arguments with her brother's hired servant.
She does not speak very well of that woman in
her letters here her memoirs. She was also initially pretty homesick.
(14:52):
Her English wasn't good enough to bond with anyone else
in Bath, and her brother was incredibly busy. Her sister
had been left a widow with six children, and Caroline
also felt badly that there wasn't anything she could do
to help. But on the upside, you know, while she
is in this whirlwind, crazy world, the learning that she
had yearned for back in Germany but had been denied
(15:15):
was certainly abundant in England. She was mentally stimulated at
all times. She had to learn the bookkeeping, as we
were saying, she was learning English as quickly as she
could uh, and she had to learn a lot more
about music in pretty short order. And in some ways
this isolation of this transition and her homesickness really likely
(15:35):
bonded her to William more than ever, although she really
didn't get as much of his time and attention as
she wished because he had so many students to see
in addition to his extracurricular studies in astronomy. She was
making a really good name for herself as a singer,
though she was even approached by other music companies to
perform with them, but she declined, saying that she really
(15:56):
needed to stay with her brother and his work. And
as William turned his attention progressively more and more to astronomy,
Caroline followed suit. Uh, she assisted her brother in the
assembling of telescopes and analyzing the heavens, and we could
do a whole podcast just about William and sort of
how his music to astronomy transition happened. So I don't
(16:17):
want people to think I'm just leaving that out, but
Caroline's really the focus here. But while she's doing all
of this and helping him assemble things and polishing lenses
and mirrors, she ended up learning a great deal about
astronomy herself. William is credited with discovering Uranus in one
while he was actually searching for double stars. Incidentally, the
planet was initially named George or at the Georgian Star,
(16:40):
after the King of England, which sounds a lot more
majestic than just calling a star George. As a return
for his work, William Herschel was indited and appointed to
the position of Court astronomer for King George the Third,
and this new appointment meant that the Herschels had to
move closer to Windsor Castle. And while he was making
less money as the royal astronomer than he had as
(17:02):
a musician and teacher, uh William Herschel was now making
enough that he didn't have to kind of have this
double career situation, so he could focus entirely on his
scientific endeavors. And William used this new position to build
a bigger telescope, and he launched a long term survey
of the sky that would turn into a project that
really ran two decades. And initially, as he would observe
(17:26):
heavenly bodies through his telescope, he was up on this
ladder and he would call them out to Caroline, who
would be down on the ground, and she would carefully
record everything that he said. So he really trusted her
to keep track of everything that they were witnessing and identifying.
As their list got bigger and became more detailed, took
on the name New General Catalog. This name persists in
(17:49):
codified for him today as the many astronomical objects are
still identified by their NC number. And William also gave
Caroline her own what he called her quote seven foot
Newtonian sweeper, and this was a telescope that she would
often use to observe the night sky, uh just on
her own or when she was filling in for William
(18:10):
while he was traveling, so that they wouldn't have any
gaps in their project. On February three, she identified an
open cluster which is on the record as n g
C sixty. The same year, she observed and recorded n
(18:33):
GC to fifty three, also known as the Sculptor Galaxy,
and one of her claims to fame is that she
was the first woman credited with discovering a comet. So
on August one and again on following nights of s six,
she saw an object that was moving across the night
sky and she identified it as a comet, and she
(18:55):
immediately sent word by mail to all of their fellow
is anomers about her discovery in the hopes that they
too would study it. She wanted to share this information
as rapidly as possible. After the comment discovery, William, who
was the King's astronomer, lobbied for his assistant Caroline to
be paid for her work. This made her the first
woman to actually be paid as a professional scientist in
(19:19):
Great Britain, and she would go on to discover a
total of eight commets uh in a little longer than
the decade following that first comet identification. And this was
all happening during a sort of comic craze that was
happening in post enlightenment Georgian England. So it gave Caroline
a certain degree of celebrity, although as a woman astronomer,
(19:40):
which was you know, certainly an odd duck for the times,
she was sometimes lampooned in comics, just as she was
also being lauded as something of a visionary. In seventeen
eighty six, Williams started courting a wealthy widow neighbor, Mary
Bernie Pitt. When when William married her in seventeen eighty eight,
his partnership with Aline changed really considerably and became somewhat strained.
(20:04):
Uh the household duties that Caroline had been taking care
of all of this time. We're past to William's bride,
and the sister was then freed up to pursue her
astronomy work full time. And this certainly sounds like a
good thing. She was likely much more passionate about the astronomy,
but the loss of control and her sense of place
in her brother's life really affected Caroline quite deeply. After
(20:27):
sixteen years living and working with William, Caroline moved to
her own lodgings and she started having to go to
his place to work. She no longer had keys to
the home or to the observatory, and we actually don't
know exactly what Caroline's feelings were at this time. There
was actually a ten year gap in her personal journals
from s to sevent those documents were destroyed. There are
(20:52):
journals with ripped out pages. Um When her personal notes
and narratives start up again near the end of the century,
she speaks of her sister in law, who by all
accounts was a really gentle and amiable woman. Everyone really
liked her with a great deal of kindness, and the
two did eventually become very close. But I think it
was a rough ride for those ten years. She probably
(21:12):
wrote some things down she did not want to be
kept on record. Those ten years were still spent working
both with her brother and on her own, and this
was when Caroline was discovering her many comments and she
was keeping records of her work. The seven comments which
followed the first were observed and identified in December seventeen
(21:33):
eighty eight, January seventeen ninety, April seventeen, December sevente October seventeen,
November seventeen, and August seventeen ninety seven, and the first
Royal Astronomer of England, who was named John Flamsteed, had
compiled an existing star catalog in the late sixteen hundreds
(21:55):
in early seventeen hundreds, and so in addition to using
this new free time that Caroline had at her disposal
after her brother's marriage to search for comets, she also
used it to cross index the Flamsteed catalog with the
data that she and William had compiled, and she was
able to add more than five hundred additional stars to
(22:16):
the existing record as a consequence. William died in eighteen
twenty two, and after her brother was gone, Caroline went
back to Germany, where she continued her work entirely on
her own. So on her own after William's death, and
also working with her nephew, who was also an astronomer,
Caroline cataloged nebulae along with her brother. Caroline was instrumental
(22:38):
in expanding the number of known star clusters from one
hundred to two thousand, five hundred. And those are rough numbers.
It's you know, more than that. But she went on
to get many many accolades uh as she aged. She
won a gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in
eighteen twenty eight for her work in nebulae. In eighteen
(23:00):
thirty two, the King of Denmark honored her with the
medal for her work. She was made an honorary member
of the Royal Society in eighteen thirty five, and she
actually shared the honor of being the first woman to
be named an honorary member of the Society with Mary Somerville,
who also worked in astronomy, and she was also given
(23:21):
this honorary membership the same year. In eighteen thirty eight,
she was made a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
In eighteen forty six, she was given the Gold Medal
for Science by the King of Prussia. Caroline wrote her
last entry in her day book in September of eighteen
forty five, and in the winter of eighteen forty seven
(23:41):
eighteen forty eight, Caroline became ill as the cold of
the season swept in. She initially refused a neighbor friend's
offer to move to her bed to a warmer room
than it existed in And she was already an elderly
woman and somewhat freel at this point, and as a
consequence of, you know, staying in this cold with a
compromised immune system already, she just got sicker and sicker.
(24:04):
She did eventually allow them to move her bed, and
while she rallied now and again, she never really recovered.
Her spirit remained until the end, though, And in a
letter from the same bed moving friend to Caroline's nephew, John,
it's reported that when a male friend sent his love
and hopes that Caroline would soon be well enough for
him to visit and give her a kiss, as he
(24:25):
had on her previous birthday, she replied by saying, tell
the general that I have not tasted anything I liked
so well. I just love that She kind of was
a little flirty even at the very end. It was
very sweet, uh. And the letter in which that story
was relayed to John was dated January six, and Caroline
(24:45):
died just three days later on January ninth. She was
ninety seven at the time. A letter written by Caroline's
niece to a cousin reads, I felt almost a sense
of joyful relief at the death of my aunt, and
the thought that now the un why at heart was
at rest. All that she had of love to give
was concentrated on her beloved brother. At his death, she
(25:07):
felt herself alone. And Caroline wrote her own tombstone inscription,
and it reads, the eyes of her who is glorified
here below turned to the starry heavens. She had very
pragmatically made all of the arrangements for her burial and
her funeral years before her death, so when she passed
(25:27):
it was basically like, nope, everything's taken care of already,
because she didn't want to burden her nephew or any
of her other relatives with dealing with it. She also wrote,
I am nothing, I have nothing. All I am all
I know I owe to my brother. I am only
the tool which he shaped to his use. A well
trained puppy dog would have done as much. So some
people interpret this as devotion to a sibling, and others
(25:51):
have read it read it almost as resentful, the words
of a woman who's bound by obligation to do this
because her brother was her benefactor and told her to.
But given her obvious love for astronomy and the work
they did together, it seems more in line with the
thinking of someone who wishes to brush away praise and
credit and instead focus the spotlight on someone else. Yeah,
(26:14):
she seemed generally uncomfortable with kind of talking about herself
in any sort of personal way, or you know, with accolades.
She was always very quick to kind of shrug them off.
There's a really lovely intro written in her memoir and
about her, and it says her own recollections go back
to the great earthquake of Lisbon. She lived through the
(26:35):
American War, the Old French Revolution, the rise and fall
of Napoleon, and all manner of lesser events and wars.
She saw all the improvements and inventions, from the lumbering
post wagon in which she made her first journey from Hanover,
to the railroads and electric telegraphs which have intersected all
Europe for she lived well down into the reign of Victoria,
(26:56):
but her work of minding the heavens with her brother
engrossed all her thoughts, and she scarcely mentions any public event.
Several comments are named after her, including thirty Herschel Rigole
as his lunar crater C. Herschel, and an asteroid called Lucretia,
which is her middle name. One of William's telescopes is
(27:17):
on display at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and another
is on display at Cambridge, and there are several other
pieces of telescopes um at various observatories and museums throughout
the world. The Herschel Museum of Astronomy now stands at
nineteen New King Street in Bath, and that is where
William and Caroline lived together, and I would love to
(27:38):
go visit, so Tracy, let's do that, Okay. So yeah,
that it's such an interesting story because she really she's
often called the Cinderella of astronomy because she started in
this sort of scullery made path and then ended up
being really illuminary in her field, especially bizarre when you
consider that on top of the fact that she was
(27:59):
a woman at a time when men were really running
the show in terms of science. I love it so much.
Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode, since it is from the archive that might
(28:22):
be out of date. Now, you can email us at
History podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you
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And you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
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you listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands
(28:44):
of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com,
Hey listeners, Happy Saturday. Today is Caroline Herschel's birthday, so
this seems like the perfect time to share our episode
about her. From Caroline Herschel is recognized as the first
woman to discover a comet, which we talked about in
this episode, but we also wanted to take just a
moment to recognize another woman, Maria Kirsch, also known as
(00:23):
Maria Winkleman, who discovered a comment in seventeen o two,
and that was decades before Herschel's first comment discovery, but
she's not often named as the first woman to discover
a comment, both because her husband initially took the credit
for it and because two other male astronomers had made
the same discovery just a few hours before in Rome.
(00:44):
So happy birthday, Caroline Herschel, and Happy Saturday, everybody. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frying and I'm Tray Wilson. Uh and today is
(01:07):
for me a whoa Astronomy Day because I love astronomy.
I love talking about space and all things astronomical, so
it's a special in my wheelhouse one. But also uh,
we're talking about a woman astronomer who really managed to
break the barrier of women in scientific fields way earlier
than you might anticipate. Uh, in part because she was
(01:30):
working alongside her brother and that sort of gave her
entree into the to the world of science and astronomy
and an equal measure though it was due to her
really steadfast dedication to her work. She was a very
no nonsense woman and completely focused uh. And as a consequence,
she had achieved a great deal. So we are talking
about Caroline Lucretia Herschel, who was born on March sixteenth
(01:54):
of seventeen fifty and she was born in Hanover, Germany.
Her parents were Anna ills Mortsen and i Isaac Herschel,
and when Caroline was born, the Herschels were already in
their eighteenth year of marriage, so they had already had
a pretty large family. They ended up having a total
of ten children, and Caroline was the eighth of them,
although four of their children did not live pastor early childhood,
(02:15):
and according to family records, the Herschel family line had
actually come from Moravia, where they left due to their
Protestant beliefs and ended up settling in Saxony. Isaac was
a musician and he played in a military regiment. He
educated his sons in music whenever he was home, and
it was during these lessons that Caroline's older brother, Williams,
(02:37):
started to show some natural gifts for music. He was
not only musically talented, but he was also extremely smart
and very quick to learn in other areas of study. Also, Yeah,
and one thing I feel like I should point out
I didn't include it in the notes when I say
that he was Isaac was able to educate his children
when he was home. Being a military musician in this
(03:00):
context is not uh as much of an easy ride
as you may think. These men had to travel with
the troops. They were in the trenches with the troops.
They were really part of a functioning, active military. It
wasn't like they just showed up to play trumpet before
things happened. So he really was traveling a lot. And
(03:22):
while William was urged into a musical career because of
his natural proclivity that exhibited itself very early on, Caroline
really felt when she looked back at their childhood, and
she mentions it in her memoirs and in letters that
if he had been allowed to pursue other interests other
than music, his genius and astronomy really would have been
revealed much earlier, and in her memoirs she mentions that
(03:45):
while her father Isaac was indeed devoted to music, he
too was also interested in the stars. And here's a
quick excerpt from one of her memories from childhood. She says,
my father was a great admirer of astronomy and had
some knowledge of that science. For I remember his taking
me on a clear frosty night into the street to
make me acquainted with several of the most beautiful constellations
(04:07):
after we had been gazing at a comment which was
then visible. And I well remember with what delight he
used to assist my brother William in his various contrivances
in the pursuit of his philosophical studies, among which was
a neatly turned four inch globe upon which the equator
and ecliptic were engraved by my brother. Caroline was also
very attached to her brother William, who was twelve years
(04:30):
older than she was, from the time she was really
very young. Yeah, she speaks of him so lovingly and
with great adoration. Uh. In her memoirs, it's it's easy
for me to identify with because my siblings are all
much older than me, and I look at them and
prettating my oldest sister almost as a parent figure. And
it's a very similar relationship that she had with William,
(04:51):
especially because Isaac traveled so much. Uh And while Isaac
wanted his children to learn music and French and philosophy,
particularly all of his children his wife uh and I
had a really much more strict and sensible path in
mind for Caroline. When she was quite young, it became
Caroline's job to knit all of the socks and stockings
(05:12):
for her brothers, and as the male siblings of the
family pursued their musical careers, Caroline learned how to care
for a home. She really did not get the benefit
of kind of the more philosophical education. In seventeen sixty one,
Caroline got really severe typhus fever and it nearly killed her.
Even after she got better, it took a really long
(05:34):
time for her to regain her strength, and she recounted
having to crawl up and downstairs on all fours for
months because she was too weak to walk up and
down them. Uh So this illness also pretty significantly stunted
Caroline's growth. She was extremely diminutive even when she was
in her adulthood and not growing anymore. She was less
(05:54):
than five ft tall, uh, and you know, it left
her not particularly pleasing to the eye in their opinion,
And so her parents sort of came to this conclusion
that she was never really going to have any marriage prospects,
and so she should hope for a career as a
scullery made like that. That was they were trying to
be very practical. It sounds really rough for a parent
to do, particularly and to the modern era, where you know,
(06:17):
children are encouraged to really follow their dreams and pursue
their heart's desires um. But in this instance, this meant
that Caroline's mother Anna basically doubled down on her insistence
that her daughter really needed to stick to learning useful
skills and leave the life of the mind to her brothers.
In the early seventeen sixties, Caroline's brother William traveled to
(06:38):
England to pursue work as a music teacher in organist
after he deserted his position with the Hannovarian Guards. Even
while he spent time in various towns traveling far away people.
The family was really hoping that he would come back
to Hanover to settle down, and he didn't make an
appearance back in Germany in seventeen sixty four, but it
(06:59):
was more than anything else, just to tell the family
that he was not coming back to live. He was
moving to England permanently, and Caroline's memoir details this is
a time of joyful reunion, but also sadness that she
was too busy with scullery work, uh and with her
first communion to really see him, and this bittersweet knowledge
(07:20):
that they all shared that it would likely be quite
some time before anyone in the family was going to
see him again. And in this particular part of her memoir,
she is really extremely clear and does not hide the
fact that he is her very favorite brother. She calls
him her dearest brother. So when William left, and as
we mentioned, it conflicted with her first communion, she was
(07:43):
really heartbroken that her goodbye was cut short, and so
she wrote this about his departure, it's effect on my
shattered nerves. I will not attempt to describe nor what
I felt for days and weeks after. I wish it
were possible to say what I wished to say without
feeling a new that feverish wretchedness which accompanied my walk
(08:04):
in the afternoon with some of my school companions and
my black silk dress and bouquet of artificial flowers, the
same which had served my sister on her bridal day.
I could think of nothing that on my return I
should find nobody but my disconsolate father and mother. So sad. Uh.
She really just adored her brother, and you know, he
(08:24):
was like a ray of sunshine when he came home,
and knowing that he was gone really broke her heart.
And the following August, their father, Isaac, had a seizure
which left his right side almost entirely paralyzed, and so
his inability to play or teach music at the level
that he once had, which had been his great joy,
and the various problems several of his children were having
(08:46):
in their lives. You know, again, Caroline was one of many,
and there were a number of struggles happening in the family,
and the fact that he had kind of as a
consequence of being uh left with this paralysis. He couldn't
do this thing that they had been doing, which was
teaching Caroline on the sly from her mother. Uh. You know,
when her mother was not around, he would secretly be like, common,
(09:07):
will teach you a little bit of music. Uh. And
they just couldn't pull that off anymore with his infirm state,
and all of this sort of conspired to leave this
once boisterous man really quite depressed and suffering in his
final several years. He ended up dying on March seventeen
sixty seven. While her father's attempts to offer her instruction
(09:28):
were cut short, Caroline did get some lessons from the
daughter of a family who lived in the same house
as the Herschels. When she was a teenager. Her friend
died of consumption, which shut yet another door for education
for Caroline, and she just really abhorred the thought of
life as a maid. She really really wanted intellectual and
creative stimulation. So she was trying to figure out how
(09:52):
she could get a slightly higher position like that of
a governess quote, where the want of a knowledge of
French would be no object action. Yeah, she knew she
was not stupid and that she was fairly bright, but
that she hadn't had all the educational opportunities that would
really prepare her for a much better position than I made.
But she was just trying to think sort of practically
(10:13):
about Okay, what could I do that's better than this? Uh,
And she did at one point managed to convince her
mother and her brother's after her father had died, that
she should be sent for a short time to a
school to learn millinery and sewing, and she describes this
as a very happy time, although her brothers were very
clear that they were sending her just so she could
(10:34):
make things for herself, that this was not going to
be a professional um stepping stone at all. Once she
returned home, however, from this short time away where she
was learning new things and meeting new people, she really
(10:57):
just fell back into the same patterns of you know,
constant chore wors in schedule and drudgery that she so despised.
That changed when the family got a letter from William
in the fall of seventeen seventy one. In this letter,
he proposed that Caroline come to live with him and
service as housekeeper and also as a singer to accompany
him in concerts. He proposed a two year trial and
(11:19):
said that if it didn't work out, he would send
her back, and Caroline was so super excited by this
prospect that even before it was all approved by her
mother and the rest of the family, she started to
practice singing in secret um so that William had actually
asked another of their brothers who was musically skilled, to
(11:41):
tutor her. But there were some siblings skirmishes that really
made that fall apart. Her brother kind of made fun
of her and she didn't like it, so she just
practiced on her own. And she also just in trying
to lay the groundwork so that they would have no
excuse to keep her. She knitted enough socks and stocking
so the whole family would be covered for at least
two years. She was really trying to make it as
(12:03):
easy as possible to make her case to go. In
the end, when William went to Germany to get Caroline,
he also gave their mother a small annuity which she
could use to hire some help to replace Caroline's work
around the house. Yeah, I mean they were in effect
losing a maid as well, So I feel like I
should note that while Caroline hated this idea of being
(12:24):
a maid in this life that her mother had planned
for her, she did not seem to hate her mother. Um.
She when She talks in her journals about leaving Hanover.
She refers to her her mother as her dear mother,
and you know the difficulty of leaving her so uh
she hated the ideas that her mother had. She did
(12:45):
not relish the plans that had been made on her behalf,
but she really didn't seem to hold them as a
negative against her relationship with her mother, particularly, So Caroline
and Williams set out for England together and and Caroline's
uh Med bours. She describes this trip at great length
and with lots of details, and she talks about all
(13:06):
the stages of the journey and all the trials and
discomfort that they often encountered because travel was extremely difficult.
Um Williams Jourtle, on the other hand, just says, August sixteen,
seventeen seventy two, set off on my return to England
and company with my sister. That just cracked me up
when I found it in her in her memoir, It
(13:27):
was it's so funny. So once Caroline and William got
to England, Caroline did indeed learn to sing, and she
developed her soprano voice so she could accompany her organist
brother and performances She also took two or three lessons
a day from her brother, because remember, at this point
he was pretty successful music teacher. But that was not
the only thing that William was up to in Bath.
(13:48):
While he was successful in music, he had already turned
his interest to science. He had astronomy students as well
as music students, and he had been writing scientific papers
for the Bath Philosophical Society. Uh, there's part of me
that wonders if this is not why he was like,
I'm never coming back to Germany, Like he knew he
would be kind of locked into the music career there,
(14:10):
and he had already started to toy with this really
significant career change, and Caroline arrived in the midst of
William kind of making this transition in his life. And
so for her, going from a life of repetition and
predictability and menial duties to one of assisting her whirlwind
brother was a huge change for this woman who was
(14:30):
only twenty two at the time. So she was suddenly
responsible for the budget of the household and taking care
of trips to the market, and she performed with her
brother as a featured singer often, and she apparently also
had a lot of arguments with her brother's hired servant.
She does not speak very well of that woman in
her letters here her memoirs. She was also initially pretty homesick.
(14:52):
Her English wasn't good enough to bond with anyone else
in Bath, and her brother was incredibly busy. Her sister
had been left a widow with six children, and Caroline
also felt badly that there wasn't anything she could do
to help. But on the upside, you know, while she
is in this whirlwind, crazy world, the learning that she
had yearned for back in Germany but had been denied
(15:15):
was certainly abundant in England. She was mentally stimulated at
all times. She had to learn the bookkeeping, as we
were saying, she was learning English as quickly as she
could uh, and she had to learn a lot more
about music in pretty short order. And in some ways
this isolation of this transition and her homesickness really likely
(15:35):
bonded her to William more than ever, although she really
didn't get as much of his time and attention as
she wished because he had so many students to see
in addition to his extracurricular studies in astronomy. She was
making a really good name for herself as a singer,
though she was even approached by other music companies to
perform with them, but she declined, saying that she really
(15:56):
needed to stay with her brother and his work. And
as William turned his attention progressively more and more to astronomy,
Caroline followed suit. Uh, she assisted her brother in the
assembling of telescopes and analyzing the heavens, and we could
do a whole podcast just about William and sort of
how his music to astronomy transition happened. So I don't
(16:17):
want people to think I'm just leaving that out, but
Caroline's really the focus here. But while she's doing all
of this and helping him assemble things and polishing lenses
and mirrors, she ended up learning a great deal about
astronomy herself. William is credited with discovering Uranus in one
while he was actually searching for double stars. Incidentally, the
planet was initially named George or at the Georgian Star,
(16:40):
after the King of England, which sounds a lot more
majestic than just calling a star George. As a return
for his work, William Herschel was indited and appointed to
the position of Court astronomer for King George the Third,
and this new appointment meant that the Herschels had to
move closer to Windsor Castle. And while he was making
less money as the royal astronomer than he had as
(17:02):
a musician and teacher, uh William Herschel was now making
enough that he didn't have to kind of have this
double career situation, so he could focus entirely on his
scientific endeavors. And William used this new position to build
a bigger telescope, and he launched a long term survey
of the sky that would turn into a project that
really ran two decades. And initially, as he would observe
(17:26):
heavenly bodies through his telescope, he was up on this
ladder and he would call them out to Caroline, who
would be down on the ground, and she would carefully
record everything that he said. So he really trusted her
to keep track of everything that they were witnessing and identifying.
As their list got bigger and became more detailed, took
on the name New General Catalog. This name persists in
(17:49):
codified for him today as the many astronomical objects are
still identified by their NC number. And William also gave
Caroline her own what he called her quote seven foot
Newtonian sweeper, and this was a telescope that she would
often use to observe the night sky, uh just on
her own or when she was filling in for William
(18:10):
while he was traveling, so that they wouldn't have any
gaps in their project. On February three, she identified an
open cluster which is on the record as n g
C sixty. The same year, she observed and recorded n
(18:33):
GC to fifty three, also known as the Sculptor Galaxy,
and one of her claims to fame is that she
was the first woman credited with discovering a comet. So
on August one and again on following nights of s six,
she saw an object that was moving across the night
sky and she identified it as a comet, and she
(18:55):
immediately sent word by mail to all of their fellow
is anomers about her discovery in the hopes that they
too would study it. She wanted to share this information
as rapidly as possible. After the comment discovery, William, who
was the King's astronomer, lobbied for his assistant Caroline to
be paid for her work. This made her the first
woman to actually be paid as a professional scientist in
(19:19):
Great Britain, and she would go on to discover a
total of eight commets uh in a little longer than
the decade following that first comet identification. And this was
all happening during a sort of comic craze that was
happening in post enlightenment Georgian England. So it gave Caroline
a certain degree of celebrity, although as a woman astronomer,
(19:40):
which was you know, certainly an odd duck for the times,
she was sometimes lampooned in comics, just as she was
also being lauded as something of a visionary. In seventeen
eighty six, Williams started courting a wealthy widow neighbor, Mary
Bernie Pitt. When when William married her in seventeen eighty eight,
his partnership with Aline changed really considerably and became somewhat strained.
(20:04):
Uh the household duties that Caroline had been taking care
of all of this time. We're past to William's bride,
and the sister was then freed up to pursue her
astronomy work full time. And this certainly sounds like a
good thing. She was likely much more passionate about the astronomy,
but the loss of control and her sense of place
in her brother's life really affected Caroline quite deeply. After
(20:27):
sixteen years living and working with William, Caroline moved to
her own lodgings and she started having to go to
his place to work. She no longer had keys to
the home or to the observatory, and we actually don't
know exactly what Caroline's feelings were at this time. There
was actually a ten year gap in her personal journals
from s to sevent those documents were destroyed. There are
(20:52):
journals with ripped out pages. Um When her personal notes
and narratives start up again near the end of the century,
she speaks of her sister in law, who by all
accounts was a really gentle and amiable woman. Everyone really
liked her with a great deal of kindness, and the
two did eventually become very close. But I think it
was a rough ride for those ten years. She probably
(21:12):
wrote some things down she did not want to be
kept on record. Those ten years were still spent working
both with her brother and on her own, and this
was when Caroline was discovering her many comments and she
was keeping records of her work. The seven comments which
followed the first were observed and identified in December seventeen
(21:33):
eighty eight, January seventeen ninety, April seventeen, December sevente October seventeen,
November seventeen, and August seventeen ninety seven, and the first
Royal Astronomer of England, who was named John Flamsteed, had
compiled an existing star catalog in the late sixteen hundreds
(21:55):
in early seventeen hundreds, and so in addition to using
this new free time that Caroline had at her disposal
after her brother's marriage to search for comets, she also
used it to cross index the Flamsteed catalog with the
data that she and William had compiled, and she was
able to add more than five hundred additional stars to
(22:16):
the existing record as a consequence. William died in eighteen
twenty two, and after her brother was gone, Caroline went
back to Germany, where she continued her work entirely on
her own. So on her own after William's death, and
also working with her nephew, who was also an astronomer,
Caroline cataloged nebulae along with her brother. Caroline was instrumental
(22:38):
in expanding the number of known star clusters from one
hundred to two thousand, five hundred. And those are rough numbers.
It's you know, more than that. But she went on
to get many many accolades uh as she aged. She
won a gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in
eighteen twenty eight for her work in nebulae. In eighteen
(23:00):
thirty two, the King of Denmark honored her with the
medal for her work. She was made an honorary member
of the Royal Society in eighteen thirty five, and she
actually shared the honor of being the first woman to
be named an honorary member of the Society with Mary Somerville,
who also worked in astronomy, and she was also given
(23:21):
this honorary membership the same year. In eighteen thirty eight,
she was made a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
In eighteen forty six, she was given the Gold Medal
for Science by the King of Prussia. Caroline wrote her
last entry in her day book in September of eighteen
forty five, and in the winter of eighteen forty seven
(23:41):
eighteen forty eight, Caroline became ill as the cold of
the season swept in. She initially refused a neighbor friend's
offer to move to her bed to a warmer room
than it existed in And she was already an elderly
woman and somewhat freel at this point, and as a
consequence of, you know, staying in this cold with a
compromised immune system already, she just got sicker and sicker.
(24:04):
She did eventually allow them to move her bed, and
while she rallied now and again, she never really recovered.
Her spirit remained until the end, though, And in a
letter from the same bed moving friend to Caroline's nephew, John,
it's reported that when a male friend sent his love
and hopes that Caroline would soon be well enough for
him to visit and give her a kiss, as he
(24:25):
had on her previous birthday, she replied by saying, tell
the general that I have not tasted anything I liked
so well. I just love that She kind of was
a little flirty even at the very end. It was
very sweet, uh. And the letter in which that story
was relayed to John was dated January six, and Caroline
(24:45):
died just three days later on January ninth. She was
ninety seven at the time. A letter written by Caroline's
niece to a cousin reads, I felt almost a sense
of joyful relief at the death of my aunt, and
the thought that now the un why at heart was
at rest. All that she had of love to give
was concentrated on her beloved brother. At his death, she
(25:07):
felt herself alone. And Caroline wrote her own tombstone inscription,
and it reads, the eyes of her who is glorified
here below turned to the starry heavens. She had very
pragmatically made all of the arrangements for her burial and
her funeral years before her death, so when she passed
(25:27):
it was basically like, nope, everything's taken care of already,
because she didn't want to burden her nephew or any
of her other relatives with dealing with it. She also wrote,
I am nothing, I have nothing. All I am all
I know I owe to my brother. I am only
the tool which he shaped to his use. A well
trained puppy dog would have done as much. So some
people interpret this as devotion to a sibling, and others
(25:51):
have read it read it almost as resentful, the words
of a woman who's bound by obligation to do this
because her brother was her benefactor and told her to.
But given her obvious love for astronomy and the work
they did together, it seems more in line with the
thinking of someone who wishes to brush away praise and
credit and instead focus the spotlight on someone else. Yeah,
(26:14):
she seemed generally uncomfortable with kind of talking about herself
in any sort of personal way, or you know, with accolades.
She was always very quick to kind of shrug them off.
There's a really lovely intro written in her memoir and
about her, and it says her own recollections go back
to the great earthquake of Lisbon. She lived through the
(26:35):
American War, the Old French Revolution, the rise and fall
of Napoleon, and all manner of lesser events and wars.
She saw all the improvements and inventions, from the lumbering
post wagon in which she made her first journey from Hanover,
to the railroads and electric telegraphs which have intersected all
Europe for she lived well down into the reign of Victoria,
(26:56):
but her work of minding the heavens with her brother
engrossed all her thoughts, and she scarcely mentions any public event.
Several comments are named after her, including thirty Herschel Rigole
as his lunar crater C. Herschel, and an asteroid called Lucretia,
which is her middle name. One of William's telescopes is
(27:17):
on display at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and another
is on display at Cambridge, and there are several other
pieces of telescopes um at various observatories and museums throughout
the world. The Herschel Museum of Astronomy now stands at
nineteen New King Street in Bath, and that is where
William and Caroline lived together, and I would love to
(27:38):
go visit, so Tracy, let's do that, Okay. So yeah,
that it's such an interesting story because she really she's
often called the Cinderella of astronomy because she started in
this sort of scullery made path and then ended up
being really illuminary in her field, especially bizarre when you
consider that on top of the fact that she was
(27:59):
a woman at a time when men were really running
the show in terms of science. I love it so much.
Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode, since it is from the archive that might
(28:22):
be out of date. Now, you can email us at
History podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in History.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands
(28:44):
of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com,
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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