Caroline Herschel Discovered a Comet - Aug. 1, 1786

Caroline Herschel became the first woman to discover a comet on this day in 1786. There's a longer look at her life in the June 30, 2014, episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class, "Caroline Herschel."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's August one. Caroline Herschel

(00:21):
was born on this day in seventy six, and she
was the sister of astronomer William Herschel, who was twelve
years older than she was, and she didn't have the
same access to education or an independent life that he
did as a woman in Germany in the late eighteenth century.
But she wasn't just William's sister. She was an astronomer
in her own right. So when they were children, their parents,

(00:45):
especially their father, had a really strong idea of what
he wanted their lives to be like. He really wanted
William to study music and Caroline was destined to be
a good wife and a homemaker, so at first that
was really how they he steered their educations. William learned
to had about things like music and philosophy and French
and while sometimes Caroline did get to participate in the

(01:06):
same sorts of study. She spent a lot more learning
how to run a household. But in seventeen sixty one
Caroline contracted typhus and she almost died. She was so
weak that she had to crawl up and down the
steps in her house rather than walking up and down them,
and that went on for months. This illness was really serious,
and it also affected her growth, and her mother in particular,

(01:29):
thought she was not going to be attractive to men
as a potential wife anymore, so instead of training her
to be someone's wife and run a household, they instead
started focusing on the idea of her becoming a scullery maid.
She would be doing a lot of the same work,
but she would be doing it as a job, a
job for pay, rather than the unpaid job of being

(01:50):
someone's wife. This whole time, though, like I alluded to earlier,
her father had been teaching her some things like music
and philosophy on the side, but that came to an
and after he became paralyzed after a seizure, and he
continued to be in really poor health until seventeen sixty seven,
when he died and she was nineteen. But then in
seventeen seventy one, William proposed that his sister Caroline come

(02:13):
to work as his housekeeper and then also to accompany
him in concerts, so she would sing and he would
play the organ, and she was overjoyed at this possibility.
She started practicing in secret, and finally the two of
them departed for England on August sixteenth of seventeen seventy two. Now,
in addition to that musical career that his father had

(02:34):
wanted for him so badly, William had also been studying astronomy,
including starting to publish in some papers. Caroline started out
by keeping his house and keeping the accounts. She sang
on stage, and she started working with her brother on
his astronomical pursuits. She learned and she assisted until eventually
William gave her her own telescope. She started identifying and

(02:56):
cataloging clusters and galaxies and so many other astronomical bodies.
On August one, six and for several nights after that night,
she spotted an object that was moving in the sky
that turned out to be a comet. This makes her
the first woman credited with discovering a comet, and after
she did so, William, who by this point had become

(03:18):
the King's astronomer, lobbied for her to have an actual
paid position, and she got one. This made her the
first woman who was paid as a professional scientist in
Great Britain. So William definitely opened a lot of doors
for Caroline. She was able to get access to things
she couldn't have had access to otherwise because she was
his sister. But she was an astronomer in her own right,

(03:41):
and her work continued long after her brother's death. In
the decade after that first comet discovery, she found seven more.
She helped expand the number of known star clusters from
a hundred to twenty five hundred. She earned medals from
the Royal Astronomical Society, from the King of Denmark, from
the King of Prussia. She became an honorary member of

(04:03):
the Royal Society of London in eighteen thirty five and
the Royal Irish Academy in eighteen thirty eight, and today
there are comets, asteroids, and a lunar crater named after her.
She died on January nine of eighteen forty eight at
the age of ninety seven. Thanks to Terry Harrison for
her audio skills, on these episodes of the Stay in
History Class, and you can learn more about Caroline Herschel

(04:23):
on the June episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class.
You can subscribe to This Day in History Class on
Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and wherever else you get podcasts. Tomorrow,
we'll have an infamous rise to power.