the Week of Proper 2 / Ordinary 7
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Bible Encyclopedias
Sir William Huggins
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or The last quarter of the 19th century spectroscopy and photography together worked a revolution in observational astronomy, and in both branches Huggins acted as pioneer.
Many results of great importance are associated with his name. Thus in 1864 the spectroscope yielded him evidence that planetary and irregular nebulae consist of luminous gas - a conclusion tending to support the nebular hypothesis of the origin of stars and planets by condensation from glowing masses of fluid material. On the 18th of May 1866 he made the first spectroscopic examination of a temporary star (Nova Coronae), and found it to be enveloped in blazing hydrogen. In 1868 he proved incandescent carbon-vapours to be the main source of cometary light; and on the 23rd of April in the same year applied Doppler's principle to the detection and measurement of stellar velocities in the line of sight. Data of this kind, which are by other means inaccessible to the astronomer, are obviously indispensable to any adequate conception of the stellar system as a whole or in its parts. In solar physics Huggins suggested a spectroscopic method for viewing the red prominences in daylight; and his experiments went far towards settling a much-disputed question regarding the solar distribution of calcium. In the general solar spectrum this element is represented by a large number of lines, but in the spectrum of the prominences and chromosphere one pair only can be detected. This circumstance appeared so anomalous that some astronomers doubted whether the surviving lines were really due to calcium; but Sir William and Lady Huggins (née Margaret Lindsay Murray, who, after their marriage in 1875, actively assisted her husband) successfully demonstrated in the laboratory that calcium vapour, if at a sufficiently low pressure, gives under the influence of the electric discharge precisely these lines and no others. The striking discovery was, in 1903, made by the same investigators that the spontaneous luminosity of radium gives a spectrum of a kind never before obtained without the aid of powerful excitation, electrical or thermal. It consists, that is to say, in a range of bright lines, the agreement of which with the negative pole bands of nitrogen, together with details of interest connected with its mode of production, was ascertained by a continuance of the research. Sir William Huggins, who was made K.C.B. in 1897, received the Order of Merit in 1902, and was awarded many honours, academic and other. He presided over the meeting of the British Association in 1891, and during the five years1900-1905acted as president of the Royal Society, from which he at different times received a Royal, a Copley and a Rumford medal. Four of his presidential addresses were republished in 1906, in an illustrated volume entitled The Royal Society. A list of his scientific papers is contained in chapter ii. of the magnificent Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra, published in 1899, by Sir William and Lady Huggins conjointly, for which they were adjudged the Actonian prize of the Royal Institution. Sir William Huggins died on the 12th of May 1910.
See ch. i. of Atlas of Stellar Spectra, containing a history of the Tulse Hill observatory; Sir W. Huggins's personal retrospect in the Nineteenth Century for June 1897; "Scientific Worthies," with photogravure portrait ( Nature); Astronomers of To-Day, by Hector Macpherson, junr. (1905) (portrait); Month. Notices Roy. Astr. Society, xxvii. 146 (C. Pritchard). (A. M. C.)
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Sir William Huggins'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/s/sir-william-huggins.html. 1910.
