A Hanoverian by birth, and a member of the band of the Hanoverian Guards, Herschel, after tasting the discomforts of war in the shape of a night spent in a ditch on the field of Hastenbeck, where that egregious general the Duke of Cumberland was beaten by the French, concluded that he was not designed by Nature for martial distinction, and abruptly solved the problem of his immediate destiny by recourse to the simple and unheroic expedient of desertion. He came to England, got employment after a time as organist of the Octagon Chapel at Bath, and was rapidly rising into notice as a musician, when the force of his genius, combined with a discovery which came certainly unsought, but was grasped as only a great man can grasp the gifts of Fortune, again changed the direction of his life, and gave him to the science of astronomy.
He had for several years employed his spare time in assiduous observation; and, finding that opticians' prices were higher than he could well afford, had begun to make Newtonian reflectors for himself, and had finally succeeded in constructing one of 6½ inches aperture, and of high optical quality. With this instrument, on the night of March 13, 1781, he was engaged in the execution of a plan which he had formed of searching the heavens for double stars, with a view to measuring their distance from the earth by seeing whether the apparent distance of the members of the double from one another varied in any degree in the course of the earth's journey round the sun. He was working through the stars in the constellation Gemini, when his attention was fixed by one which presented a different appearance from the others which had passed his scrutiny.
In a good telescope a fixed star shows only a very small disc, which indeed should be but a point of light; and the finer the instrument the smaller the disc. The disc of this object, however, was unmistakably larger than those of the fixed stars in its neighbourhood—unmistakably, that is, to an observer of such skill as Herschel, though those who have seen Uranus under ordinary powers will find their respect considerably increased for the skill which at once discriminated the tiny greenish disc from that of a fixed star. Subsequent observation revealed to Herschel that he was right in supposing that this body was not a star, for it proved to be in motion relatively to the stars among which it was seen. But, in spite of poetic authority, astronomical discoveries do not happen quite so dramatically as the sonnet 'On First looking into Chapman's Homer' suggests.
'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken'
is a noble simile, were it only true to the facts. But new planets do not swim around promiscuously in this fashion; and in the case of Uranus, which more nearly realizes the thought of Keats than any other in the history of astronomy, the 'watcher of the skies' felt probably more puzzlement than anything else. Herschel was far from realizing that he had found a new planet. When unmistakable evidence was forthcoming that the newly discovered body was not a fixed star, he merely felt confirmed in the first conjecture which had been suggested by the size of its disc—namely, that he had discovered a new comet; and it was as a new comet that Uranus was first announced to the astronomical world.
It quickly became evident, however, that the new discovery moved in no cometary orbit, but in one which marked it out as a regular member of the solar system. A search was then instituted for earlier observations of the planet, and it was found to have been observed and mistaken for a fixed star on twenty previous occasions! One astronomer, Lemonnier, had actually observed it no fewer than twelve times, several of them within a few weeks of one another, and, had he but reduced and compared his observations, could scarcely have failed to have anticipated Herschel's discovery. But perhaps an astronomer who, like Lemonnier, noted some of his observations on a paper-bag which had formerly contained hair-powder, and whose astronomical papers have been described as 'the image of Chaos,' scarcely deserved the honour of such a discovery!
When it became known that this new addition to our knowledge of the solar system had been made by the self-taught astronomer at Bath, Herschel was summoned to Court by George III., and enabled to devote himself entirely to his favourite study by the bestowal of the not very magnificent pension of £200 a year, probably the best investment that has ever been made in the interests of astronomical science. In gratitude to the penurious monarch who had bestowed on him this meagre competence, Herschel wished to call his planet the Georgium Sidus—the Georgian Star, and this title, shortened in some instances to the Georgian, is still to be found in some ancient volumes on astronomy. The astronomers of the Continent, however, did not feel in the least inclined to elevate Farmer George to the skies before his due time, and for awhile the name of Herschel was given to the new planet, which still bears as its symbol the first letter of its discoverer's name with a globe attached to the cross-bar
. Finally, the name Urănus ('a' short) prevailed, and has for long been in universal use.