Abstract
Lambert’s memoir on the satellite of Venus was for a long time the last serious study of the subject. By the 1780s the satellite was on its way out of astronomy, with the majority of astronomers either dismissing it or, more commonly, ignoring it. Lalande’s mention of the subject in the Dictionnaire de physique of 1781 and later in his Astronomie of 1792, uncommitted but not clearly dismissive, was an exception. As we shall see, the rejection of the satellite of Venus did not mean that it was deemed to oblivion. This was far from the case. Still, from the point of view of the large majority of astronomers the question was no longer controversial. Whatever its mysteries (and these were many), it was agreed that Venus just could not boast of a moon.
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References
Herschel 1912, vol. 1, p. 444. Originally published as “Observations on the planet Venus,” Philosophical Transactions 83 (1793), 201–219.
Bode 1807, p. 35. Calling the existence of the moon “still most doubtful” (noch sehr zweifelhaft) may suggest that Bode was not yet willing to write off the satellite.
Bode 1816, p. 357.
Schröter 1796, p. 193. A modern selection of Schröter’s important observations of Venus, including papers by Herschel and Harding, appears as Schröter 1995. For an appreciation of Schröter’s astronomical work, see Moore 1960.
Schröter 1792, p. 337. Venus does have high mountains — the highest peak has an elevation of 11,580 km — but that became known only much later. Chimboraco, now Chimborazo, a defunct volcano in Ecuador, has a height of 6,310 m. The greater height of Mount Everest and other Himalayan mountains was only established in the mid-nineteenth century. On the history of the high mountains of Venus, see Baum 1973, pp. 51–69.
Montucla 1802, pp. 15–16; Bailly 1779, vol. 2, pp. 407–411. Most of Montucla’s volume 4, which dealt with the astronomical sciences and appeared only posthumously, was written by Lalande, a lifelong friend of Montucla. It is uncertain if the section on Venus’ moon was written by Montucla or Lalande.
Gehler 1798, p. 340. The second edition, published in 1833 and edited by the chemist Leopold Gmelin (1788–1853) and others, excluded the account of the former edition and simply stated in a footnote that it was unnecessary to deal with “the opinion, so certainly erroneous” that Venus possesses a moon (vol. 7, p. 64).
Hutton 1795, vol. 2, p. 649.
Most of the account on the satellite of Venus is quoted in Thornton 1804, pp. 329–332. The first edition of the Encyclopœia Britannica appeared in 1768–71.
Erxleben 1787 (fourth edition), pp. 569–570. The Danish translation of the book, Begyndelsesgrunde til Naturlæren (1790), included references to the works of Roedkiær and Horrebow.
Fleischer 1786, p. 909. Fleischer (1732–1804) was unaware of Scheuten’s observation and of course also of the unpublished observations of his compatriots Roedkiær and Horrebow of 1761.
Thornton 1804. The English naturalist R. J. Thornton (1768–1837) was a Darwinian avant le mot, and Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) praised The Temple of Flora as having “no equal.” On Thornton and Darwin, see Bush 1974.
Aikin 1803, p. 880. The work under review was Thornton 1803. From 1803 to 1808 Aikin (1773–1854) served as editor of the Annual Review.
Thornton 1804.
Brückner 1828, vol. 2, p. 55.
Delambre 1821, p. 743.
Examples are Anger 1862 and Tuxen 1861, pp. 215–216 (in Danish). We have not made any systematical study of the literature.
Humboldt 1845–58, vol. 3, p. 539. Schorr 1875 protested against Humboldt’s characterization (pp. v, x and 60).
Mädler 1873, vol. 1, pp. 475–476. The idea of an unknown planet masquerading as the moon of Venus was developed by J.-C. Houzeau in 1884 (see section 6.1).
Mädler 1873, vol. 2, p. 234.
Hussey 1834.
Arago 1854–60, vol. 2, pp. 538–542. The book appeared simultaneously in German, as Populäre Astronomie, ed. W. C. Hankel (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1855–59), where the section on the Venus moon is in vol. 2, pp. 473-476. Although best known as a physicist, Arago (1786–1853) also contributed to astronomy and astrophysics. He was director of the Paris Observatory 1843–53 and during the 1842 solar eclipse he examined the Sun’s chromosphere and determined that the limb of the Sun is gaseous.
Hind 1852, p. 37. J. R. Hind (1823–1895) received the Royal Society’s Gold Medal and the Lalande Medal. He discovered ten asteroids and was the first to observe the new planet Neptune from Britain. Obituary in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 56 (1896), 200–205.
Webb 1859, pp. 45–46. According to Hockey 2007, p. 1200, T. W. Webb (1806–1885) was “the patron saint of British amateur astronomers.” On Webb’s life, see the obituary in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 46 (1886), 198—201.
Anger 1862, p. 103. See also Lardner 1860, p. 206, which concluded that the observations of Venus’ moon were probably due to illusions.
Klein 1879, p. 118, which included a reproduction of Lambert 1775 and 1776.
Smyth 1844, vol. 1, pp. 109–110.
Astore 2001, p. 37. On Dick (1774–1857) as a pluralist, see Crowe 1999, pp. 195–202 and Hennesey 1999, pp. 62–65. Yeo 1986 provides an insightsful analysis of the British context of pluralism and natural theology.
Dick 1838, p. 96 and p. 99.
Ibid. p. 135. His population number for Mars was 15.5 billions, and for the Moon 4.2 billions; Saturn, including its system of rings, could boast of no less than 13,630 billion inhabitants. For comparison, the population of the Earth in 1838 was about 1.2 billion. Dick’s table is reproduced in Crowe 1999, p. 199.
Dick 1838, p. 140.
Mattison 1849 (fifth edition), p. 94. Apart from his lectures and books on astronomy, Mattison (1811–1868) was also known for his active support of the anti-slavery movements.
Quoted in Dick 1838, p. 99 and also in Smyth 1844, p. 109. We have not been able to locate the original source. Neither Dick nor Smyth accepted Brewster’s argument that astronomers in the eighteenth century had been deceived by optical illusions. As Dick pointed out, the satellite had been seen both with refractors and reflectors, and sometimes with different powers applied, for which reasons it was unlikely that the observations were caused by the instrument.
Brewster 1854, p. 76. On Brewster’s pluralism and his debate with the prominent scientist, philosopher and priest William Whewell (1794–1866) on this issue, see Brooke 1977 and Crowe 1999, pp. 313–351.
Quotations from Whewell 1856, pp. 113–114. It was generally believed at the time that William Herschel had discovered six moons around Uranus. See further in Chapter 7.
On Proctor (1837–1888), see Ranyard 1889. Apart from his astronomical works, Proctor also has a place in the history of cosmology. In Other Worlds than Ours he conceived of a hierarchic model universe of such a kind that, even if the universe were filled with an infinitude of stars, the total amount of starlight received on Earth would be quite small. In this way he escaped Olbers’ paradox without introducing interstellar absorption. This kind of cosmological model was later developed by the Swedish astronomer Carl Charlier (1862–1934) and is sometimes known as Charlier’s hierarchic universe.
Proctor 1896, p. 84.
Ibid., p. 85.
Ibid., p. 86.
Spencer 1858, p. 86. First published in Westminster Review 70 (1858), 185–225 and included in the 1891 edition of his Essays (Spencer 1891). On Spencer’s theory, see Brush 1996, pp. 50–53.
Lardner 1860, p. 213, found it “not altogether improbable that a satellite of Mars may yet be discovered.” The argument was the traditional one of a correlation of the number of satellites with the distances of the planets from the Sun.
Spencer 1858, p. 87.
H. Tuttle, Arcana of Nature, 2 vols. (Boston: Berry, Colby & Co., 1860–63), reprinted in Tuttle and Denmore 2003, where the reference to the satellite of Venus is on p. 169.
The Illustrated London News, 28 August 1852, which includes an illustration of the telescope and its associated brick tower, 61 feet in height. For details about Craig (1805–1877) and his telescope, see Steel 1982, Smye-Rumsby 2004 and the website http://homepage.ntlworld.com/greg.smyerumsby/craig/index.html.
Neither Haase nor Schorr is listed in Poggendorff’s Biographisch-Literarisches Handwörterbuch and they are also absent from Hockey 2007 and from Royal Society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers (1800–1900). A Hannoverian civil servant, Haase published in 1857 and 1861 a couple of observations in the Astronomische Nachrichten.
The literature on Vulcan and the Mercury anomaly is extensive. See Baum and Sheehan 1997 and the sources mentioned therein. On the anomaly as a problem for Newton’s law of gravitation, and its role in the formation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, see Roseveare 1982. There are certain similarities between the observations of Vulcan and the Venus moon apart from both being spurious. As Baum and Sheehan observes, “Like the phantom satellite of Venus of the 17th and 18th centuries, Vulcan managed to reappear just often enough to maintain a shadowy existence among true believers” (ibid., p. 168). A main difference between the two cases is that whereas fundamental physics (Newton’s law of gravitation) was involved in the case of Vulcan, the satellite of Venus had no connection to theory.
Carrington 1860. On the attempts to find observations of Vulcan before 1859, see Baum and Sheehan 1997, pp. 157–160. Wolf 1891, vol. 1, p. 537 puts Venus’ moon and Vulcan in the same basket.
Haase 1863–69.
Ende 1811, p. 394, letter dated 4 September 1811. Apart from Uranus, the “new planets” were the asteroids discovered in the early years of the nineteenth century: Ceres (1801), Pallas (1802), Juno (1804) and Vesta (1807).
Blacklock 1868, p. 197. See also the comment by Thomas Webb in the same issue of the Astronomical Register where Webb admitted that the consistency of the observations in 1764 was difficult to explain (Webb 1868).
Anon. 1876b.
Letter of 10 November 1781, reproduced in part by von Zach in his Monatliche Correspondenz (Bernoulli 1802). Baron von Zach (1754–1832) was court astronomer to Duke Ernst of Saxe-Gotha, founder and editor of the Monatliche Correspondenz and a leading figure in the search for missing planets between Mars and Jupiter (asteroids) in the early years of the nineteenth century. J. Bernoulli (1744–1807), sometimes known as Jean Bernoulli III, was the last of the famous Swiss dynasty of mathematicians.
Koch 1802, p. 235, letter dated 24 August 1802. See also the review in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, no. 54, 22 February 1803, p. 430. J. A. Koch (1752–1817), a member of the Danzig naturforschender Gesellschaft, wrote several papers on variable stars, asteroids and other subjects. In 1818 he published a table of variable stars. The asteroid Pallas was discovered by Olbers on 28 March 1802 and Gauss found its orbital inclination to be 34°.
Ibid., p. 236.
For a count of 23 pre-discovery observations of Uranus, from 1690 to 1771 (but not including Roedkiæ’s in 1764), see Grosser 1979, p. 41. See also Forbes 1982 and the detailed list in Alexander 1965, pp. 80–91.
Schorr 1873. In this work he did not mention the possibility of a Venus moon.
Schorr 1875, p. xi.
Ibid., p. 185. On the basis of the corpuscular theory of light, the English natural philosopher John Michell (1724–1793) had put forward the idea of dark stars in 1784, and in 1844 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784–1846) inferred that Sirius was accompanied by a small unseen star. See, e.g., Clerke 1903, pp. 399–403. Eisenstaedt 1991 is a detailed analysis of the idea of dark stars from Newton to Laplace. For the connection to black holes, see also Israel 1987.
Webb 1876. Another lengthy and generally positive review appeared in Bertrand 1875 (see also below). T. W. Webb is best known for his publication in 1859 of Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes, a classic guide for amateur astronomy for more than half a century.
The suggestion of atmospheric illusions or images was much elaborated in Thirion 1885 (see section 6.1).
Webb 1876, p. 195.
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(2008). A spurious but persistent satellite. In: The Moon that Wasn’t. Science Networks. Historical Studies, vol 37. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-8909-3_5
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