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Janssen, a Traveling Scientist

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Part of the book series: Astronomers' Universe ((ASTRONOM))

Abstract

We need to go back a few years to better understand the work done by Jules Janssen, one of the most interesting characters in the story of helium. Janssen had a difficult youth. It is said that a nurse dropped him when he was a baby, and the accident left walking with a limp the rest of his life. He could not attend primary or high school but was tutored at home. Although he came from a cultured family—his father was a musician—they were not well-to-do. As a result, he had to go out and get a job at a bank early in his life.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See the biography of Janssen written by Françoise Launay, Un globe-trotter de la physique céleste-L’astronome Jules Janssen (Coédition Vuibert-Observatoire de Paris : 2008). Also, David Aubin’s “Orchestrating Observatory, Laboratory, and Field: Jules Janssen, the Spectroscope, and Travel,” Nuncius (2003), 615–634.

  2. 2.

    In “Mémoire sur l’absorption de la chaleur rayonnate obscure dans les milieux de l’oeil,” Annales de Physique et de Chimie, 3c serie, 1860, Vol. 60, 72; as quoted in Pierre Amalric, “Jules Janssen (1824–1907): From opthalmology to astronomy,” Documenta Ophthalmologica, Vol. 81 (1992), 37.

  3. 3.

    Letter to Henriette Janssen, December 16 and 20, 1862, BIF, 4,133, 46.

  4. 4.

    Letter to Henriette Janssen (December 6, 1862), BIF, 4,133, 45.

  5. 5.

    Letter to Henriette Janssen (March 1863), BIF, 4,133, 58.

  6. 6.

    Letter to Henriette Janssen (1859), BIF, 4,133, 22.

  7. 7.

    David Aubin, Ibid., 618.

  8. 8.

    Based on the interpretation that these particular lines in the spectrum were caused by water vapor, he thought he saw water lines in the spectra of Mars and Saturn.

  9. 9.

    Françoise Launay, Ibid., 31.

  10. 10.

    The good weather also brought along an unexpected crowd to look through Janssen’s telescope, to his annoyance. We will see another similar incidence a year later, in India, when Pogson’s observations during the 1868 eclipse would attract a lot of crowd, at times, to his consternation. Janssen wrote to his wife about his experience in Italy: ‘At the instant proper of the eclipse, the house from where I was observing the eclipse was raided by crowds, it became necessary to send for the guard to control the rush, and they grabbed my instruments, jostled me around, insisted on viewing through a large telescope: Sir, let us see too; Sir, when will the moon be upon the sun? Sir, what are you looking at there? Sir, Sir…But all these people did not suspect what was going on to be some serious research, they considered it their right to view through instruments.’ (his letter to Henriette Janssen, 06-03-1867).

  11. 11.

    Quoted in David Aubin’s “Eclipse politics in France and Thailand, 1868,” in The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture, eds. D. Aubin, C. Bigg, H. O. Sibum (Duke University Press, London, 2010),116.

  12. 12.

    Letter from Jules Janssen to Urbain Le Verrier, 12.3.1868, Archives of the Marsailles Observatory.

  13. 13.

    Mentioned by Yvert Benoit, Gazetteer of ministers (1786–1989) (Paris, Perrin, 1990), 252.

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Nath, B.B. (2013). Janssen, a Traveling Scientist. In: The Story of Helium and the Birth of Astrophysics. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5363-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5363-5_5

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