Sky & Telescope - September 2022 - 36

GALLE: HISTORICAL IMAGE COLLECTION BY BILDAGENTUR-ONLINE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO;
NORTHUMBERLAND REFRACTOR: ANTIQUA PRINT GALLERY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Solar System History
identified a symbiotic relationship
between the Royal Observatory and
Cambridge Observatory. The historians
believe that the strong ties between
the two institutions prompted Airy to
try for a discovery specifically from
Cambridge. By the 1840s, specialized
mathematical education at Cambridge
had come under some attack. It would
have been a spectacular confirmation of
the university's worth had the presence
of the planet been both predicted and
visually confirmed by Cambridge men.
A bigger mystery is why didn't
Adams respond to the follow-up queries
in Airy's letter of November 5th?
According to Grosser, Airy was widely known for answering
correspondence right away, so taking two weeks to reply
showed the " Astronomer Royal's negative feelings. " As a
result, Grosser contended, Adams felt " distinctly rebuffed "
and never answered the letter " because he felt that Airy was
putting him off. "
Recent scholarship, however, reveals that both Adams and
Airy were working under tremendous pressure. Adams was
from a relatively poor working-class family, so tutoring was
his only source of income. The demands on his time were so
great that the only opportunities he had to work on investigating
the wayward motions of Uranus were university vacations.
In what little time he had to spare during school terms,
he was tasked with calculating comet orbits for Challis.
Airy, too, was extraordinarily busy. In addition to his
regular duties as director of the Royal Observatory, he was
also interviewing engineers and testing trains in his capacity
AT THE EYEPIECE Johann Gottfried
Galle was the first to lay eyes on Neptune,
and also to recognize it for what it was. He
could not have done it without the assistance
of Heinrich d' Arrest, who knew where
to find a just-published, accurate new star
chart of the right area of the sky.
as Scientific Commissioner of the Rail
Gauge Commission. Nonetheless, Airy
likely was keenly interested in Adams's
efforts, not least of all because he had
learned during his European trip the
previous month that Le Verrier was
working on the Uranus problem. Never
mind the highly irregular social faux pas of Adams (who was
basically a 26-year-old junior faculty member) dropping in
on Britain's most important astronomer without an appointment,
but his timing on October 21, 1845, couldn't have
been worse. Airy's 42-year-old wife was in her last week of
pregnancy with the couple's ninth child - a worrisome time
given that all her previous pregnancies had been difficult and
dangerous. At the same time, Airy's long-time observatory
assistant had just been dismissed for incest, leaving the Royal
Observatory short-staffed. November 5th was likely the first
moment Airy was free to respond to Adams's note.
So, if it wasn't a matter of Adams feeling snubbed by the
two-week delay, why didn't he respond to Airy's queries? In
June 2004, when astronomy historian Craig B. Waff visited
the Adams papers at the Cornwall Records Office, he discovered
a revelatory, unfinished letter intended for Airy and
dated November 13, 1845. In the document, Adams clearly
struggled to find the right tone for detailing his methodology
to the most important and internationally renowned astronomer
in Britain. Adams tried to avoid sounding presumptuous
or patronizing to the Astronomer Royal.
But he never mailed his reply. Quite simply, he appears to
have dropped the ball. The only explanation Challis offered
later was that Adams " experiences also a difficulty, which
all young writers feel more or less, in putting into shape and
order what he has done, and well done, so as to convey an
adequate idea of it to others by writing. " Challis always found
Adams " more willing to communicate [verbally] than by writing. "
Furthermore, according to historian William Sheehan,
Adams's failure to answer Airy's questions was, in modern
terms, " rather like the failure of the author of a scientific
paper to respond to the comments of a referee. " Regardless,
the honest misunderstandings between Adams and Airy had
ALMOST FAMOUS The Illustrated London News published this
rendering of the 11.6-inch (29.5-cm) Northumberland Telescope at the
University of Cambridge in 1843. Observer James Challis used this telescope
to hunt for Neptune, but because he didn't analyze his data in a
timely fashion, he failed to realize he'd recorded sighting the planet twice
in August 1846 - a month before Galle and d'Arrest spotted it.
36 SEPTEMBER 2022 * SKY & TELESCOPE
Sky & Telescope - September 2022

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