BESSEL, FRIEDRICH WILHELM (1784-1846)

This article appears in Volume V03, Page 822 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: BER-BLA

BESSEL, FRIEDRICH WILHELM (1784-1846) , German astronomer, was born at Minden on the 22nd of July 1784. Placed at the age of fifteen in a counting-

house

HOUSE
HOUSE (O. Eng. hiss, a word common to Teutonic languages, cf. Dut. huis, Ger. Haus; in
Gothic
- GOTHIC
it is only found in gudhiss, a temple; it may be ultimately connected with the root of " hide," conceal)

at Bremen, he was impelled by his desire to obtain a situation as supercargo on a foreign voyage to study navigation, mathematics and finally astronomy. In 1804 he calculated the orbit of Halley's comet from observations made in 1607 by Thomas Harriot, and communicated his results to H. W. M. Others, who procured their publication (Monatliche Correspondenz, x. 425), and re-commended the young aspirant in 1805 for the post of assistant in J. H. Schroter's observatory at Lilienthal. A, masterly investigation of the comet of 1807 (Konigsberg, 1810) enhanced his reputation, and the king of Prussia summoned him, in 1810, to superintend the erection of a new observatory at Konigsberg; of which he acted as director from its completion in 1813 until his death. In this capacity he inaugurated the modern era of practical astronomy. For the purpose of improving knowledge of

star

STAR

-places he reduced James Bradley's Greenwich observations, and derived from them an invaluable catalogue of 3222 stars, published in the volume rightly named Fundamenta Astronomiae (1818). In Tabulae Regiomontanae (1830), he definitively established the uniform system of reduction still in use. During the years 1821-1833, he observed all stars to the ninth magnitude in zones extending from-r5 to +45 dec., and thus raised the number of those accurately determined to about 50,000. He corrected the length of the seconds' pendulum in 1826, in a discussion re-published by H. Bruns in 1889; measured an arc of the meridian in East Prussia in 1831-1832; and deduced for the earth in 1841 an ellipticity of T4-g. His ascertainment in 1838 (Asir. Nach., Nos. 365-366) of a parallaxof 0"31 for 61 Cygni was the first authentic result of the kind published. He announced in 1844 the binary character of Sirius and Procyon from their disturbed proper motions; and was preparing to attack the problem solved later by the discovery of Neptune, when fatal illness intervened. He died at Konigsberg on the 17th of March 1846. Modern astronomy of precision is essentially Bessel's creation. Apart from the large scope of his activity, he introduced such important novelties as the effective use of the heliometer, the correction for personal equation (in 1823), and the systematic investigation of instrumental errors. He issued 21 volumes of Aslronomische Beobachtungen auf der Sternwarte zu Konigsberg (1815-1844), and a

list

LIST (O.E.
lisle
- LISLE, ALICE (c. 1614-1685)
, a Teutonic word, cf. Dut. lust, Ger. Leiste, adapted in Ital. lista and Fr.
lisle
- LISLE, ALICE (c. 1614-1685)
)
LIST, FRIEDRICH (1789-1846)

of his writings

drawn

DRAWN

up by A. L. Busch appeared in vol. 24 of the same

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

. Especial attention should be directed to his Astronomische Untersuchungen (2 Vo1S. 18411842), Populare Vorlesungen (1848), edited by H. C. Schumacher, and to the important collection entitled Abhandlungen (4 vols. 1875-1882), issued by R. Engelmann at

Leipzig

LEIPZIG

. His

minor

treatises numbered over 350. In pure mathematics he enlarged the resources of analysis by the invention of Bessel's Functions. He made some preliminary use of these expressions in 1817, in a

paper

PAPER
PAPER (Fr. papier, from Lat. papyrus)

on Kepler's Problem (Transactions Berlin .Academy, 1816-1817, p. 49), and fully developed them seven years later, for the purposes of a research into planetary perturbations (Ibid. 1824, pp. 1-52).
See also H. Durege, Bessels Leben and Wirken (Zurich, 1860; J. F. Encke, Geddchtnissrede auf Bessel (Berlin, 1846) ; C. T. Anger, Erinnerung an Bessels Leben and Wirken (Danzig, 1845) ; Astronomische Nachrichten, xxiv. 49, 331 (1846); Monthly Notices,Roy. Astr. Society, vii. 199 (1847) ; Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, Ii. 558-567.

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