Quarter 2 Biography: James South

Gabrielle Pata

Period 1

10 January 2011

                       

James South

            James South was a British astronomer who was born in Southwark, London, England in October of 1785.  He died at Campden Hill, Kensington, London, on October 19, 1867.   South grew up as a son of a pharmaceutical chemist.  He originally studied surgery, and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and he acquired an extensive practice when, through marriage in 1816, he suddenly became wealthy enough to get into studies involving medicine.  James South started devoting much of his time to astronomy at this time.  He established many observatories in London and Paris, where he worked with many good telescopes.

            South worked in collaboration with another astronomer, John Herschel, during the years of 1821 to 1823.  John Herschel was lucky enough to find a collaborator like James South, who could afford the refined instruments that were necessary. Double stars, which were originally discovered by Herschel, were one of South's interests during the nineteenth century.  Together, they produced a catalogue of 380 double stars in 1824.  New ones were being found and more precise measurements were made with each improvement in telescopes.   The main purpose of their studies of double stars was to detect position changes.  They helped verify the newly discovered orbital motion of certain neighboring stars, and they went on to catalog 380 double stars.  They showed them to the Royal Society in 1824, and they were given the gold medal of the Astronomical Society and the grand prize of the Institut de France.  By doing this, they were revisiting quite a few of the double stars that William Herschel had discovered.  Over the course of the next year, South went on to discover another 458 double stars.  South was then awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for the founding of this next group of stars. 

             South became greatly worried about the decline of science in Britain.  So, he published a criticism of the Nautical Almanac in 1822, alleging its inferiority to continental ones.  Then, in 1829, when he was in charge of the Astronomical Society committee, he publicly criticized the Royal Society.  He was trying to improve the effectiveness of the institutions, but it did no good. 

            During the late 1820s and 1830s, South did much of his astronomical work.  In 1826, James South won the Copley Medal.  Later on in that same year he won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.  Due to a technicality in 1831, he left the organization.  South then became knighted in the year of 1831. He also became a part of the Royal Society of London, the Linnaean Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitana.  He then had craters on Mars and the Moon named after him.  Beginning in 1826, South had plans for a bigger telescope, which would be an equatorially mounted achromatic refracting lens telescope in a brand new observatory.  He got a 12 inch lens from Paris, and it was so big that it most likely was the biggest achromatic object in the world in its time.  South completed building the telescope, but it was destroyed in 1838.  The problem was the equatorial mount, which caused the telescope to become dismantled.  James helped found the Astronomical Society of London.  He was president of the society from 1831 to 1832.  Under his presidency of the group, a petition was successfully submitted to have a royal charter in 1831, upon which the society became called the Royal Astronomical Society. 

            South got involved in a famous lawsuit brought against Edward Troughton, who was the instrument maker.  The problem was over the equatorial-mount telescope that Troughton had built for him, which had been thought to be defective by South.  So, Edward sued  him and ended up winning.  James destroyed the telescope mount, while the lens was saved and given to the Dublin Observatory in 1862.  They mounted it on a Grubb equatorial, where it still stands today.  After Stephen Groombridge, James was the next owner of the Troughton made, Groombridge Transit Circle of 1806.