John Herschel

John Herschel catalogued the southern sky, invented several of the words photography is described in, and was the most broadly accomplished British scientist of his generation. He was the son of William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, and the nephew of Caroline Herschel, and he took up his father's unfinished survey rather than the mathematics he had trained in at Cambridge, where he had helped introduce continental analytical notation into English teaching. Between 1834 and 1838 he took his family to the Cape of Good Hope and swept the southern heavens systematically, cataloguing more than seventeen hundred nebulae and star clusters and over two thousand double stars, and observing Halley's comet and the great eruption of Eta Carinae. The results were published at his own expense. In chemistry he found in 1819 that hypo dissolves silver salts, which is the fixing agent that made photographs permanent; he told Talbot in 1839 and the process was adopted at once. He coined photography, negative, positive and snapshot, and made the first photograph on glass. He also did serious work in optics and in the mathematics of light polarisation, wrote a Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy that Darwin said stirred in him a burning zeal, and named the moons of Saturn and Uranus. He was master of the Mint for five years and hated it. The New York Sun attributed a series of fabricated reports of life on the Moon to him in 1835, the Great Moon Hoax, which he found funny at first and tiresome afterwards. He was buried in Westminster Abbey next to Newton. He had twelve children, one of whom organised his catalogues after his death. The General Catalogue he compiled became the New General Catalogue, and NGC numbers are still how most galaxies are referred to.

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