William Henry Smyth

William Henry Smyth ( born January 21, 1788 in Westminster, London, † September 9, 1865 ) was an admiral in the Royal Navy and an English astronomer.

He was the only son of Joseph Brewer Palmer Smyth and his wife Georgina Caroline née Pilkington. As descendants of Captain John Smith, the founder of the first English colony in Jamestown, Virginia, lived in this East Jersey (now New Jersey). After the American Revolution she emigrated to England, where her son was born.

William was the father of Charles Piazzi Smyth, Sir Warington Wilkinson Smyth and General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth. Of his daughters, Henrietta Grace Smyth married Professor Baden Powell and the mathematics itself was mother of Robert Baden- Powell, while Georgiana Rosetta Smyth married Sir William Henry Flower.

Smyth joined the Royal Navy and during the Napoleonic Wars he served in the Mediterranean and reached the rank of admiral. In 1815 he married Eliza Anne Warington called " Annarella ", only daughter of T. Warington Esq., From Naples. She became his companion and assistant in all his later scientific work. While a contract for the provision of navigable waters, he met the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1817 in Palermo and visited the observatory. This visit aroused his interest in astronomy, and in 1825 he retired from the Navy.

He then founded a private observatory in Bedford, England which was equipped with a telescope with 15 cm aperture width of Tully. He watched so over two decades, a variety of deep-sky objects in the 1830s. He published his observations in 1844 under the name Cycle of Celestial Objects, which in 1845 the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society earned him and at the same time its chairman.

The first volume of his work was generally about astronomy, but the second band was known as Bedford Catalogue and contained the observations of 1604 binary stars and nebulae. It served as a standard work for the following years. No observer in front of him has created such a detailed catalog faint objects.

In 1826 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was its Vice - President 1836-1837, 1846-1847, 1856-1857.

After he had finished his observations, Smyth went 1839 in Cardiff in retirement. His observatory was dismantled and his telescope was sold to John Lee and housed in a new observatory at Hartwell House. Smyth but still had the opportunity to use it as his house was not far from St. John 's Lodge in Stone from his home. This he used even in the years 1839 to 1859 to carry out further astronomical observations. The telescope is now in the Science Museum in London.

Smyth suffered a heart attack and the beginning of September 1865 seemed at first to recover again. On September 8, he showed the planet Jupiter his grandson Arthur Smyth Flower through a telescope. A few hours later on the morning of 9 September, he died at the age of 78 years. He was buried at the cemetery Stone, Buckinghamshire near Aylesbury.

The moon sea Mare Smythii was named after him.

Works

  • Memoir descriptive of the resources, Inhabitants, and hydrography, of Sicily and its islands: interspersed with antiquarian and other notices. Publisher: John Murray, London 1824.
  • Sketch of the Present State of the Iceland of Sardinia. Published by John Murray, London 1828th
  • The Life and Services of Captain Philip Beaver. Publisher: John Murray, London 1829
  • Descriptive catalog of a Cabinet of Roman Imperial Large -brass medals. Publisher: James Webb, Bedford 1834.
  • A cycle of celestial objects: for the use of naval, military, and private astronomers. Volume First. Prolegomena. Publisher: J. W. Parker, London 1844.
  • A cycle of celestial objects: for the use of naval, military, and private astronomers. Volume the second. The Bedford Catalogue. Publisher: J. W. Parker, London 1844.
  • Aedes Hartwellianæ: Or, Notices of the Manor and Mansion of Hartwell. Printed for private circulation, by J. B. Nichols and Son, London 1851
  • Addenda to the Aedes Hartwellianae. Printed for private circulation, by J. B. Nichols and Son, London, 1864.
  • The Mediterranean: a memoir physical, historical, and nautical. Publisher: John W. Parker and Son, London, 1854.
  • Carl Boettger: The Mediterranean. A representation of its physical geography, together with other geographical, historical and nautical studies, with use of Rear- Admiral Smyth 's Mediterranean. Publisher: Gustav Mayer, Leipzig 1859
  • Girolamo Benzoni: History of the New World. Translated from Italian by Rear Admiral WH Smyth. Printed for the Hakluyt Society in 1857.
  • Francois Arago: Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men 1st Series. Translator: Admiral WH Smyth, The Rev. Baden Powell and Robert Grant. Publisher: Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1859 Riverside, Cambridge:. Printed by HO Houghton and Company.
  • Francois Arago: Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men 2nd Series. Translator: Admiral WH Smyth, The Rev. Baden Powell, Robert Grant and Sir William Fairbairn. Publisher: Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1859
  • By the late Admiral William Henry Smyth: The sailor 's word -book: an alphabetical digest of nautical terms, including some more Especially military and scientific ... as well as archaisms of early voyagers, etc. Revised for the press by Vice - Admiral Sir Edward Belcher. Publishing Blackie and Son, London, 1867.
  • William Henry Smyth: A Cycle Of Celestial Objects. Publisher: The Clarendon Press, Oxford. 2nd edition 1881
City of Westminster John Lee (guitarist) Astrophysics Data System Integrated Authority File
822948
de