SCHEMATIZING (16)

By: Joshua Glenn
September 25, 2023

One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.

William Herschel (1738–1822) was a German-born British astronomer and composer. In 1781 he discovered Uranus — the first planet to be discovered since antiquity. (Keats alludes to Herschel’s discovery of Uranus in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.”)

Herschel pioneered the use of astronomical spectrophotometry, using prisms and temperature measuring equipment to measure the wavelength distribution of stellar spectra. In the course of these investigations, and assisted by his sister Caroline (who’d become the first woman to work as a professional astronomer), Herschel discovered infrared radiation; and he was the first to propose a model of our galaxy based on observation and measurement. The steel-engraved print here is found on a page of Rees’ The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature (serialized 1802–1820). The diagram — which bears a close resemblance to my own G-schema — is apparently related to some aspect of Herschel’s 1790 rendering of the Milky Way.

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SCHEMATIZING (16)

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