Sir John Herschel

In addition to carrying on his father’s astronomical research, John Herschel was a polymath who achieved success in the fields of mathematics, chemistry, photography, geology, and meteorology. He was close friends with George Biddell Airy, the seventh Astronomer Royal, and they worked together on numerous initiatives that helped to form the operations of the Royal Observatory in the first part of the 19th century.

He found and published his studies with silver and salts in 1819. The first glass-plate image was created by him, and he was one of the Astronomical Society’s founding members in 1820. Until the day of his death in May 1871, Herschel pursued his scientific work.