Great Astronomers: Parsons
Great Astronomers in Modern English
by Sir Robert S. Ball, 1895 (paraphrased by Leslie Noelani Laurio)
To view the table of contents for the rest of this book, click here.
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, 1800-1867
Constructor of the famous "Leviathan of Parsonstown" telescope.
William Parsons is unusual among scientists. Most scientists rose from obscurity to fame, but William Parsons was born into a family connected with royalty. His father, Sir Lawrence Parsons, was a member of the Irish Parliament and the 2nd Earl of Rosse. So William Parsons became the 3rd Earl of Rosse [at the age of 41]. He was born in York [England] on June 17, 1800. Before he became an Earl, he was Baron Oxmantown.
He was educated at Trinity College in Dublin, and then Magdalen College at Oxford. He wasn't unusually distinguished at college, but he was a diligent student, and did very well in mathematics. He was very interested in social issues and had a passion for political economy. He represented King's County [now called County Offaly; it's in the center of Ireland] in the Irish Parliament's House of Commons from 1821 to 1834. His family's estate [Birr Castle] was located here.
[He married Mary Field in 1836; they had four sons who survived into adulthood. He became Lord Rosse in 1841.]
Lord Rosse liked working with mechanical things. He had qualities excellently suited to be a scientific engineer along with the manual skill that also made him good at practical hands-on projects. He was a talented mechanic, a good founder [casting metal], and a brilliant optician. Most of his acquaintances were also interested in mechanics, and he loved to visit engineering workshops where refined processes in those fields were being done. One time after he had been shown an establishment somewhere in northern England, the owner said the place really needed a foreman, and, since William seemed so mechanical, he offered him the position! At that point, William divulged that he was Lord Oxmantown -- not quite the person for a job as a foreman -- but that he appreciated the compliment. So the owner invited him to dinner, and they became long-time friends.
This is how Lord Rosse explained how he ended up devoting his attention to astronomy: since he was a man with financial means and time on his hands, he looked around and considered how he might best use his money and leisure time. Not surprisingly, he thought about something that would use his interest in mechanics. It occurred to him that telescopes hadn't advanced much since the days of Sir William Herschel. Constructing great telescopes to observe the heavens would require both time and money. He also realized that the fundamental challenges of this task would take all the mechanical skill he had. So he decided that he would make that his life's work.
Seventy miles from Dublin, in the middle of Ireland, right on the border between King's County and County Tipperary is a little town whose name is still not quite settled. Its official name is Parsonstown [after the Parsons family], but whose inhabitants often insist is actually Birr. For every six people who say its name is Parsonstown, another six will say that it's actually Birr. Whichever it is, Parsonstown or Birr [it was officially changed to Birr in 1899], it is a charming little Irish town. The widest street is called the Oxmantown Mall. It is lined on both sides with colorful houses and rows of stately trees. At one end of Oxmantown Mall is the Parish Church [St. Brendan's Church], and at the other end are the gates to Birr Castle, the ancestral home of the Parsons family. [See Birr Castle on YouTube!] A visitor passing through those gates enters a beautiful spacious area with woods and water [called Birr Castle Demesne]. There's a lovely wooded spot where where the two rivers meet. At various places, you can still see displays of Lord Rosse's engineering skill, such as a beautiful lake that he added, designed and landscaped to look completely natural, complete with ducks. Water is fed into the lake by a tube that passes under one of the rivers. The overflow of the lake turns a water-wheel that runs a pair of hydraulic lifts brilliantly designed to drain the low-lying areas of the estate.
Regarding the fame that Lord Rosse's mirrored telescope brought to the town of Birr, here is a quote from the book "The Natural History of Ireland," by Gerard Boate, Thomas Molyneaux, and others that mention how Parsonstown was famous for its glass 150 years ago:
'We close this chapter by mentioning the glass produced in Ireland. There were several glasshouses that the English built in Ireland to make glass. There were none in Dublin, or any of the other cities; they were all out in the country. The main one was at the market town Birr. The town had been called Parsonstown, named for Sir Lawrence Parsons after he purchased land there and built an estate on it. His son William Parsons inherited it. The town is within Queen's County, about 50 (Irish) miles southwest of Dublin, bordering the provinces of Leinster and Munster. This glass factory provided Dublin with all kinds of windows, drinking glasses, and other commonly used glass items. They brought in sand from England, and used ash from ash trees. Their biggest challenge was getting clay to make pots for melting the materials in, and they got that from the north.' from Ch 21.
Birr Castle is a noble mansion, reminiscent of the days of Cromwell. It is surrounded by a moat and has a modern drawbridge. From the windows, there are beautiful views of lovely spots all over the park. Lord Rosse loved living in his home country. Visitors naturally want to see the castle, but the most interesting feature of the place isn't in the castle. On the extensive lawn between the moat and the lake, there are two brick walls that look like turreted towers. They are taller than an ordinary house and covered with ivy. As the visitor approaches, he sees something in between those two walls that looks like a huge pipe propped up on the ground. It's a wooden tube, sixty feet long and six feet in diameter -- wide enough for a man to enter and walk through from one end to the other without having to stoop. This is the largest telescope ever built [until the Hooker Telescope was built in California in 1917]. Close to the two walls is a tiny building called The Observatory [image here]. The smaller instruments are kept in this building, as well as some reference books. The observatory also provides shelter for star-gazers, and has provisions for a warm fire and a cup of hot tea to make chilly nights observing the winter stars a little more comfortable.
The first thing a visitor would notice about the telescope, besides the enormous size [they don't call it the "Leviathan of Parsonstown" for nothing!], is that it looks different from other telescopes. Ordinary telescopes look like a tube with glass lenses at both ends. Even large telescopes at our observatories are made that way -- one end focuses on the object, and the other end is the eye-piece. Naturally, the lower end would be the eye-piece and the other end was pointed at the sky. But this telescope is missing those glass lenses, because the observer doesn't look through the lower end. Instead, he has to use the ingenious system of stairs and balconies that give him access to the mouth of the great tube. This colossal telescope is a reflector -- like the one Isaac Newton invented. It swings between the two walls. There's a reflecting mirror at the lower end of the huge tube. The mirror is made from two parts copper and one part tin. Copper is tough and brown; tin is silvery, soft, and almost stringy in texture. But when they're mixed, the alloy [called speculum metal] is totally different -- it's extremely hard and brittle. It resembles tin in its colour, but is much shinier. When it's polished, it's almost as brilliant as silver.
[Reflectors use mirrors to bounce the image back to the viewer and are better for viewing galaxies and nebulae in deep space. View diagrams of reflectors on Wikipedia. Refractors collect, focus and magnify light. They are better for observing closer things like planets and the moon. Diagrams of refractors are also on Wikipedia. Read more about their differences here.]
To make this telescope, Lord Rosse had to make a large mirror -- six feet in diameter, and almost five inches thick. A mirror this large had never been attempted before. William Herschel had made a mirror four feet in diameter and a few smaller mirrors, but he never published the process he used to make them. The larger in diameter, the more difficulties would be encountered. Lord Rosse began having difficulties right from the start, and at every step of the process. The mold to cast the metal weighed three or four tons, and that alone was troublesome. If he had been casting some common metal like iron, it would have been a fairly straightforward process that any founder could have handled since he deals with those kinds of jobs all the time. But speculum metal is very unmanageable to work with. Melting down the copper is easy. Adding the right amount of tin to the melted copper is also no problem. It's a little tricky to pour the molten metal from various crucibles at the same time to fill the mold simultaneously, but once that was done, that's when the real difficulties began. Speculum metal is excessively brittle. If it was cooled like ordinary copper or iron, the mirror would shatter into pieces. Speculum metal had to be cooled very, very slowly to make it harden. So, once the mirror had gotten to a solid state but was still red hot [about 20 minutes], it was put into an annealing [hardening] oven. There, the temperature was allow to decrease slightly over a six week period. On one of the trials, after the casting had been cooled, when it was opened, the speculum mirror was cracked into two pieces. After investigating, they discovered that one of the walls of the oven had only a single thickness of bricks. That meant that heat escaped more easily through that side than the other walls, which were double thick. So the speculum metal hadn't cooled uniformly, and that caused it to crack. There were other failures, but Lord Rosse persisted and finally [on the fifth attempt] managed to cast two perfect discs so that he could begin the tedious process of grinding and polishing. [He made two so that one could be in use while the other was being cleaned and polished.] On top of all this, the weight of all that copper and tin meant that each mirror weighed about 500 pounds!
Lord Rosse's mechanical ingenuity was put to the test in devising the machinery that was needed to grind and polish the mirrors. Most telescope makers did this by hand, but that's not so easy when your mirror is as big as a dining room table and weighs 500 pounds! The initial rough grinding was done with a cast iron tool the same size as the mirror. It moved back and forth and around by machine, while sand and water were placed between it and the mirror to scrub it smooth. As the surface became smoother, emery [aluminum oxide with iron oxide used to polish gems] was used instead of sand. When this was done, the grinding tool was replaced with a polishing tool. The polishing tool had heat-softened pitch so it would conform to the exact shape of the mirror. Rouge [reddish ferric oxide used for fine polishing or for make-up] was used as the polishing substance. After nine hours of rubbing with rouge, the mirror was as shiny and brilliant as highly polished silver. The disc was about six feet in diameter and four inches thick. It had a very slight depression in the center of half an inch. This huge speculum mirror was placed on a truck and transported to the instrument; then it was placed at the bottom of the sixty foot tube -- sixty feet was the focal distance of the mirror [for greater magnification]. Another small reflector [mirror] was put in a smaller tube that extended sideways out of the huge tube. This allowed the observer to see the reflected image from the huge mirror. And now with the addition of the mirrors, the largest telescope that had ever been built was completed.
[You can read details about how the Leviathan was constructed at the History Ireland website.]
I was one of the few lucky people that Lord Rosse trusted to use his telescope. For two seasons in 1865 and 1866, I had the honour of being his astronomy assistant [Sir Robert S. Ball was born in Dublin, 70 miles from Birr Castle, and served at the Dunsirk Observatory in Ireland in 1874.] I spent many nights in the observer's gallery looking through that remarkable telescope. When I was there, the main things being researched were nebulae. Lord Rosse's telescope was specially suited to view these hard-to-see faint smudges of light that lie far away on the outskirts of the heavens. They are so delicate that they require a powerful telescope that captures as much light as possible.
One of the greatest discoveries made with this telescope came when the telescope was still quite new. Lord Rosse discovered that some of the nebulae have a spiral shape! When he first announced this discovery, many people found it hard to believe. Other astronomers looked at nebulae themselves and they couldn't see any spiral shape, so they decided that it must not exist. Maybe Lord Rosse's telescope was defective. Or maybe he was just imagining it. But anyone who was open to investigate the matter, and was willing to consider the evidence couldn't doubt Lord Rosse's discovery. Finally the camera, an eyewitness whose judgment is never questioned because it cannot be influenced by imagination, confirmed Lord Rosse's discovery. Dr. Isaac Roberts, a Welsh businessman and amateur astronomer, mounted photographic plates to his own telescope and his 1888 photo of the Great Nebula in Andromeda shows the spirals, as do his photos of other nebulae. [View the photo on Wikipedia or the Starts with a Bang Blog.] Isaac Roberts's photographs captured images that showed that there are nebulae that our eyes can't see, but the telescopic camera can -- and they also have spiral shapes!
When the Leviathan telescope was completed in 1845, Lord Rosse was enthusiastic about using it to observe the heavens. But, as those who knew him will testify, he was more interested in the mechanical aspect of building a telescope than in actually star-gazing. One of the people who knew him best said that his interest in the huge telescope was over as soon as the last nail was in place. But that doesn't mean the telescope lay idle and abandoned. He was always associated with some young and eager astronomer who was thrilled to take on a position as astronomy assistant in Lord Rosse's observatory and take advantage of the use of the Leviathan. The physicist Johnston Stoney [who named the "electron"] was one of them.
Lord Rosse became so famous because of his great telescope, his spiral nebulae discovery, and his mechanical workshops on the grounds of Birr Castle that visitors came from all over to see him. His home became one of the most remarkable science centers in Great Britain. All of the leading men of science from his own country and illustrious foreigners would gather there from time to time. He was made President of the Royal Society in 1848, and gave advice on practical mechanical matters. As a person, he charmed everyone who came into contact with him. One time one of his assistants told me that he dropped and broke one of the small mirrors after Lord Rosse had spent hours working on it. The only remark that Lord Rosse made was, 'accidents sometimes happen.'
In the later years of his life, Lord Rosse lived a more secluded life. Sometimes he took short visits to London during "the season" [January to late June], or went out for a cruise in his yacht. But he spent most of the year at Birr Castle studying political and social issues, and rarely leaving the grounds except to go to church on Sunday mornings. His health began to fail in 1865, and he developed a tumor on his knee. He died October 31, 1867 at the age of 67.
His oldest son, Lawrence, who inherited his father's scientific skills, became the 4th Earl of Rosse and continued to do astronomy work with his father's great telescope. [Lawrence focused his studies on the moon, and discovered NGC 2, a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Pegasus in 1873.]
[There's another video about the telescope on YouTube.]
by Sir Robert S. Ball, 1895 (paraphrased by Leslie Noelani Laurio)
To view the table of contents for the rest of this book, click here.
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, 1800-1867
Constructor of the famous "Leviathan of Parsonstown" telescope.
William Parsons is unusual among scientists. Most scientists rose from obscurity to fame, but William Parsons was born into a family connected with royalty. His father, Sir Lawrence Parsons, was a member of the Irish Parliament and the 2nd Earl of Rosse. So William Parsons became the 3rd Earl of Rosse [at the age of 41]. He was born in York [England] on June 17, 1800. Before he became an Earl, he was Baron Oxmantown.
He was educated at Trinity College in Dublin, and then Magdalen College at Oxford. He wasn't unusually distinguished at college, but he was a diligent student, and did very well in mathematics. He was very interested in social issues and had a passion for political economy. He represented King's County [now called County Offaly; it's in the center of Ireland] in the Irish Parliament's House of Commons from 1821 to 1834. His family's estate [Birr Castle] was located here.
[He married Mary Field in 1836; they had four sons who survived into adulthood. He became Lord Rosse in 1841.]
Lord Rosse liked working with mechanical things. He had qualities excellently suited to be a scientific engineer along with the manual skill that also made him good at practical hands-on projects. He was a talented mechanic, a good founder [casting metal], and a brilliant optician. Most of his acquaintances were also interested in mechanics, and he loved to visit engineering workshops where refined processes in those fields were being done. One time after he had been shown an establishment somewhere in northern England, the owner said the place really needed a foreman, and, since William seemed so mechanical, he offered him the position! At that point, William divulged that he was Lord Oxmantown -- not quite the person for a job as a foreman -- but that he appreciated the compliment. So the owner invited him to dinner, and they became long-time friends.
This is how Lord Rosse explained how he ended up devoting his attention to astronomy: since he was a man with financial means and time on his hands, he looked around and considered how he might best use his money and leisure time. Not surprisingly, he thought about something that would use his interest in mechanics. It occurred to him that telescopes hadn't advanced much since the days of Sir William Herschel. Constructing great telescopes to observe the heavens would require both time and money. He also realized that the fundamental challenges of this task would take all the mechanical skill he had. So he decided that he would make that his life's work.
Seventy miles from Dublin, in the middle of Ireland, right on the border between King's County and County Tipperary is a little town whose name is still not quite settled. Its official name is Parsonstown [after the Parsons family], but whose inhabitants often insist is actually Birr. For every six people who say its name is Parsonstown, another six will say that it's actually Birr. Whichever it is, Parsonstown or Birr [it was officially changed to Birr in 1899], it is a charming little Irish town. The widest street is called the Oxmantown Mall. It is lined on both sides with colorful houses and rows of stately trees. At one end of Oxmantown Mall is the Parish Church [St. Brendan's Church], and at the other end are the gates to Birr Castle, the ancestral home of the Parsons family. [See Birr Castle on YouTube!] A visitor passing through those gates enters a beautiful spacious area with woods and water [called Birr Castle Demesne]. There's a lovely wooded spot where where the two rivers meet. At various places, you can still see displays of Lord Rosse's engineering skill, such as a beautiful lake that he added, designed and landscaped to look completely natural, complete with ducks. Water is fed into the lake by a tube that passes under one of the rivers. The overflow of the lake turns a water-wheel that runs a pair of hydraulic lifts brilliantly designed to drain the low-lying areas of the estate.
Regarding the fame that Lord Rosse's mirrored telescope brought to the town of Birr, here is a quote from the book "The Natural History of Ireland," by Gerard Boate, Thomas Molyneaux, and others that mention how Parsonstown was famous for its glass 150 years ago:
'We close this chapter by mentioning the glass produced in Ireland. There were several glasshouses that the English built in Ireland to make glass. There were none in Dublin, or any of the other cities; they were all out in the country. The main one was at the market town Birr. The town had been called Parsonstown, named for Sir Lawrence Parsons after he purchased land there and built an estate on it. His son William Parsons inherited it. The town is within Queen's County, about 50 (Irish) miles southwest of Dublin, bordering the provinces of Leinster and Munster. This glass factory provided Dublin with all kinds of windows, drinking glasses, and other commonly used glass items. They brought in sand from England, and used ash from ash trees. Their biggest challenge was getting clay to make pots for melting the materials in, and they got that from the north.' from Ch 21.
Birr Castle is a noble mansion, reminiscent of the days of Cromwell. It is surrounded by a moat and has a modern drawbridge. From the windows, there are beautiful views of lovely spots all over the park. Lord Rosse loved living in his home country. Visitors naturally want to see the castle, but the most interesting feature of the place isn't in the castle. On the extensive lawn between the moat and the lake, there are two brick walls that look like turreted towers. They are taller than an ordinary house and covered with ivy. As the visitor approaches, he sees something in between those two walls that looks like a huge pipe propped up on the ground. It's a wooden tube, sixty feet long and six feet in diameter -- wide enough for a man to enter and walk through from one end to the other without having to stoop. This is the largest telescope ever built [until the Hooker Telescope was built in California in 1917]. Close to the two walls is a tiny building called The Observatory [image here]. The smaller instruments are kept in this building, as well as some reference books. The observatory also provides shelter for star-gazers, and has provisions for a warm fire and a cup of hot tea to make chilly nights observing the winter stars a little more comfortable.
The first thing a visitor would notice about the telescope, besides the enormous size [they don't call it the "Leviathan of Parsonstown" for nothing!], is that it looks different from other telescopes. Ordinary telescopes look like a tube with glass lenses at both ends. Even large telescopes at our observatories are made that way -- one end focuses on the object, and the other end is the eye-piece. Naturally, the lower end would be the eye-piece and the other end was pointed at the sky. But this telescope is missing those glass lenses, because the observer doesn't look through the lower end. Instead, he has to use the ingenious system of stairs and balconies that give him access to the mouth of the great tube. This colossal telescope is a reflector -- like the one Isaac Newton invented. It swings between the two walls. There's a reflecting mirror at the lower end of the huge tube. The mirror is made from two parts copper and one part tin. Copper is tough and brown; tin is silvery, soft, and almost stringy in texture. But when they're mixed, the alloy [called speculum metal] is totally different -- it's extremely hard and brittle. It resembles tin in its colour, but is much shinier. When it's polished, it's almost as brilliant as silver.
[Reflectors use mirrors to bounce the image back to the viewer and are better for viewing galaxies and nebulae in deep space. View diagrams of reflectors on Wikipedia. Refractors collect, focus and magnify light. They are better for observing closer things like planets and the moon. Diagrams of refractors are also on Wikipedia. Read more about their differences here.]
To make this telescope, Lord Rosse had to make a large mirror -- six feet in diameter, and almost five inches thick. A mirror this large had never been attempted before. William Herschel had made a mirror four feet in diameter and a few smaller mirrors, but he never published the process he used to make them. The larger in diameter, the more difficulties would be encountered. Lord Rosse began having difficulties right from the start, and at every step of the process. The mold to cast the metal weighed three or four tons, and that alone was troublesome. If he had been casting some common metal like iron, it would have been a fairly straightforward process that any founder could have handled since he deals with those kinds of jobs all the time. But speculum metal is very unmanageable to work with. Melting down the copper is easy. Adding the right amount of tin to the melted copper is also no problem. It's a little tricky to pour the molten metal from various crucibles at the same time to fill the mold simultaneously, but once that was done, that's when the real difficulties began. Speculum metal is excessively brittle. If it was cooled like ordinary copper or iron, the mirror would shatter into pieces. Speculum metal had to be cooled very, very slowly to make it harden. So, once the mirror had gotten to a solid state but was still red hot [about 20 minutes], it was put into an annealing [hardening] oven. There, the temperature was allow to decrease slightly over a six week period. On one of the trials, after the casting had been cooled, when it was opened, the speculum mirror was cracked into two pieces. After investigating, they discovered that one of the walls of the oven had only a single thickness of bricks. That meant that heat escaped more easily through that side than the other walls, which were double thick. So the speculum metal hadn't cooled uniformly, and that caused it to crack. There were other failures, but Lord Rosse persisted and finally [on the fifth attempt] managed to cast two perfect discs so that he could begin the tedious process of grinding and polishing. [He made two so that one could be in use while the other was being cleaned and polished.] On top of all this, the weight of all that copper and tin meant that each mirror weighed about 500 pounds!
Lord Rosse's mechanical ingenuity was put to the test in devising the machinery that was needed to grind and polish the mirrors. Most telescope makers did this by hand, but that's not so easy when your mirror is as big as a dining room table and weighs 500 pounds! The initial rough grinding was done with a cast iron tool the same size as the mirror. It moved back and forth and around by machine, while sand and water were placed between it and the mirror to scrub it smooth. As the surface became smoother, emery [aluminum oxide with iron oxide used to polish gems] was used instead of sand. When this was done, the grinding tool was replaced with a polishing tool. The polishing tool had heat-softened pitch so it would conform to the exact shape of the mirror. Rouge [reddish ferric oxide used for fine polishing or for make-up] was used as the polishing substance. After nine hours of rubbing with rouge, the mirror was as shiny and brilliant as highly polished silver. The disc was about six feet in diameter and four inches thick. It had a very slight depression in the center of half an inch. This huge speculum mirror was placed on a truck and transported to the instrument; then it was placed at the bottom of the sixty foot tube -- sixty feet was the focal distance of the mirror [for greater magnification]. Another small reflector [mirror] was put in a smaller tube that extended sideways out of the huge tube. This allowed the observer to see the reflected image from the huge mirror. And now with the addition of the mirrors, the largest telescope that had ever been built was completed.
[You can read details about how the Leviathan was constructed at the History Ireland website.]
I was one of the few lucky people that Lord Rosse trusted to use his telescope. For two seasons in 1865 and 1866, I had the honour of being his astronomy assistant [Sir Robert S. Ball was born in Dublin, 70 miles from Birr Castle, and served at the Dunsirk Observatory in Ireland in 1874.] I spent many nights in the observer's gallery looking through that remarkable telescope. When I was there, the main things being researched were nebulae. Lord Rosse's telescope was specially suited to view these hard-to-see faint smudges of light that lie far away on the outskirts of the heavens. They are so delicate that they require a powerful telescope that captures as much light as possible.
One of the greatest discoveries made with this telescope came when the telescope was still quite new. Lord Rosse discovered that some of the nebulae have a spiral shape! When he first announced this discovery, many people found it hard to believe. Other astronomers looked at nebulae themselves and they couldn't see any spiral shape, so they decided that it must not exist. Maybe Lord Rosse's telescope was defective. Or maybe he was just imagining it. But anyone who was open to investigate the matter, and was willing to consider the evidence couldn't doubt Lord Rosse's discovery. Finally the camera, an eyewitness whose judgment is never questioned because it cannot be influenced by imagination, confirmed Lord Rosse's discovery. Dr. Isaac Roberts, a Welsh businessman and amateur astronomer, mounted photographic plates to his own telescope and his 1888 photo of the Great Nebula in Andromeda shows the spirals, as do his photos of other nebulae. [View the photo on Wikipedia or the Starts with a Bang Blog.] Isaac Roberts's photographs captured images that showed that there are nebulae that our eyes can't see, but the telescopic camera can -- and they also have spiral shapes!
When the Leviathan telescope was completed in 1845, Lord Rosse was enthusiastic about using it to observe the heavens. But, as those who knew him will testify, he was more interested in the mechanical aspect of building a telescope than in actually star-gazing. One of the people who knew him best said that his interest in the huge telescope was over as soon as the last nail was in place. But that doesn't mean the telescope lay idle and abandoned. He was always associated with some young and eager astronomer who was thrilled to take on a position as astronomy assistant in Lord Rosse's observatory and take advantage of the use of the Leviathan. The physicist Johnston Stoney [who named the "electron"] was one of them.
Lord Rosse became so famous because of his great telescope, his spiral nebulae discovery, and his mechanical workshops on the grounds of Birr Castle that visitors came from all over to see him. His home became one of the most remarkable science centers in Great Britain. All of the leading men of science from his own country and illustrious foreigners would gather there from time to time. He was made President of the Royal Society in 1848, and gave advice on practical mechanical matters. As a person, he charmed everyone who came into contact with him. One time one of his assistants told me that he dropped and broke one of the small mirrors after Lord Rosse had spent hours working on it. The only remark that Lord Rosse made was, 'accidents sometimes happen.'
In the later years of his life, Lord Rosse lived a more secluded life. Sometimes he took short visits to London during "the season" [January to late June], or went out for a cruise in his yacht. But he spent most of the year at Birr Castle studying political and social issues, and rarely leaving the grounds except to go to church on Sunday mornings. His health began to fail in 1865, and he developed a tumor on his knee. He died October 31, 1867 at the age of 67.
His oldest son, Lawrence, who inherited his father's scientific skills, became the 4th Earl of Rosse and continued to do astronomy work with his father's great telescope. [Lawrence focused his studies on the moon, and discovered NGC 2, a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Pegasus in 1873.]
[There's another video about the telescope on YouTube.]
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