Mary Somerville

British science writer, Mary Somerville
Credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZ62-51363)

Mary Somerville (née Mary Fairfax) was a British science writer born in Scotland in December 1780. Her influential works crossed many different scientific disciplines, as she enjoyed studying mathematics, botany, and geology just to name a few. Upon moving to London in 1816, Somerville met a wide variety of prominent scientists, including the Herschel siblings. The result of meeting all these astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians was the publication of her first scientific paper, On the Magnetizing Power of the More Refrangible Solar Rays, in 1826.

Somerville was asked in 1827 to condense Laplace's five-volume work Traité de mécanique céleste which described the mechanics of the solar system. So long was the work that it took Somerville four years to finish. The astronomer Sir John Herschel thought Somerville had made a brilliant piece of work, so he recommended it for publication and Mechanism of the Heavens was born. British astronomers and mathematicians praised Mechanism of the Heavens, and the Royal Society commissioned a marble bust of Somerville to be constructed by the sculptor Francis Chantrey. Somerville and Caroline Herschel would become the first women to receive honorary memberships to the Royal Astronomical Society.

In 1834, Somerville published her next book entitled The Connection of the Physical Sciences. In this work, she summarized the fields of astronomy, physics, geography, and meteorology. Somerville wrote nine subsequent editions to keep up with the new discoveries being made, and in her third edition, she noted that the difficulties in determining the position of Uranus might be due to perturbations caused by an undiscovered planet. This insight inspired British astronomer John Couch Adams to begin the calculations that would end up leading to the discovery of the planet Neptune.