THE TRAILBLAZER
As a woman in the 18th century, Mary Somerville was not expected to understand scientific works – far less play a role in the discovery of Neptune
Mary Somerville’s incredible 18th-century scientific discoveries
Next year, the new Royal Bank of Scotland £10 notes will feature a portrait of Mary Somerville, a pioneer in science and women’s acceptance in the sciences. There is something wonderfully ironic in the fact that she might not have received this recognition had it not been for an Illustrated Magazine of Fashions she perused as a teenager.
Somerville was born Mary Fairfax in Jedburgh on Boxing Day, 1780. Although she would travel widely, she returned frequently to the Borders from the family home in Burntisland. In Personal Recollections, From Early
Life to Old Age, she reminisced about playing in the River Jed, blithely unaware that upstream at Inchbonny the geologist James Hutton was studying a sedimentary rock formation now known as Hutton’s Unconformity, which would lead him to propose that the Earth was far older than the biblically reckoned six thousand years. A few miles east, her contemporary and later friend Sir David Brewster, ‘the Kepler of Optics’, Principal of Edinburgh University and early proponent of photography, lived at Nisbet; he would praise Somerville as ‘the most extraordinary woman in Europe – a mathematician of the very first rank,’ adding, of course, ‘with all the gentleness of a woman’. In her career, Somerville would write about geology and optics, as well as astronomy, molecular and microscopic science, algebra, calculus and magnetism.
Her fascination, particularly with the heavens, started early. She recalled that when she was very young her older brother, looking out
‘Her fascination, particularly with the heavens, started early’
the window, shouted ‘O Mamma, there’s the moon rinnin’ awa,’ deducing that it must have been a celebrated meteor in 1783. Her education was otherwise patchy. ‘My mother taught me to read the Bible, and to say my prayers morning and evening,’ she wrote, ‘ otherwise she allowed me to grow up a wild creature.’ Her father, a vice-admiral not often in residence, was apparently shocked by her lack of accomplishment at the age of eight. She could barely read and write. He set her to reading the Spec
tator each morning (‘I have never since opened that book’) and David Hume’s History (‘a real penance to me’) before placing her in a school in Musselburgh run by a Miss Primrose, where the girls were forced to wear a ‘steel busk’ with a rod down their spine to improve posture.
How did this vaguely vagabond child turn into the polymath for whom the word scientist was coined (by William Whewell, the Master of Trinity College Cambridge, reviewing her book
On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences)? One factor was being sent to study painting under the artist James Nasmyth. In explaining the rules of perspective, he mentioned Euclid in passing. Somerville pestered her brother’s tutor until he brought her a copy of The Elements. Her father, having been exasperated by her lack of education, now seemed infuriated by its surfeit. Playing the piano and painting by day, she read Euclid at night until the servants complained about the rapidly diminishing stock of candles. With the candles confiscated, she lay awake going through the geometry by memory. Her father berated her mother, saying, ‘Peg, we must put a stop to this, or we shall have Mary in a strait-jacket one of these days.’ She also remembered seeing the aforementioned magazine of ‘coloured plates of ladies’ dresses, charades and puzzles’ with a Miss Ogilvie. ‘At the end of a page I read what appeared to me to be a simple arithmetical question; but on turning the page, I was surprised to see strange-looking lines mixed with letters, chiefly X’es and Y’s and asked, “What is that?” “Oh,” said Miss Ogilvie, “It is a kind of arithmetic: they call it Algebra; but I can tell you nothing about it.” ’
In 1804 she married a distant cousin, Samuel Greig, the British Consul to Russia. Although he ‘did not prevent me from studying’ he ‘possessed in full the prejudice against learned women which was common at the time’. He had ‘a very low opinion of the capacity of my sex, and had neither knowledge of nor interest in science of any kind.’ Greig died in 1807 and Somerville returned to Scotland. She remarried, to another cousin, William Somerville, in 1812; a far happier match. Indeed, he
‘Playing the piano and painting by day, she read Euclid at night’
‘frankly and willingly acknowledged’ her superiority to himself. Just as significantly, she won a competition to solve a problem in the Mathematical Repository of 1811, being awarded a silver medal and bringing her to the attention of figures such as John Playfair and John Leslie.
Somerville became acquainted with the major scientific figures of the time: William and Caroline Herschel, Charles Babbage, Cuvier, Arago, Humboldt, Faraday and James Watt. She was unofficial tutor to Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, who collaborated with Babbage on the precursor of the modern computer. In the cultural sphere, she was friends with Walter Scott and John Stuart Mill – on whose petition for female suffrage her signature appears first. Henry Brougham, the Lord Chancellor, and one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, encouraged her to produce a translation of Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste. When Mechanism of
the Heavens was published in 1830, it was more than a translation from French to English; it was a translation of algebra into common language. It was, in some ways, among the first works of popular science.
The success of Mechanism has led some to underestimate Somerville as one who explains, rather than an original thinker; this is not the case. Anomalies in the motion of Uranus led her to postulate in 1842 that it may be being influenced by another planet, as yet unobserved. In 1846, Neptune was discovered.
Somerville’s achievements were recognised in her lifetime: she and Caroline Herschel were made the first female members of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835, and she was also elected to the Royal Irish Academy, the American Philosophical Society, the Italian Geographical Society and the Genevan Society of Physics and Natural History. Somerville College in Oxford takes its name from her. Her contemporary, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, wrote that she was ‘one who has done more to remove the light estimation in which the capacity of women is too often held than all that has been accomplished by the whole Sisterhood of Poetical Damsels & novel-writing Authors’.
Yet she never quite threw off the snipes about her ‘foolish manner of life and studies’. When a relative took ill and had a craving for currant jelly she made a batch, and the family expressed surprise at her ‘being able to be so useful’. Perhaps that is why, alongside classics of scientific explanation, her complete works include Cookery and Domestic Economy: Containing Upwards of One Thousand Carefully Tested Recipes, Expressed in Terms Suitable for Everyday Life. Even then, the scientist peeps through in that ‘carefully tested’.
‘The success led some to underestimate Somerville’