Johannes Hevelius and his second wife and collaborator, Elisabetha were the 17th-century's astronomy power couple. For one, they had a personal observatory that was considered one of the most important in all Europe.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I'm gonna do a little bit of administrative work up top. Let's do it. Which is exciting administrative work, which is that I have a book coming out. Yeah. My other podcast, which is called Criminalia, involves cocktails that go alongside historical true crime stories. And we have a book called Killer Cocktails coming out October fifteenth, which features abridged stories that you may have heard on the show, as well as about half of them are brand new tales and cocktails. Every cocktail has a mocktail version. One chapter of the book the Mocktails of the Star, and the cocktail part is kind of secondary because it's about imposters. So I hope if that sounds interesting to you, you will check it out. You can buy it pretty much every where books are sold. Again, that is Killer Cocktails, And I wrote that with my co host on Criminalium, Marie Tramarky. I hope you get it, and if you do, I hope you enjoy it. Now to the business at hand, it's astronomy time. Yeah, this one started out in kind of a kooky way because I have been wanting to do for a minute an episode of several sort of obscure women in astronomy history, because there are a lot and a lot of them. Because they were women, there's maybe not always as much documentation as men that were working at the same time, right, But one of those that I came across is Elizabethajavelius, and then as I was looking at her, it became very much about her and her husband because they worked alongside each other. So this one is also a love story. It does, I will tell you upfront, come with an age difference that's so big that it's a little dicey. If it happened today, I think a lot of criticism would happen. But it features the work of seventeenth century Polish astronomer Johanna Savelius and his second wife and close collaborator, elizabethas So that is who we are talking about today.
Johanna Savalias was born in Danzig, Poland. That's how it's known. In German today, it is more often known as its Polish name of Gadax, and he was born on January twenty eighth sixteen eleven. You will see his last name spelled in a variety of ways, although it's believed that Johannes was the first to use the form Hevelius, which has roots in Latin, instead of one of the German or Polish variations on the family name. Hevelius's father, Abraham, was a wealthy man and his mother was Cordelia Hecker.
Yeah. She was also from a pretty comfortable family and when Johanns was seven he started school and that went well for a while, but when he was thirteen, problems brought on by the Thirty Years' War caused his school to close, and at that point Johannes was sent to another village to continue his education where the schools were still running normally. This village, Gon Deelch, was populated mostly by Polish speakers, whereas growing up in danteg at the time, young Havilias had encountered mostly German speakers. This gave the boy a high degree of proficiency in both languages.
His father believed he was destined to follow in the family business, which was brewing, and initially that is how things went. He started working on a law degree at the age of nineteen, and that's something that would be valuable in business. And then in sixteen thirty four, at the age of twenty three, he returned home. He had spent some time at the University of Leyden in Holland, and in London and in Paris. While he had been in law school, a solar eclipse had captured shared an interest in astronomy, which he'd actually had in childhood. He continued his legal education, but he also made time to study other interests. As he traveled, Hevelius connected with various scientists and philosophers of Europe, and he kept up correspondence with a lot of them for years afterward. This was, of course, an incredible time to be a young, smart, curious person who also had family money in Europe. The telescope had been invented at the beginning of the century, and Galileo had been observing the heavens through a telescope for just a little more than two decades, and all of this was really exciting to Johannes, maybe a bit too exciting, because as he was planning to tour Italy and meet some astronomers there, his family told him, even though he had not finished his education and did not get his law degree, that it was time to pack it up and come home. Once he was home, his parents decided he was ready to start his career running the family brewery, but that was not his only job. The Hevelius family owned a lot of businesses and he oversaw those as well, so he was running a stable in several townhouses as well. He also got married to a young woman named Katrina Rabeshka on March twenty first, sixteen thirty eight. Then he joined the Brewers Guild in sixteen thirty nine. So there's another man that we need to discuss briefly because he had a significant impact on Johannes, and that is Peter Krueger. Krueger had been one of Hevelius's teachers when he was still a young kid, and Krueger had also been hired to do some private tutoring with Johannes, and then as Johannes grew up, the two men had become friends. Krueger was the person who had first taught Johannes about astronomy, and when the teacher was in his final days and Hevelius visited him, Krueger told him that he felt that Johannes should pursue work not in business, but in studying the heavens. This deathbed talk clearly left a strong impression on Helius. Because he took it to heart, he started making plans to build his own observatory. Another solar eclipse on June one, sixteen thirty nine, also influenced this decision. Watching the eclipse, Helius became completely certain that he wanted to study the heavens. Construction of his observatory took place in sixteen forty one, and this was a project that was possible because of the Helius family wealth, both in terms of financing the work and in having a suitable spot to build in the first place. Johannes owned three townhouses that sat in a row in Danzig, and he built his observatory across the roofs of all three of them to maximize his space. When he was done, Helius called it Star Castle, and despite being outside of the major hubs of astronomy in France and England, it was recognized by scientists of the day as both impressive and important. Yeah, he occupies this really unique space because anyone else would have had to go out and seek patronage and funding to get something like that done, and he managed it on his own. Although to make this dream work, Hevelius had to cut back on the amount of time that he spent managing the brewery and the other businesses, and at this point his wife Katerina really stepped in to handle them. Johannes also was elected to fill some leadership positions in Dunzig, first as an alderman and then as a magistrate. Is how it's put in one thing. In others, it's like he was more like a city councilman. But those additional roles once again strained his schedule and kind of left him without much time to pursue his scientific interests. We mentioned in our episode about Thomas Harriet that Harriet drew the first map of the Moon in the sixteen teens. Roughly thirty years later, Havelius wanted to draw a much more detailed map.
Of the lunar's surface.
This also ties into our twenty fourteen episode on the discovery of longitude, because one of the reasons people were so eager to learn everything they could about the Moon was so they could use it as a tool to calculate longitude.
Yeah, that was a big driver in a lot of astronomical study at this time. Hevelius started observing the moon each night and making sketches and then refining those into his early moon maps. A friend of Hevelius that he had met when traveling as a young man, Parisian scientist Pierre Gassendi, was the first colleague that Hevelius sent his early sketches to for feedback, and gus Anddi was deeply impressed with Hevelius's work and encouraged him to please keep going.
Spurred by Guessendi's encouragement, Johannes started a laborious process in which he would draw the moon in detail every night as he observed it through his telescope, and that he would make a copper engraving of that drawing the following morning. He was making all of his own equipment for this work, including his engraving setup and a mind boggling telescope that measured one hundred and fifty feet or forty six meters in length. Hevelius ground all of the lenses himself. When he had a full five years worth of observations and engravings, which showed even subtle shifts in the Moon's appearance as viewed from a fixed point on Earth. He collected forty of them into one book, which was the first Moon Atlas Selenographius dive Lune description, which translates to selenography or a description of the Moon. In sixteen forty seven, Selenographia was published, and it was immediately recognized as a significant work. In addition to being far more detailed than any other illustrations of the Moon, these illustrations were also.
Just simply beautiful. His drawings of the lunar surface are framed by cherubs, some of w told up banners that carry the titles and the details of the specific lunar map, and others which appear to be observing the Moon and the heavens like tiny astronomers with their own little telescopes and globes and other tools. And because Helias was completing every step of this process himself, from note taking to drawing to illustrating, to the copper plates to printing, there was no step where someone else could misinterpret information or accidentally change his data. And this made this not just an impressive creative and scientific feat, but it also kind of gave it this patina as a source that people felt was completely trustworthy in its content. When the book was presented to Pope Innocent the Tenth, it said that he proclaimed that it would be an amazing achievement if Hevelius wasn't a heretic. Helius took an approach to his moon maps in which he mirrored the way that the Earth was mapped. He used words that were familiar, like continents and island and bays, but those really weren't a one to one in terms of what people already knew these words to mean, which that created some confusion for some people. Other astronomers would eventually reclassify the features of the moon, but for a while, even as those other astronomers were working, Johanna Savelius's work was the favored source. He also identified the cyclic oscillation of the moon's position, known as liberation. In just a moment, we're going to introduce someone who would become very important to Johanna Savelius's life, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. The same year that Selenografia was published, ELIZABETHA. Copeman was born on January seventeenth. Like Johannas, she was born into a wealthy family. Her father, Nicholas Copeman, was a successful merchant, and he and her mother, Johanna Mennings, had moved to Danzig ten years before their daughter, Elizabetha was born. From the time she was tiny, Elizabeta was fascinated by astronomy, and living in Danzig, she of course knew about the city's famous astronomer, Hevelius. She has said to have visited Hevelius in his observatory when she was still a young child, and that during that visit he had promised to show her the heavens when she was just a bit older. We're going to come back to Elizabetha in just a bit, because according to the accounts we have, she did not forget that promise. Two years after the moon Atlas came out, Hevelius found himself once again reassessing his responsibilities because his father died. This left Johannes, who was the only one of his brothers to survive childhood, to take over all the various business interests of the family. But he still had Katerina's help, so he worked in his observatory and she managed the day to day. But then in March of sixth steen sixty two, Johannes's wife, Katerina died later that year. Elizabeta once again visited Hevelius, and she asked him once again if he would teach her about astronomy. She was fifteen at that time and Hevelius was fifty one. In what would be a scandalous match today and was unusual for the time as well, the payer fell in love and they married the following year in Saint Catharine's on February third, sixteen sixty three. So okay, Obviously, that thirty six year age difference is huge, and it's kind of unsettling because she was underage. And while all of the accounts and stories we have kind of suggest that Elizabetha pursued Hevelius, we don't know if that's true, And even if it were true, we can't really put a whole lot of responsibility on her because there's this inherent power imbalance of a teenager and a mature person, and that mature person was also famous. Yeah, it's like, even factoring in people getting married at younger ages.
That was still unusually young. It was still unusually young, unusually big age gap between the two of them. Taking all that into account, though, they did seem to be pretty well matched intellectually, and they genuinely cared very deeply for one another. Elizabeta clearly had some hero worship when it came to her husband, and he found her youth invigorating, which was compounded by her eagerness to work alongside him. They had a son early in their marriage who died as a baby, and then three daughters who all lived to adulthood. Their oldest daughter, Katerina Elizabetha, was baptized on February fourteenth, sixteen sixty six. Elizabeta and Johanna's really built their life together around their shared love of studying the cosmos. In their time working together, we actually don't have a clear understanding of a lot of which parts of their work each of them was responsible for, because they were both so involved in the work. Sometimes she's listed as his aide or his assistant, but a lot of other accounts are like no, she was like just about an equal collaborator. It is worth noting, though, that Elizabetha was working on their astronomy projects, but she was also raising their kids and managing their household. One of the questions that comes up about Elizabetha is in regard to her notations of their work and her correspondents writing for the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St. Andrew's, Scotland, JJ. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson point out that ELIZABETHA could write in Latin, often in the correspondence she sent to other scientists. That wouldn't have been especially common, especially not in a young woman, and it's unclear whether she had this skill before she and Hevelius reconnected when she was fifteen, or if maybe he taught it to her after they became a couple. Similarly, she was able to manage the mathematics of the measurements that her husband took. These may have been subjects she had studied as an academic outlier, because she was a curious girl in a wealthy family and had more access to education than most children did. But she also might have learned it from Johannes, which would indicate that she was very smart, because she would have learned it very rapidly based on how soon she was using those skills, and during this second marriage, Johannes gained even more notoriety for his astronomy work. The year after Johannes and elizabetha married Francis. Louis the fourteenth became a patron of Hevelius, setting him up with an annual pension. Jean Baptiste Colbert, who was Louis the fourteenth's finance minister, had also been giving Johannes money since almost the beginning of his astronomy efforts. You're wondering why was France so keen on financing the work of a Polish astronomer that was all about naval power. As Hevelius worked on his lunar maps and his star charts, he gave information about all of that, and particularly star coordinates, to the French, and they used that information to improve their own navigational charts. The year after the French king became Hevelius's patron, the astronomer also became a member of the Royal Society of London, which was unusual because most members were English. Throughout his scientific work, Johannes created new instruments for himself, including new telescopes, and in sixteen seventy three he published a book about them titled Machina Celestis. The engravings used as illustrations in the book may be the most telling in terms of how he saw his young wife. He included an engraving that featured Johannes on the left, the octant he is using in the middle, and Elizabetha on the right. Another engraving has the exact same composition, but instead of an octant, they're working with a sextant. In both of these images, the two of them are equal in terms of the composition.
Yeah, when you look at them, it very much looks like the two of them are collaborators. It doesn't look like he is doing the work and she is in any way, you know, below him compositionally, or in the background. In any way, she is essentially next to him with this apparatus in the middle. In addition to his work in moon maps, Hevelius also created star maps, and these maps improved on those that had already been created by other astronomers that came before him, including Tycho Brahi. This pursuit shows an interesting divergence away from his lunar mapping work because he did not believe in using telescopes to create star maps. He thought that the best way was to use the naked eye to be able to take in the sky in a more complete way than the use of a telescope could offer. Right, if you're looking through a telescope, you're only seeing the portion that you're focused at, as if you're looking at the whole thing, you see it in its entirety. He rather famously debated other well known astronomers on this matter, though he was definitely not alone in his position. Robert Hook and John Flamstead, to English astronomers who have been mentioned here on the podcast before, both believed that greater accuracy could be achieved in mapping the stars with the help of telescopes. This argument apparently began when Hook read Hevelius's book Machina Celestis, in which the Polish astronomer talked about how he had observed and recorded various celestial objects. Hook kind of came in hot with a very forceful critique which was published by the Royal Society, but Hevelius argued against the points that in fact that would skew the perception of star positions. Hevelius was mistaken in this belief, but again he was not alone. This was a belief held by a lot of astronomers of the day. In the summer of sixteen seventy nine, Sir Edmund Halley visited the observatory of the Heliuses. This was the direct result of Helius complaining to the Royal Society about Hook's attack. Hallie had been sent to see how Johannes was doing his work and whether he couldn't get more accurate coordinates for stars using a telescope than Havevelius achieved with his own instruments and the naked eye. Those tests were inconclusive, but Halle became friends with the couple as a result of having spent time with them.
One of the charming parts of their friendship is that Elizabeth to ask Callie if he would get her addressed from England. He agreed, and when he returned home he had it custom made in the latest fashion and then sent.
Later that year. He asked for three copies of her husband's books as reimbursement. There are some variations on this story, so one aspect of those tests being inconclusive is that Hevelius really was just so egoized like he They sometimes mentioned that he had the eye of a lynx, that he really could better than almost any other astronomer, like pick things out of this guy and measure things that he was seeing with the naked eye, whereas other people would have needed a telescope. But I also wonder if Halle wasn't like I like these people. Let's just call it a wash. But the other thing is that there is some other debate about that whole dress thing, and that really the money was supposed to be used to get some scientific stuff for Hevelius, and that Halle spin it instead on this dress that he knew that ELIZABETHA would want. It's all very cute in any regard. It seems like they were all great friends, which I love. So The arguments, though at the Royal Society over the best method to measure the heavens, whether with the naked eye or a telescope, continued for years. Some of the members went after Hook for criticizing a project of a magnitude that he himself had never taken on, and he had kind of a reputation for being a pompous jerk. So even though he was ultimately correct about telescopes generally offering better measuring and plotting accuracy, a lot of people just didn't like him, and so they cited opposite of him. Some of the members of the Society even resigned amidst the back and forth that went on there, which Havilius wasn't even really a part of. At that point, a big loss was about to befall the Havevlius household, and we will get to that right after we hear from the sponsors that keep the show going. On September twenty sixth, sixteen seventy nine, just a few months after Hallie's visit, the Havlius Observatory went up in smoke. Literally. The accounts we have suggest that a candle that was left burning by a member of the household staff started the fire. There have even been hints that it may have been a case of arson. So here is an excerpt from a letter that was written at the time by a person named Die Capellis, and it was sent to the British consul, Peter Weika. Quote, the very noble and famous Hevilius, feeling himself oppressed with great and unaccustomed troubles, as if presaging some disaster to himself, withdrew with his much loved spouse, but to his great misfortune, on the sixteenth September to a garden not far from the city gate of Danzig, in order that he might refresh and restore his fatigued and weary self. He bade his coachman return to the city with the horses before the gates were closed, and tell the domestics to guard carefully against fire. The coachman, when he had unharnessed and stabled the horses, made as if to go to bed about nine o'clock. And whether by carelessness, as some think, or with intent and of purpose, as the very noble Heavilius himself concludes, from the fact that he never rescued from the flames, four horses of choice breed and great value, left a burning candle in the stable and set the whole place of fire. The fire being started, he passed on tiptoe through the front house without saying a single word about it. This took place about half past nine in the evening. After he left, a hall servant, noticing an unusual smell of smoke, went hastily to the rear portion of the house, where he found the house unstable, burning with a steady blaze. The fire, fanned by a strong southerly wind, creeping further every moment, catching up everything adjacent before it could be stopped. So the three front structures of the house quickly began burning. These Hevelius occupied, and on these he had erected the famous and incomparable observatory. His museum indeed, was broken open by friendly hands hastening to assist and save what they could from the flames, and the bound books were thrown down from the windows, but not a few, purloined at the hands of unscrupulous men, never returned to their owner. So, because the observatory was built on a wooden platform that straddled all three rooms connected, it was quickly consumed, as were the houses below it. One important piece of Johannes and Elizabetha's work was saved by their thirteen year old daughter Katerina, who was at home at the time. That was their unfinished fixed star catalog. Much of the rest of their work was destroyed, though, as the account suggests, people of the area, recognizing the importance of the observatory, broke in and they tried to save what they could from the burning building. Because of that, it's hard to know if everything burned or if something's just kind of walked away in the hands of looters. At this point, and noted later in the letter that Holly just read from. Only ten copies of the Macinuslestis had been sold, and all the other copies had burned.
Up, so even in Hevelius's time, this was recognized as a rare and valuable item. In addition to all the manuscripts that were in various states of completion, all the astronomical instrum that Johannas had constructed were also destroyed. For a while, there was actually a rumor that Johannes had died in the fire because he hadn't been home and everybody didn't know that he had gone to the country to spend time quietly with his wife. There was a lot of like, where is he, He's not here, he must have died. And it was actually during all of that confusion that Halle sent Elizabetta's dress with a note that he had heard that rumor and he hoped Johannas was actually okay. Halle and Elizabetha continued to be friends and correspond after this. Some of it was her asking for recommendations from Halle on various doctors that might help her husband's, you know, various ailments as he got older. Unwilling to just give up their work and without really access to another observatory. They immediately began rebuilding. Havelius was sixty eight at this point, so not a young man, but he felt like he had plenty of work left to do, and he wanted to finish the star catalog. He reached out to King Louis the fourteenth of France, noting in his letter that by chance he had been somewhat out of sorts the night before the fire, and suggested to Elizabetta that they spend some time at their country house so they weren't at the observatory when the fire broke out. The royal was a patron of Hevelius, so this letter was a request for funding assistance for the rebuild project. They did indeed rebuild, and by the end of sixteen eighty one they were recompiling the information and illustrations that had been lost. At some point right around this time of their lives. We don't know specifically the date or even year. Elizabeta contracted smallpox, and, according to an account written by johann Bernoulli, who was not alive when this happened and was relaying the information decades later, Johannes took care of her throughout her illness. She was left with scars but did recover, and Johannas did not contract it. In November of sixteen eighty six, Nui Savelius was admitted to the hospital for an illness that's unclear in nature. He lived just three more months and died on January twenty eighth, sixteen eighty seven. That was his seventy sixth birthday. In his lifetime, he'd been one of the first people to observe sunspots and saw planets transiting the Sun, and he had advanced knowledge of the moon and the stars significantly. And his Big Star Catalog was just about complete, as were two other works, but they had not been published yet, so Elizabetha focused on getting them ready to be printed. Near the end of the year that he died, she asked the Royal Society in London to get help with editing, but she did not receive it. She did, however, get financial assistance to finish the work from the King of Poland, Yon the third Sobieski, so she kept working. Before sixteen eighty seven was over, the Stillarum Fixarum, the Fixed Star Catalog was published. She continued to work on preparing and editing the remaining two works, which took several years. In sixteen ninety, Elizabetha was finally able to see the rest of the work she and Johannes had produced together.
Published.
The first of these was Fir Momentum sobs anam civa Uranographia et cetera that was a star atlas. It contained fifty six engraved star maps, each of which spanned two pages. This book integrated information from the fixed Star Catalog, represented visually in varying views of the heavens. Eleven new constellations were shown in the book, seven of which retain their usage today. Others were incorporated into other larger constellation groupings. Also in sixteen ninety, Elizabetha managed the publication of Prodromus Astronomier. This was a companion volume too for Momentum, and it built on the information in the Fixed Star Catalog and the star atlas. This book includes information on how the stars were cataloged, the way the various instruments of the lab were used in the process, and it lists stars by their constellation. It's believed that Elizabeta did not just edit these works, but contributed to them in a significant way. Her printed signature in them reads Elizabetta, widow of Hevelius. When Elizabeta died on December twenty second, sixteen ninety three, three years after she published the last of their work, she was buried in the same tomb as her late husband. She was just forty six when she died. Today, not far from Saint Catharine's, a statue of Johannes Hevelius stands in Gadansk in the Old Town section of the city that shows him with long hair and a long twisted mustache, seated and holding astronomical tools as he looks at the heavens. His rebuilt observatory lasted a long time, but it is now gone because, like many other buildings in Gadansk, it was destroyed during World War II. Because of the Hevalius families were in brewing, there have been at various times Havelius named beer festivals that combine the love of beer with an appreciation for astronomy. I am on board with that, and there have been a number of beers named for Johanna Savelias over the years as well.
Yeah, he's like the Samuel Adams of Europe. I think he's the brewer astronomer. I love that there are are Someavelias brews. I feel like next time I am in Europe, I might be looking around to see if I can find some, even though I'm not a particularly big beer drinker, but I want one because it's historical. I also have some listener mail. This is from our listener Brian, and it tickled me, he writes, Holly and Tracy love your podcast. Our family tends to save them up for drives of an hour plus, especially long vacation road trips. Our seven year old son, who likes the podcast more than he lets on, will periodically ask us to play an episode we didn't finish on an earlier I'll ask him if he likes the podcast, and he will respond with something like it's more interesting than staring out the window of the car. I love seven year old logic. I love all of that. I found your John ven podcast particularly timely given the increased profile of a certain big fan of ven Diagrams in the news lately. For pet tax I've included a couple of photos of our approximately fourteen year old cat, Benny, who we've had in our family for about a dozen years. He has become increasingly sweet in his older years. Oh my goodness, Benny is the cutest baby maybe on the planet. I have a little weakness for creamsicle kiddies. He's a little orange baby, and he just has one of those sweet faces that looks like it could do no wrong ever, at any time. Whatever has happened, Benny is faultless in my opinion. If he would like to write to us and send us pictures of your very good babies who never do any wrong, you can do that at History podcast heartradio dot com. You can also subscribe to the podcast if you haven't gotten around to that yet. That is very simple to do on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
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