The 4-Foot-3 German Astronomer Who Discovered Eight Comets, Catalogued 561 New Stars, and Was the First Woman Paid a Salary by the British Crown for Scientific Work

Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750–1848) was the eighth child of the Hanoverian Oboist Isaac Herschel. She survived a childhood case of typhus that arrested her growth at approximately 4 feet 3 inches (130 cm) and left her scarred. Her mother, regarding Caroline as physically unsuited for marriage, kept her at home in Hanover through her teenage years as a kitchen servant and seamstress. She received no formal schooling.

In 1772, when she was 22, her older brother William Herschel — who had emigrated to England in 1757 and was working as a church organist and music teacher at Bath — invited her to join him as a household manager and amateur singer. Caroline left Hanover, learned English, took voice lessons from William, and became a paid solo soprano in his Bath oratorio performances.

In 1773 William’s interests began to shift to astronomy. He started grinding telescope mirrors at home. By 1779 he was the most skilled amateur reflecting-telescope-maker in England. In March 1781, working from the garden of his Bath house, he discovered the planet Uranus — the first planet discovered since prehistory and the first ever discovered with a telescope.

George III appointed William Court Astronomer at £200 per year in 1782. The Herschel siblings moved together to a house and observatory near the king’s residence at Windsor. By 1784 they had moved to a permanent purpose-built house and observatory at Slough.

Caroline’s astronomy

Through the 1780s Caroline was William’s full-time astronomical assistant. She kept the observation logbooks, performed the spherical-trigonometry calculations to reduce his raw observations to right-ascension and declination, supervised the production of his star catalogues, and on William’s nights away from the telescope, swept the sky herself with her own small telescope that he had built for her.

Sweeping for comets — systematic slow scanning of the sky looking for faint fuzzy objects that moved against the fixed-star background — was a niche where Caroline could work independently of William. On 1 August 1786 she identified her first comet, designated C/1786 P1 in modern notation and known then as Caroline’s First Comet. The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions published her observation report under her own name in November 1786. She was 36.

Over the next eleven years she discovered seven more comets: 1788, 1790 (two), 1791, 1793, 1795, and 1797. The 1788 and 1790 discoveries were significant because they were comets later shown to be periodic — returning to the inner solar system on calculable orbits. The 1790-II comet was independently rediscovered in 1939 and is now numbered 35P/Herschel-Rigollet.

She also catalogued approximately 561 stars omitted from John Flamsteed’s 1725 British Catalogue of Stars, and 14 new nebulae — corrections and additions that William incorporated into his ongoing nebula and double-star catalogues.

October 1787

In October 1787 George III granted Caroline a personal annual salary of £50 in recognition of her role as William’s official astronomical assistant. The amount was small (William’s was £200) and the role was officially auxiliary — Caroline appears in the royal household lists as “assistant to His Majesty’s astronomer.” But the salary was nonetheless the first ever paid by any government in any country to a woman as a working scientist. She accepted the £50 throughout the rest of William’s life and the seven years she remained at Slough after his 1822 death.

What came after

William Herschel died at Slough in August 1822, aged 83. Caroline was 71. She immediately closed the observatory, packed her papers, and returned to Hanover. She lived there alone for twenty-six more years, corresponding with the second-generation Herschel astronomer (William’s son John Herschel), publishing in 1828 a final Catalogue of the Nebulae which have been observed by Sir William Herschel in his Sweeps, and being awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal in 1828 — the first ever awarded to a woman.

She died at Hanover on 9 January 1848, aged 97. The Royal Irish Academy obituary noted that she had outlived every other astronomer mentioned in William’s first 1782 observation logbook.

Caroline Herschel had been the first woman paid for science. She was also one of the longest-lived astronomers of the 18th and 19th centuries — a working scientist who had outlived her own discipline’s generational turnover by half a century.