WILLIAM Herschel struck it very lucky. He was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1738 and came to England in 1757, where for some years he earned a precarious living as a music teacher. But by 1782, circumstances were such that Herschel's friends were able to lobby King George III to grant him a royal pension. On receipt of a generous endowment, Herschel moved to Windsor, where his only duty was to allow the royal family to look through his telescope whenever they might want to. His good fortune was compounded in 1788 by marriage to a rich widow, who brought him financial security until his death in 1822.
The event that changes Herschel's life occurred 216 years ago today on March 13th, 1781. In his spare time he had studied astronomy, and on that fateful night, gazing through his telescope in the garden of his home in Bath, he made a unique discovery: "I had perceived a star that appeared visibly larger than the rest; being struck with its uncommon magnitude I compared it to H. Geminorum and to the small star in the quartile between Auriga and Gemini, and finding it so much larger than either of them I suspected it to be a comet".
But this was no comet; William Herschel had discovered a new planet - the first to be found since ancient times, and destined to be named Uranus after the Greek god of the sky.
The discovery brought Herschel almost instant fame - and, as we have seen, a pension to allow him to devote the reminder of his life to astronomical activities. Before then it was believed that, apart from Earth, there were only five major planets in the solar system. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were all well known to Greek and Roman astronomers, so it came as a surprise after all that time to realise that there were more. The newcomer had a diameter of 32,000 miles, was four times the size of Earth, and orbited the sun every 84 years.
In due course it was discovered that Uranus had no less than 15 moons. Two of these, Titania and Oberon, were noticed as early as 1787; Ariel and Umbriel appeared in 1851, and Miranda almost a century later in 1948. The other 10 were children of the space age: Bianea, Cressida and Desdemona; Ophelia, Cordelia, and Juliet; and Belinda, Portia, Rosalind and Puck.
It will not, incidentally, have escaped astute readers that there are two impostors on this list: Umbriel and Belinda are characters from The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, while all the remaining 13 are characters from Shakespeare's plays.