Gruithuisen, Franz von Paula

Abstract

Johann Galle, astronomer at Berlin and Breslau, discovered the planet Neptune and three comets, composed noted catalogs of the orbital elements for comets, and elaborated a new method to measure the solar parallax.Galle was the eldest of seven children born to Marie Henriette and Johann Gottfried Galle, who earned a living distilling wood to obtain tar and turpentine. After successful studies at the Wittenberg Gymnasium, he matriculated at Berlin University in 1830 to study practical and theoretical astronomy. In 1835, the director of the Berlin observatory, ▶ Johann Encke, invited Galle to fill the post of his assistant. In 1845, he obtained his doctorate in astronomy from Berlin University, and was appointed as director of Breslau (now Wrocaw, Poland) Observatory in 1851. In 1856, Galle married C€ asilie Eugenie Marie Regenbrecht. Their elder son, Andreas , was an astronomer and geodesist, their younger son, Georg, a physician. Galle remained professionally active into very old Selected References

In search of historical roots of the meteorite impact theory: Franz von Paula Gruithuisen as the first proponent of an impact cratering model for the Moon in the 1820s

“…Fauth (, p. 144) still declared: “We will not deal with Schroeter's fantastic expectations or Gruithuisen's precarious speculations.” On the other hand, however, Elger (, p. 22) stated that Gruithuisen, for a long time discredited, was indeed “keen‐sighted and very imaginative,” and he explicitly expressed a high regard for Gruithuisen's data, as profoundly confirmed recently (e.g., Baum , , ). In fact, since the last decades of the 19th century, Gruithuisen was increasingly appraised as a mostly truthful and undervalued naturalist.…”

“…46–47; Whitaker , pp. 109–114), and frequently infamously noted in astronomical encyclopedias (e.g., Sheehan , p. 455; Baum ). It is noteworthy that his name is also absent in modern German historical monographs on geosciences and impact studies (Wagenbreth ; Kölbl‐Ebert ).…”

“…Young Gruithuisen, inspired by Schröter and fascinated by the refined abilities of the superior Fraunhofer refracting telescope (Fig. A), “romantically” inferred a habitability of the Moon (e.g., Baum ), as well as, e.g., cataclysmic mega‐floods (Fig. ).…”

“…The “accumulation effect of attraction power” for cosmic debris on a planetary scale, pointed out by Chladni (), paired with the coeval discovery of the first asteroids a few years later, was soon extended in several German works directly into an “aggregation theory” (Günther , p. 38). As stressed by several authors (Both, , p. 10; Hoyt , p. 21; Sheehan and Dobbins , p. 86; Baum ), the coalescence ideas, described as “conglomeration of cosmic bodies,” were factually initiated by the Bierberstein brothers and Moll. However, there are some convoluted questions related to so defined credit.…”

“…In the anglophone world, the Gruithuisen conceptual priority was likely first proposed by Beard (, p. 168): “The idea that the moon's craters were formed by the impact of gigantic meteoric bodies apparently originated with Gruithuisen, a German selenographer.” Of course, this inference was already made earlier in German papers (e.g., Perty ; Thiersch and Thiersch ; Althans ; Günther , , ; Meinecke ). Later, Green (, p. 378, table 1) described Gruithuisen as “the founder of the impact school.” In the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics (Murdin ), The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (Baum ), and the Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms (Hargitai et al. , p. 1009), Gruithuisen is indeed recorded as a proponent of the impact theory of lunar craters, as well as in World Who's Who in Science (Debus ).…”