Wheelwright of the heavens
Michael Vestey
BBC radio is pretty good at popularising science; so, nearly 300 years ago, was James Ferguson, the subject of Inventors Imperfect on Radio Four last week (Wednesday). The Scottish self-taught astronomer became a sought-after lecturer on science in London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and an inspiration to a new generation of astronomers. According to the presenter of this latest series, Adam Hart-Davis, it was probably the result of an insatiable curiosity.
The son of a poor Banffshire farmer, Ferguson would spend nights in the fields under a blanket staring up at the stars until he devised a means of measuring and charting them with beads attached to a thread. His fascination with machines led him to make pulleys, levers, wheels and cranes, and he built an orrery, a model of the solar system. He even studied anatomy and worked as a doctor for a while, though the medicines cost so much and his patients were too poor to pay for them that he gave it up. In 1743 he went to London to lecture in the coffee houses on mathematics but instead became famous for his lectures on the stars, charging the public a shilling each.
His field was broadly known as natural philosophy, which, apart from astronomy, included mechanics, hydraulics and electricity, and the Science Museum in London has some of his inventions. One of the curators. Jane West, told Hart-Davis that Ferguson was very good at gearing an orrery (named after the Earl of Orrery for whom one was made) to predict an eclipse. He used them in lectures, A curator at the National Museums of Scotland said Ferguson's wheels and gears helped him make sense of the planets. To help pay for his models and lectures and maintain his family, he became a portrait painter of miniatures, two-inch ovals for which he charged ten shillings each; some are in the pictorial section of the Science Museum, and his subjects, painted from life, were both from London and Edinburgh.
What everyone agreed was that something about his personality and character inspired others. William Herschel bought Ferguson's book about Isaac Newton's Principia (which contained a full description of the universe as was known then), encouraging him to examine what he called the 'construction of the heavens'. Herschel went on to discover the planet Uranus in 1781, using a telescope of his own design. Ferguson's most well-known book was Astronomy Explained, which was in the form of a dialogue between a brother who was at Cambridge and his sister for whom higher education wasn't possible at the time. Hart-Davis told us that as Ferguson had educated himself he was keen to keep science simple for others. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine wrote of him in 1883: 'It is too much to call him an astronomer. He was a sort of star mechanic, the carpenter, the wheelwright of the heavens.' Broadcasting House, the Sunday-morning news and current affairs programme on Radio Four is to have a series of guest presenters throughout November, Eddie Mair is leaving to present PM on Radio Four, part of the same stable. One hopes that the programme might sharpen up a little as a result, Mystifyingly, one Sunday in October, the editor devoted 25 minutes to the election of a new governor of California before the vote. It was far too much. Each week we had heard from one of the unknown no-hoper candidates, as if this might be amusing. In fact, it was incredibly dull. One listener complained to Feedback on Radio Four that he found it infantile.
The editor Roger Clark admitted that there were plenty of other items that weekend, but he had found California to be interesting, the aim being to give the audience an understanding of the gubernatorial race and the involvement of someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He thought the programme was serious as well as irreverent, with warmth and humour. I'm all for humour but the jokes have to work, and all too often they don't on Broadcasting House. The tedious 'Donald Rumsfeld soundbite of the week' clip went on for week after week and wasn't even funny.
Clark reminded the presenter of Feedback, Roger Bolton, that Broadcasting House was the Broadcasting Press Guild's programme of the year. I might be able to shed some light on this. I bumped into a member of the Guild and asked why it had been chosen. 'It's their turn,' I was told. 'They haven't had anything before.' This is often the nature of broadcasting awards; they might give a boost to the programmes, but they're fairly meaningless.
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