From earliest times, human beings have regarded the sky with fascination. The passage of time on a daily basis and the coming and going of the annual seasons are marked by the movements of sun, stars and planets. Sailors and wanderers in the desert used the stars to find their bearings. When human societies adopted agriculture as a way of life, predicting seasonal change became crucial to decisions made as to when to sow seed and when to harvest crops. It seems likely therefore, that the first systematic study of the night sky, was carried out by scholars and priests in the ancient civilisations of North Africa and the Near East more than four thousand years ago. The philosophers of ancient Greece were preoccupied by the relationship between the earth and the heavenly bodies. The model of the universe which emerged from their observations and speculation influenced European thinking up until the 17th Century. The astronomer and geographer, Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolomeus) who lived in Alexandria in Egypt in the 2nd Century A.D. gave this theoretical system its final form. Since that time it has been known as the Ptolomaic System. The earth was believed to be fixed at the centre of the universe surrounded by eight concentric shells. The sun and planets were considered to be attached to the first seven of these shells and their positions relative to one another explained by a series of complicated movement termed ‘epicycles’. The eighth shell held the stars whose position is fixed in relation to each other.
In 1543, the part Polish, part German astronomer, Nicholas Copernicus, published a book in which he revealed a revolutionary theory which forms the basis of our understanding of the universe to this day. Rather than our own earth being viewed as the fixed point around which the planets and moon rearrange themselves on a daily and seasonal basis, he suggested that the sun should fulfil this central role. A picture of the universe emerged in which the planets take the form of spheres (or balls) travelling in circles around a spherical sun. The earth rotates on its own axis and in doing so exposes half of its surface to sunlight at any one time giving rise to the distinction between night and day. At the same time, the earth traces a circular path around the sun on a journey which occupies a period of a year. In doing so, the earth takes its place alongside its near neighbours, Mercury, Venus and Mars, voyaging around the central point of the sun against a background of unmoving stars.
New ideas such as that of Copernicus (the ‘heliocentric’ model of the universe) met with fierce opposition from religious authorities in the 16th and 17th Centuries. By the 18th Century, all aspects of the world were being subject to enthusiastic enquiry and there was a thirst for new ideas. Nowadays, the presentation of science to the public in accessible form occupies many hours of television air-time. The first exponents of popular science, however, came on the scene during the 18th Century . They made a living by entertaining and informing audiences using experimental devices such as the prism in order demonstrate the laws governing light and colour. The vacuum jar was used to make apparent the influence of the atmosphere on flames and on living creatures. A complex mechanical arrangement was used to explain the workings of the universe within which our own planet moved. This was termed an ‘orrery’. Metal spheres representing the planets and sun were linked by means of cogs and gear wheels. When these were set in motion they simulated the relative movements of the planets around the sun. By placing a light source in the central position occupied by the sun, all of the observable effects of planetary movement in relation to solar illumination could be demonstrated.
In the year 1800, in the small village of Fenwick in Ayrshire, John Fulton was born. He followed his father in his trade as a cobbler. Fulton was typical of a breed of technical innovators whose imagination and skill drove forward the Industrial Revolution. Largely self-taught, he studied botany, learned several foreign languages and constructed a ‘velocipede’ or early bicycle. He also experimented with the production of coal gas. Astronomy held a particular fascination for him. He caught the attention of a wider public when he successfully assembled an orrery – a working model of the solar system. This was purchased by the Philosophical Society of Kilmarnock and exhibited in towns around Scotland and England. The creation of the orrery won him a medal awarded by the Scottish Society of Arts along with a prize of ten sovereigns. His technical skills brought him employment in London where he worked for a firm which produced scientific instruments for the King, William IV. Ill health forced him to abandon his professional activities and return to Fenwick where he died in 1853.
