John Pringle Nichol
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John Pringle Nichol (1804 – 1859) was a Scottish educator and astronomer who did much to popularise astronomy in a manner that appealed to 19th century tastes.
Born Huntly-Hill, near Brechin, Angus, he was the son of a gentleman farmer and was educated at the local grammar school and than at King's College, Aberdeen. He was licensed a preacher and soon proved an effective communicator but a change in his theological views led him to abandon the Church for education.
He held a number of posts in education and journalism and correspnded with many leading thinkers of the times, including John Stuart Mill. He clearly made some impression in economics as James Mill and Nassau Senior nominated him as Jean-Baptiste Say's successor as professor of political economy at the College de France though he was at the time too ill to take the post.
In 1836 and in competition with Thomas Carlyle, Nichol was appointed regius professor of astronomy at the University of Glasgow. He became an enthusiastic and effective lecturer and made a profound impression on the young William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin with his introduction of the "Continental" approach to mathematical physics of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier.
Nichol turned to popular lecturing and authored a number of popular and successful books about astronomy. In 1841 George Eliot wrote:
I have been revelling in Nichol's Architecture of the Heavens and Phenomena of the Solar System, and have been in imagination winging my flight from system to system, and from universe to universe ...
William John Macquorn Rankine declared Nichol's Dictionary of the Physical Sciences to be:
... almost unparalleled for the extent and accuracy of the information that it contains in a small bulk."
In 1831 he married Jane Tullis who died in 1850. He married Elizabeth Pease in 1853, a prominent reformer and member of the Darlington Pease family (much against her family's wishes). He died in Rothesay on 19 September 1859.
[edit] Bibliography
- Nichol, J.P. (1838) The Architecture of the Heavens
- - The Solar System
- - (1846) The System of the World
- - The Stellar Universe
- - (1852) Memorials from Ben Rhydding
- - (1855)The Planet Neptune
- - Dictionary of the Physical Sciences
- - General Principles in Geology, the preface to Keith Johnston's Physical Atlas
