Mary Somerville – the first scientist

This blog was written and researched by Library Volunteer Edward Maunder. 

Mary Somerville (1780-1872) was the first person to be referred to as a scientist – a woman in a largely man’s world! Somerville College Oxford is named after her, and The Royal Bank of Scotland honoured her in 2017 by printing her portrait on a ten-pound note. She lived to the ripe old age of 92.

Her remarkable history is explained in her biography collated by her daughter Martha in the book: Personal recollections from early life to old age of Mary Somerville, published in 1873, the year after she died, and available to view in the DEI library. These recollections include letters to and from Mary by many famous personages and mathematicians of her day.

As a child Mary’s parents considered that a special school education was unnecessary “the burden of abstract thinking would injure the delicate female physique”. Her mother taught her to read the bible and to say her prayers morning and evening. When she was 7 or 8 she began to be useful: picking fruit, shelling peas and beans, feeding the poultry and looking after the dairy. In terms of academic subjects, Mary seems to have been largely self-taught, studying long hours into the night by candlelight. At the age of 10 she was sent to a boarding school where she was “utterly wretched”, but learnt the rudiments of French and English grammar. By the time she was eleven, Mary had decided for herself to read all the books she could get her hands on and she also taught herself Latin and Greek.

The family would spend the winter months in Edinburgh, where she learnt to play the piano, paint and dance and to lead a more social life. When she heard from her piano teacher that Euclid’s Elements were the basis for the study of astronomy and other sciences, she worked through this book – with the support of her younger brother (who did receive extensive tuition). She would rise at daybreak and read algebra until breakfast.

She married her first husband at the early age of 24 and moved with him to London, where she continued with her mathematical pursuits, but without any interest from her husband. After three years and two children, her husband died and left her a wealthy widow. She returned to Edinburgh and continued her studies.

By now she had a circle of friends who strongly encouraged her in her studies of mathematics and science. In particular John Playfair, then professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, encouraged her and through him she began a correspondence with William Wallace (Playfair’s former pupil) who was then professor of mathematics at the Royal Military College at Great Marlow. In this correspondence they discussed the mathematical problems set in the Mathematical Repository and in 1811 Mary received a silver medal for her solution to one of these problems. At this time Mary also read Newton’s Principia and, at Wallace’s suggestion, Laplace’s Mécanique céleste (Mechanism of the Heavens) and many other mathematical and astronomical texts.

In 1812 Mary married her second husband, the physician William Somerville, and then she moved to London, where access to all sciences opened up to her through William, who became a member of the Royal Society. Had her first husband not died early, she might never have developed her mathematical and scientific knowledge as she did with the encouragement of William.

One of her life changing moments came in 1827 when William received a letter of invitation from Lord Brougham for Mary to write an English translation of Laplace’s famous work Mécanique céleste, concerning the motions of the solar system. It is interesting to note that the invitation (on behalf of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge) was sent to William, and not directly to Mary herself. This way of communicating appears to follow the etiquette of the time.

Lord Brougham was a rising star in the government of the day (elected as an MP in 1810 and Lord Chancellor 1830-1834). During the 1820s he helped to found not only the University of London but also the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, intended to make good books available at low prices to the working class. He was also a member of the Royal Society. At that time Mary was 47, a wife and mother, and without formal higher education, but essentially self-educated from a great desire to develop her interests in mathematics and science. She had no academic qualifications, so why was she invited? Whilst in London she was introduced to a wide circle of scientific friends who were impressed by her knowledge and understanding gained essentially by self-study.

One of her best friends was Sir John Herschel, who gave her much support in the task after her initial reluctance to accept it (she wrote “I am incapable of such a task”). In her translation of Laplace’s work she expanded the original text putting it into layman’s language, and introduced diagrams “for the convenience of the reader”. The result brought her great acclaim , and it was used as an undergraduate text at Cambridge University for the rest of her long life. It proved to be a great financial success and appeared in ten editions; the commentaries were even translated into German and Italian.

The emotional support William gave to his wife was probably his most important contribution to her work. Mary acknowledged this in the autobiography she wrote towards the end of her life: “The warmth with which Somerville entered into my success deeply affected me; for not one in ten thousand would have rejoiced at it as he did”. Mary seems to have been ambivalent about her abilities and her public role as a pioneering female science writer. While she was the first to sign John Stuart Mill’s unsuccessful 1868 petition to give women the right to vote, she sometimes played down her (and her gender’s) intellect. In a draft of her autobiography she wrote:

“I was conscious that I never made a discovery myself, that I had no originality. I have perseverance and intelligence but no genius, that spark from heaven is not granted to the sex, we are of the earth…”

The text is divided into Books and chapters within books, chapter 2 of Book 2 concerns the law of universal gravitation as deduced from observations. Unlike William Clifford, the Victorian mathematician and humanist, the subject of a previous blog, Mary firmly believed in the existence of God as the Creator, but it was up to humans with their intellect to explore and reveal the laws of creation.

“It may be concluded that gravitation must have been selected by Divine wisdom out of an infinity of other laws, as being the most simple, and that which gives the greatest stability to the celestial motions.”

Two months after its publication, the fellows of the Royal Society of London pledged £156.10 to pay for a marble bust of Somerville by renowned sculptor, Francis Chantrey, to sit in their meeting room. Today, a copy of the Chantrey bust can be found in the Mary Somerville Room. Four years after the publication (1835), she was awarded an annual pension of £300 by the government in recognition of her work in communicating science to a wider audience.

In 1835, she and the astronomer Caroline Herschel (Willliam Herschel’s sister) became the first women to be admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society.

In the 1830s Mary also became the private tutor to Ada Byron (daughter of Lord Byron, and later known as Ada Lovelace) who was keen to develop her mathematical talents. Ada developed a special relationship with Mary, who not only invited her to attend concerts together. Mary was also acquainted with Thomas Young (of Young’s modulus fame). In her recollections she notes how she and her husband had been stargazing with a telescope until about two o’clock in the morning when they happened to notice a light in the window of Young’s house in Welbeck St; clearly Young was burning the midnight oil again. Mary’s husband rang the bell at no. 48. Dr Young appeared in his dressing gown, and they were invited inside to see a piece of Egyptian papyrus which he was then in the middle of translating.

After the success of the Mechanics of the Heavens, Mary with her husband and family moved in 1838 to the continent, mainly Italy, There were several reasons for doing so, but mainly to live in a healthier climate compared with London, and to experience a lower cost of living. The downside however was that she became more remote from her circle of stimulating scientific friends. Nevertheless, she continued to study and write, e.g. producing the work Physical geography in 1848, which went on to become her most successful work.

In the last decade of her life she developed her mathematical interest in the study of quaternions, an emerging topic of algebra that would have the potential to benefit current computational mechanics! From her Personal Recollections, it appears that she was heavily involved in this study up to the day she died at the age of 92.

While Somerville admitted that her memory for “ordinary events and especially names” was fading, she wrote: “I’m still able to read books on the high algebra for four or five hours in the morning and even to solve the problems. Sometimes I find them difficult, but my old obstinacy remains. For if I do not succeed today, I attack them again on the morrow.”

Sources available to view in the DEI Library: 

Euclid, Euclidus quae supersunt omnia, (1703). Classmark: J.17.12 (Oversize)

Pierre-Simon Laplace, Traité de mécanique céleste, (1798-1827). Classmark: J 31.10-13a and 13b

Mary Somerville, On the connexion of the physical sciences, (1834). Classmark: J 34.13

Mary Somerville, Mechanism of the Heavens, (1831). Classmark: J 19.27

Mary Somerville, Physical geography, (1848). Classmark: J.34.14-15

Mary and Martha Somerville, Personal recollections, from early life to old age, of Mary Somerville : with selections from her correspondence, (1873). Classmark: O/SOM