Thomas Phillips · 1834 · National Galleries of Scotland
Mary Somerville
1780 — 1872
Her family took away her candles to stop her studying. Then the word "scientist" was coined in a review of her book.
As a girl in Burntisland, on the Fife coast, Mary Fairfax was given about a year of real schooling and was expected to settle for needlework. She taught herself Latin from her father's library, then Euclid and algebra from books a tutor bought for her, reading late into the night. As she told it, her father worried that study would unhinge her, and the servants were told to take her candles away. She went on working Euclid's problems from memory in the dark.
Thirty years later she was the best-known woman in British science. Her book on Laplace's celestial mechanics was used to teach Cambridge undergraduates, who could not have studied alongside her. When William Whewell reviewed her next book in 1834, he went looking for a word to describe people like her, and suggested "scientist."
Ninety-one years, most of them self-taught
The lifeline
1780
Born 26 December in the manse at Jedburgh; raised in Burntisland, Fife
1811
Widowed since 1807, she wins a silver medal for solving a published mathematical problem
1826
Her paper on sunlight and magnetism is read to the Royal Society
1831
The Mechanism of the Heavens, her version of Laplace, makes her famous
1835
She and Caroline Herschel become the first women honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society
1872
Dies in Naples on 29 November, aged 91, still working on mathematics
By the numbers
The measure of her
1834
The year "scientist" was coined, in Whewell's review of her book
10
Editions of On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences
£200
Yearly civil-list pension the Crown granted her for her science
88
Her age when her last book, Molecular and Microscopic Science, came out
What she wrote, and what it did
The work
1811
A silver medal for her solution of a Diophantine problem posed in the Mathematical Repository. She published her solutions under the name "A Lady."
1826
"On the magnetizing power of the more refrangible solar rays." Its conclusion turned out to be wrong, but it was one of the first experimental papers by a woman printed in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions.
1831
The Mechanism of the Heavens, her expanded rendering of Laplace's Mécanique céleste. In her words, she "translated Laplace's work from algebra into common language." Cambridge set it as a textbook for decades.
1834
On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, which showed that astronomy, light, heat, electricity and magnetism were connected. The 1842 edition suggested that unexplained wobbles in Uranus's orbit might reveal an unseen planet. Neptune was found in 1846.
1848
Physical Geography, the first English textbook on the subject. It stayed in use for decades and won her the Royal Geographical Society's Victoria Medal.
1869
On Molecular and Microscopic Science: two volumes and about 180 illustrations, written over ten years while she was in her late seventies and eighties.
Famous, yet locked out
Recognition
In her lifetime
Barred, as every woman was, from attending any British university
Her first husband shared the period's prejudice against learned women
Her marble bust by Chantrey stood at the Royal Society, which admitted no woman as a Fellow until 1945
Hers was the first name on John Stuart Mill's petition for women's suffrage
Today
Somerville College, Oxford, founded in 1879 for women, bears her name
Her face is on the Royal Bank of Scotland's £10 note, chosen by public vote in 2016
She has an asteroid (5771 Somerville), a lunar crater and an Arctic island named after her
The Institute of Physics gives a Mary Somerville Medal for public engagement in physics
The shore that taught her
Burntisland, Fife
Her childhood home was a small port on the Firth of Forth. At low tide she spent hours on the sands collecting shells, starfish and sea urchins. On the pier she found blocks of limestone printed with what looked like leaves, and carried pieces home without knowing what they were. The family lived in what she called genteel poverty on her father's naval pay.
10
Her age when she was sent to boarding school at Musselburgh, for about a year
Fossils
The "impressions of leaves" she found on the limestone at the pier
Forth
Her home faced the firth. Somerville Square now marks where it stood
"The progress of modern science … has been remarkable for a tendency to simplify the laws of nature, and to unite detached branches by general principles."
— Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834)
