William Huggins was born to a silk mercer and linen draper in London, on February 7, 1824. He attended the City of London School at its opening in 1837, but was later removed and taught by private tutors at home after recovering from smallpox. His predominant interest as a child was in science despite the broadness of his studies, and his first telescope was a cheap one, purchased when he was about eighteen. The combination of family circumstances and the fact that London was too poor of a place for astronomical observations ultimately led him to give up on his studies and take over his father’s business, although he continued his studies in science as a hobby.
In 1854, he joined the Royal Astronomical Society (which he later became president of, in 1900), and moved with his parents out to Tulse Hill, which had better conditions for doing astronomy research. He found himself too sensitive to experiment on animals and decided on astronomy over microscopy for his primary interest, and began to set up an astronomical observatory in his new home. He remained in Tulse Hill for the rest of his life, and once both his parents were deceased he married Margaret Lindsay Murray, who also held a profound interest in astronomy. She contributed to many of his major publications, and seemed to be to him what Caroline Herschel was to her brother.
The earliest astronomical work that Huggins pursued was about conventional lines, and this caused him to form a friendship with W. R. Dawes, who is a well-known amateur observer. Dawes sold him a better telescope and Huggins began to make observations about the planets. However, Huggins is the most well-known for his work in the field of spectroscopy, and in 1859 he heard about Kirschoff’s work on the Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum. Immediately Huggins realized that this could be applied to all of the stars, and he convinced a friend and professor of chemistry, W. A. Miller, to collaborate with him. Together, they designed a primitive spectroscope, which was basically two prisms attached to a telescope, and built upon their idea to create a more functional and efficient spectroscope. Huggins compiled maps of twenty-four terrestrial spectra and compared them to stellar spectra using this more efficient telescope, and he and Miller published their results in 1864. Their research concluded that the brightest stars had similar structures to our own sun, and that, although there was a diverse chemical composition, there were just as many similarities as differences.
Continuing on the same notions of his research, Huggins had an epiphany and decided to see what the spectral lines of nebula looked like. He targeted a planetary nebula in Draco, and discovered that the nebula was not composed of a group of stars, but was simply luminous gas. He went on and observed other nebula, and determined that they fell into one of two categories; star cluster, or glowing gas. However, while he could figure out the chemical make-up of the star clusters, he had more trouble with the gas; he could identify the hydrogen, and termed the other lines “nebulium”, which he thought was a new element. It was later discovered by Ira S. Bowen, in 1927, that nebulium was actually ionized oxygen and nitrogen.
Huggins also recognized the possibility of taking photographs of stellar spectra, and attempted to do so with Sirius, but the poor results made him realize that the technology was not yet sufficient. It wasn’t until 1872 that a fellow scientist named Draper was successful, and Huggins immediately followed it up by photographing the spectra of bright stars, and even attempted to do so to detect solar corona in full sunlight, although this was never reached.
However, Huggins was still not satisfied. He observed the radiation of three comets and compared them to the spectral lines of a candle flame, concluding that they were somehow carbon-based, and began to study fainter celestial objects. A younger scientist, Norman Lockyer, indirectly convinced him to study the sunlight when he discovered how to spectroscopically observe solar prominences – Huggins expanded on his idea by widening the slit in the spectroscope, allowing for a full range of observation rather than a narrow spectrum line. Lockyer and Huggins came into conflict later on as Lockyer began to form a hypothesis about celestial evolution based around Huggins’ “nebulium” spectral lines, and Huggins absolutely refused to admit that Lockyer is right. They continued to butt heads, disagreeing on even basic scientific methods, in which Lockyer argued that observation was a means to an end, but Huggins claimed was the end itself. In the end it was a moot point, since both of their scientific observations contributed to one another, and to the greater scientific community.
