NEWALL, HUGH FRANK

(b. Gateshead, England, 21 June 1857; d. Cambridge, England, 22 February 1944)

astrophysics.

Newall was the son of R. S. Newall, a wealthy manufacturer and a fellow of the Royal Society. During the 1860’s Thomas Cooke of York constructed a twenty-five-inch refracting telescope—for a short time the largest in the world—for the father, who installed it at his home. Newall was not then interested in astronomy; he read mathematics as an undergraduate at Cambridge and subsequently worked under J. J. Thomson in the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1889, only weeks before his death, Newali’s father offered his refractor to Cambridge University, with the request that it be used primarily for work in stellar physics. Certain financial problems arose, however, which were resolved when Newall offered the university a sum of money in addition to his own services as an unpaid observer. Throughout the early 1890’s he concentrated on putting the telescope into service and providing it with appropriate instrumentation. He continued to be interested in the design of instrumentation throughout his life.

From the mid-1890’s Newall’s interest focused increasingly on the sun. He took part in four eclipse expeditions between 1898 and 1905, studying the flash and coronal spectra and the polarization of the corona. As the result of a substantial bequest of money by Frank McClean in 1905, Newall was able to construct a horizontal solar telescope at Cambridge and to begin a program of solar observations there. He concerned himself primarily with sunspot spectra and the rotation of the sun. His time was much occupied, however, by the transfer of Sir William Huggins’ instrumentation to Cambridge in 1908, followed by the transfer of the Solar Physics Observatory (formerly under the direction of Sir Norman Lockyer) from South Kensington in 1911.

Newall was appointed professor of astrophysics in 1909 and held this post until his retirement in 1928, He published less than many of his contemporaries; partly, perhaps, because he was a perfectionist and partly because, being financially independent, he was under no pressure. His influence in the astronomical community was felt mainly through his local, national, and international organizational work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Some of Newall’s MS diaries are preserved at the Cambridge Observatories. The majority of his published astronomical work appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society between 1892 and 1927.

There is a detailed obituary of Newall by E. A. Milne in Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London, 4 (1944), 717–732. Additional details, especially concerning instrumentation, can be found in Annals of the Solar Physics Observatory (Cambridge), 1 (1949).

A. J. Meadows