Johann Elert Bode

1749-1826

German Astronomer and Mathematician

German mathematician and astronomer Johann Elert Bode was seemingly born to teach the world about the wonders of astronomy. The child of well-educated parents, Bode early on developed a passion for astronomy and higher mathematics, and only slightly later began publishing accounts of what he had learned and observed. A prodigy, Bode published his first astronomical treatises while he was a teenager.

In 1772, still in his early twenties, Bode accepted a position as a mathematician at the prestigious Berlin Academy. The key benefit for Bode was his supervision of the Academy's yearbook, an annual publication aimed at distilling astronomical information and charts, as well as recapitulating leading scientific discoveries of the time. Before Bode, the yearbook had lost some of its luster, but he applied himself to restoring its reputation for accuracy and thoroughness, with the result that sales of the yearbook increased dramatically.

In that same year, 1772, Bode published the mathematical formula that bears his name. A scrupulously honest scholar, Bode never claimed to have invented the formula. That accomplishment took place in 1766 by Prussian astronomer Johann Daniel Titius (1729-1796), who discovered a fascinating relationship among certain numbers, a relationship that seemed to have astronomical significance. According to Titius , adding 4 to each of the numbers in the sequence 0, 3, 6, 12, 24,48, 96, 192, and so on, and then dividing each number by ten, would roughly derive the distances of the planets from the Sun (in astronomical units).

Bode's contribution was to present the formula to a wider public; honoring its originator, Bode named the formula the Titius-Bode law, although it came to be known almost universally as Bode's law. Under either name the formula provided astronomers with a tool for deducing the likeliest locations of planets not yet discovered. The formula, for example, helped astronomers locate the asteroid belt, which occupied an orbit that, according to Titius-Bode, should have held a planet. In 1846 the discovery of Neptune in an orbit that violated the formula caused the law to fade from scientific currency, although it has lost little of its popular appeal. The relationship between the numbers and the planets remained a fascinating coincidence—the law was never found to have a provable theoretical basis.

By 1776 Bode had transformed the Astronomische Jahrbuch ("Astronomic Yearbook") into one of the world's most respected catalogs of astronomical data. He published other works frequently, including massive star charts and concordances, one of which, the 1801 Uranographia, was a major contribution, cataloging more than 17,000 stars and nebulae. (In 1781 it had been Bode who assigned the name Uranus to the planet newly discovered by William Herschel [1738-1822].)

Bode's reputation continued to grow, and in 1784 he was made Royal Astronomer. In 1786 Bode was named Director of Berlin's Astronomical Observatory and labored to make the institution a world-class facility, although, lacking the best equipment, the facility continued to lag behind other observatories. His own observational achievement rests on his catalogs of astronomical objects visible to the naked eye. But it was not as an observational astronomer that Bode would be remembered: rather, posterity salutes his tireless efforts to centralize and systematize astronomical knowledge.

Bode remained Director of the observatory until his retirement in 1825. He died a year later, still working on the astronomy yearbooks that had occupied him for more than half a century, an all but unparalleled commitment to the ongoing, systematic synthesis of the world's astronomical findings, a crucial contribution during a period when observational astronomy was undergoing a great flowering. Much of the public's information about astronomy and related sciences came from publications overseen by the field's great popularizer, Johann Elert Bode.

KEITH FERRELL