Maker Info
William Cranch Bond
William Cranch Bond was born on 9 September 1789 in Falmouth, District of Maine, Massachusetts (now known as Portland, Maine). Bond relocated to Boston, where he became a clockmaker. His interest in astronomy was piqued after observing a solar eclipse in 1806. He built a home observatory in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
In 1815, Bond was instructed by the Harvard Corporation to visit the Greenwich Observatory and the firm of Troughton & Simms to inquire what the necessary instruments and their costs would be for Harvard to establish a first class observatory. Bond was in Europe at the time, and he reported back on these particulars and other information he gathered at observatories in Britain and on the Continent.
Upon his return, Bond supervised the construction of a model observatory dome. As funds were lacking for the project, the university put the plans on hold. Bond meanwhile continued his private astronomical pursuits and undertook a survey of astronomical and meteorological data for the United States government in connection with observations to be made by the Exploring Expedition to the South Seas under the command of Captain Charles Wilkes.
Bond was appointed the "Astronomical Observer" of Harvard College in 1839 and set up in Dana House in Cambridge. This was a great deal for the university. Bond was an excellent observer; he brought his own instruments with him; and he received no salary. When Harvard was able to raise the money for an official observatory in 1843, Bond played a major role in acquiring for it a Great Refractor of 15-inches made by Merz and Mahler of Munich and equal to the largest in the world at the time. He also acquired a transit circle made by Troughton & Simms. Bond became the Harvard College Observatory's first director in 1847. He was elected an associate of the Royal Astronomical Society in England in 1849, and was the first U.S. citizen to be so.
His son, George Phillips Bond (1825–1865), was also an astronomer and succeeded him as director of Harvard's observatory in 1859. Together, father and son discovered Hyperion, the eighth satellite of Saturn in 1848. In 1850, they discovered the dark inner ring of Saturn (the so- called Ring C, or Crape Ring). The pair experimented with daguerreotypes of the moon and stars. J. A. Whipple, working under William Cranch Bond, made the first daguerreotype of a star, Vega, in 1850. The Bonds made the first recognizable photographic print of the Moon and of a double star (Mizar and Alcor) in the handle of the Big Dipper in 1857 using the wet-plate collodion process.
William Cranch Bond died on 29 January 1859 in Cambridge.
