Christiaan Huygens and the Dutch Golden Age: Hugh Aldersey-Williams (1655)
Hugh Aldersey-Williams by Helen May
In this episode of Travels Through Time the author and journalist Hugh Aldersey-Williams takes us back to 1655 and the vibrant heart of the Dutch Golden Age to meet Christiaan Huygens, a figure oddly forgotten by us today but who was once venerated as the greatest mathematician, astronomer and physicist of his age.
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In the late 1640s news began to circulate the intellectual circles of Europe of the emergence of a brilliant young thinker called Christiaan Huygens. At his university in Leiden he had acquired the nickname, ‘the Dutch Archimedes’ for his skill in mathematics, and he was being talked about as a prodigy who had a particular flair for logic, philosophy, optics and geometry.
This was the first news of a figure who would go on to astound his contemporaries and to propel forward the process we today call the Scientific Revolution.
Christiaan was the second son of Constantjin Huygens, a man who was already known around the courts of Europe, where, though his work as a diplomat, he had met such figures as Francis Bacon and King James I. Constantjin has also helped foster the career of the young Rembrandt, but it was as the father of Christiaan that he would chiefly be remembered by history.
Christiaan was both a practical and a theoretical thinker. In his early career he focussed on the design for telescopes, grinding the glass for better lenses with his brother at their Dutch home. He also considered the nature of fluids and pondered the puzzle of pendulum motion.
Working in the mid-seventeenth-century, Christiaan benefited from a vibrant scientific culture and was able to build on breakthroughs made by characters like Galileo and Rene Descartes. His time was further charged by a period that historians now call the Dutch Golden Age, a period which now spans about a century from the 1580s and to 1670s when Dutch art, trade and science were esteemed to be among the very finest in the world.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, Hugh Aldersey-Williams opts to take us back to 1655, a year at the very heart of this time. It is the year when Christiaan truly makes his name.
He takes us to the gardens of the Huygens house one night in the early spring when - through his home-made telescope - Christiaan makes the thrilling discovery of one of Saturn’s moons. It was the first new body in the solar system since Galileo’s ‘Medicean stars.’ The moon would later be called ‘Titan’ by John Herschel.
He then takes us to see Christiaan analysing a newly-patented clock. Clocks were exciting objects at the time and were considered to be valuable tools in unlocking the ancient puzzle of longitude.
Finally we head to the magical moment in the summer of 1655 when Christiaan visited Paris – the city he came to love - for the very first time.
Huygens eventually settled in Paris in 1663 and lived there until 1681. With influential French allies, he found himself favoured by Louis XIV’s minister Colbert, and invited to lead the new Academie des Sciences, a signal moment in building up science as an international pursuit.
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Show notes
Scene One: 25 March 1655. With Christiaan and his telescope in the garden of the Huygens’s house in The Hague. The discovery of Saturn’s moon later to be called Titan.
Scene Two: 4 March 1655, Huygens recommends a Polish inventor’s clock for Dutch patent, demonstrating that he is already thinking about the problem of pendular motion.
Scene Three: 23 July 1655, Huygens arrives in Paris - the city that he would grow to love - for the very first time
Memento: One of Huygens’s magic lanterns
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Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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The planet Saturn, as photographed from the Cassini Orbiter in 2004
While cruising around Saturn in early October 2004, Cassini captured a series of images that have been composed into the largest, most detailed, global natural color view of Saturn and its rings ever made. Credit: WikiCommons.
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As mentioned in the podcast: Constantjin Huygens’s letters available online (in French)
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