Date: November 28, 2011
Title: Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg
Podcaster: Adam Fuller
Description: In 1576, Tycho Brahe laid the cornerstone for Uraniborg, the world’s first modern research institution. He established a place where scientists, scholars, and artisans could come together, perform cutting edge research with incredibly precise observational equipment, work with modern chemistry facilities, and mix in an environment that promoted humanities like no other before it. In today’s podcast we’ll talk about the founding, construction, and influence Uraniborg had on the Renaissance and the emerging Scientific Revolution.
Bio: Adam Fuller is a physics and chemistry instructor at Saint James School in Hagerstown, MD. He earned his masters in Planetary Sciences from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 2011. He graduated from Columbia University in the City of New York with a B.S. in Astrophysics in 2009. He also has a B.A. in Journalism from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include planetary atmospheres, planetary formation, exoplanets and astrobiology. He’s incredibly excited for this year’s North Carolina men’s basketball team.
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Transcript:
In the winter of 1575, King Frederick II of Denmark was in crisis mode: Tycho Brahe, Denmark’s greatest scientific mind and member of one of its most noble families, was contemplating leaving the King’s service. He aspired to lead a scholarly life, and his best options at that point involved moving out of the country. On February 10, 1576, King Frederick summoned Tycho Brahe to Ibstrup, just north of Copenhagen, to make an amazing proposition.
“I saw the little island of Hven, lying in the sound in the direction of Landskrona. No nobleman possesses it. As I recall, your uncle, Steen Bille, told me once…that you liked its location. It occurred to me that it would be very well suited to your investigations of astronomy, as well as chemistry, because it is high and has an isolated location….[I]f you want to settle down on the island, I would be glad to give it to you as a fief. There you can live peacefully and carry out the studies that interest you, without anyone disturbing you….What good would it do for you to return to Germany and be a stranger there, when you can accomplish every bit as much in your native land? We should see to it that Germans and people of other nations who want to know about such things should come here to see and learn that which they could hardly acquire knowledge of in any other place.”
And with those words, Uraniborg, the first truly modern research institution in the Western world, was established. Tycho Brahe took possession of Hven, a pear-shaped island of almost 3 square miles—approximately one third the area of the island of Manhattan—and inhabited by about 200 villagers, most of whom had been farmers since time immemorial. Within 5 years he transformed it into a world-renowned research facility that included multiple observatories, extensive chemistry labs, the world’s first scientific printing press, and incredibly precise (as well as incredibly large) astronomical observational equipment. Most importantly, Uraniborg established the standards for modern scientific inquiry. It was the crucible by which the Renaissance became the Scientific Revolution, as scholars, scientists, and artisans filtered onto the island and then back out to the rest of Europe, spreading the contagious zeal for scientific discovery they contracted at Uraniborg.
Hi, my name is Adam Fuller, and I’m a physics and chemistry instructor at Saint James School in Hagerstown, Maryland. Today we’re going to peer back over 400 years to explore what was arguably Tycho Brahe’s greatest achievement: the foundation of the modern research institution, its methodologies, and every-day practices. It was at Uraniborg, his home and research lab on the island of Hven, where Tycho Brahe pioneered new observational instrument construction methods for higher precision measurements, new mathematical techniques for data analysis, and painstakingly formed a model of the solar system that bridged the gap between the old, flawed geocentric model, centered on an immovable Earth, and the Copernican heliocentric model, where all planets orbited an immovable Sun.
Just north of the center of Hven, down the road from the only town on the island, Tycho Brahe began construction of Uraniborg in 1576. The name of the building, Uraniborg, means “The Castle of Urania,” and was dedicated to the Muse of Astronomy, Urania. Its cornerstone was laid on August 8. Construction, however, didn’t allow Tycho Brahe and his family to move into Uraniborg until four years later, in November 1580.
Tycho Brahe designed the building, the surrounding gardens, and the planned outer wall to have a very geometric design. The building had a square base, roughly 50 feet along each wall, with entryways exactly facing east and west, and was three stories tall. Semi-circular towers faced north and south. A third tower sat centered atop the third floor. The building’s exacting orientation with the cardinal directions would simplify observational measurements once the instruments were put into their permanent locations within Uraniborg.
The four corners of Uraniborg’s first floor were dividing into equally sized rooms. The southeast room was called the Winter Room, and it was here Tycho and his wife, Kirsten Jørgensdatter, slept. The southwest room contained the huge mural quadrant, a device used to measure the angles of stars. It had an almost six and a half foot radius. The other two rooms were spare bedrooms for visiting guests or esteemed staff. The kitchen was found in the north tower’s main floor. Underneath the kitchen, in the basement, was storage for food, wine, and ale.
The south tower housed Tycho’s museum. This wasn’t a museum in the contemporary sense. It was instead his and his assistants daily work area. The walls were adorned with portraits of the greatest natural philosophers and patrons as well as Tycho’s library of over three thousand volumes. It also contained several celestial globes, one of which was the largest, most accurate of the period. It had a six-foot diameter and sat in a five-foot tall base. Another instrument, a triquetrum made out of pine that once belonged to Copernicus, was also on display in this room, along with several clockwork celestial models. This museum represented the earthly space where humans toiled away while the floor above, the main observatory, was open to the heavens, and the massive basement below housed the chemistry laboratory, sealed deep within the earth.
The second floor was divided in half: one half was a single room set aside for visiting royalty, the other half split into two separate, equally-sized spare bedrooms. The third floor contained eight “loft apartments” for students and other lower assistants. Each room had multiple occupants.
The observatory and several balconies in Uraniborg’s towers contained the many observational instruments. These sextants, quadrants, and triquetrums were all immense and highly accurate measuring devices that Tycho had invented himself or had made modifications to that greatly improved their precision. Many of these were mounted to balconies along the towers, and it was quickly discovered that they were easily moved by the wind. So a year after Uraniborg was completed, a nearby underground facility called Stjerneborg, or “star castle,” was built to house many of these instruments. The roof of Stjerneborg was level with the ground, and it had many openings to allow for observations.
Like I mentioned before, just up the road from Uraniborg was Hven’s only village, Tuna. Tuna was inhabited by 50 households containing mostly farmers but also carpenters, smiths, cobblers, and a handful of other mercantile professionals. They were considered free-holding farmers because they owned their own farms and worked only for themselves. This was the traditional labor model of the time. When Tycho was given possession of Hven, he brought with him the more modern Danish labor model called Gutswirtschaft. With backing from the king, Tycho was able to implement Gutswirtschaft, forcing the villagers to work for him personally at the villagers’ cost one or two days a week. This work could be anything from helping construct Uraniborg to transporting goods back and forth from the mainland to the backbreaking work of clearing boulders from the fields. The workers were known as boon workers, and construction of Uraniborg and Stjerneborg depended exclusively on this type of labor.
The villagers, unaccustomed to being forced to labor at their own expense, appealed to the King for relief. The result was a royal charter that delimited exactly what the villagers were required to do for Tycho. They still had to perform boon work, but it also included provisions that forced Tycho to purchase goods from the villagers at full market price. Sadly, the charter also had provisions to strip the villagers of their farmland after the current generation passed away. The farmers’ land had been passed down for generations, and while it was understood who owned what on the island, back in Kronborg, the capital, there was no official documentation. Since documentation meant everything, Tycho and the King exploited this loophole—a loophole other nobility had been using with increasing frequency—to eventually strip the villagers’ future generations of their land.
Tycho viewed this as a necessary step towards the reorganization of the community’s economy and structure from one of agriculture to one of scientific research. In the process, Tycho relied on two things to help refocus the community and bring the best minds to Hven. First, he had extensive experience helping his uncle establish a glassworks and papermill at Herrevad Abbey in 1571 in what is now southern Sweden. There he’d help bring glassmakers and mill operators from all over Europe, construct a chemical laboratory, and made his world famous observations of the 1572 supernova. Second, his time traveling Europe in his twenties as a cultural emissary of King Frederick II put him in contact with many different artistic and scholarly communities all throughout Europe. He put these experiences and contacts to work in bringing the best European artists, engineers, scientists, and scholars to Uraniborg.
War in Spain and Holland was driving Flemish Protestants towards Denmark, and Tycho recruited the best of them to come to Hven. Artists and artisans from northern Italy came to construct instruments, marvelous moving water fountains, and intricate metal works throughout Uraniborg. He also recruited craftsmen from his old haunt at Herrevad Abbey. Finally, another major vein for talent and skill was the University of Copenhagen, 16 miles to the southwest of Hven. There he got many university students and graduates that served as competent lab or observatory assistants.
These lab assistants, fellow observers, mathematicians, and astronomers were allowed to pursue research projects of their own choosing, like modern research institutions today, but by 1583 Tycho Brahe had them mostly focus on calculating the distance between the Earth and Mars. If Tycho could do this, he would have evidence that would allow him to determine which system was more correct: the Copernican system where Mars comes close to Earth in its orbit versus the Ptolemaic system where its distance is held constant. Determining the diurnal parallax of Mars required exquisite precision that Tycho Brahe alone was capable of achieving with his new equipment. His emphasis on high-precision measurements, repeatable observations, and due diligence in data analysis was unheard of in his time. These things, however, are cornerstones of modern research.
Over time, individuals came and went through Uraniborg. As they spread back out into Europe, they took many of Tycho’s ideas and methods with them. One example is Paul Wittich, a Polish mathematician who invented an easy way to decompose trigonometric operations into simple arithmetic operations. He brought this method with him to Uraniborg, and he and Tycho enjoyed a brilliant collaboration. A few months later, Wittich returned to Poland, but his influence on Hven was felt for years. Tycho extensively adopted his mathematical methods, eventually teaching it to everyone who came through Uraniborg. Tycho’s thinking on how the solar system was modeled was also greatly influenced by Wittich’s own models. In return, Wittich introduced many of the original and modified instruments Tycho used to the rest of Europe.
King Frederick II died in 1588, but it wasn’t until 1597 when Tycho lost his funding from the new king, Christian IV. Tycho left Hven that year and eventually settled in Prague two years later. He died there in 1601. Uraniborg was destroyed shortly after Tycho died. Despite such an ignoble ending to such an important place, Tycho and Uraniborg’s influence and fame spread quickly throughout Europe. Even today, research institutions that fight diseases with tools like genetic therapy, develop new materials and technologies to stave off energy crises, and send rovers to other planets in the name of scientific inquiry owe Tycho Brahe and his innovations at Uraniborg a huge debt. Without his belief in the power of the human intellect to understand reality and his dedication to precise measurement and painstaking data analysis, the Renaissance may never have taken off to the heights that it did.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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