Gauss and the Royal Society: The reception of his ideas on magnetism in Britain (1832—1842)

Abstract

Karl Friedrich Gauss (1977—1855) was a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (from 1804) and a recipient of the Society’s Copley Medal in 1838. His magnanimous disposition to mathematics and physics in Britain is exemplified in his contacts and regular correspondence with Fellows of the Royal Society involved in terrestrial magnetic research. Gauss’s own paper on the intensity of the terrestrial magnetic force in absolute measure (1832) was of fundamental importance in the history of geophysics. Extensive correspondence with George Biddell Airy, J. F. W. Herschel, Edward Sabine and Humphrey Lloyd led to close collaboration and the adoption of his ideas on magnetism in Britain after 1835, which had important consequences especially for the further development of geomagnetic instruments. The magnetic observatories established in the British Isles and in the colonies (1839) and the British Antarctic Expedition (1839—1843) were equipped with instruments operating on Gaussian principles. In this paper the reception of Gauss’s ideas on magnetism in Britain in the years from 1832 to 1842 is examined and selections from his and other unpublished letters to British contemporaries are presented.