Mary, Queen of Science

Although widely used today, the term ‘scientist’ was coined relatively recently. with academic experts on ‘the way the world works’ initially being referred to as ‘natural philosophers’ or ‘cultivators of science’. The multidisciplinary academic (and lover of neologisms), William Whewell, coined the word ‘scientist’ in 1833 and first printed it in his review of Mary Somerville’s book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in 1834. 

Conceived as a more humble term to differentiate from the higher status of ‘philosophers,’ Whewell’s coinage deliberately echoed lowly positions like ‘journalist’ or ‘tobacconist.’ It was even seen as insulting at the time. Here’s how Somerville’s extraordinary work helped to own and elevate the position of ‘scientist’ to its current place of prestige. 

Mary Somerville was born in Jedburgh, in the Scottish Borders, in 1780. Her father was in the navy and her mother helped support the family by farming vegetables and keeping cows. Somerville spent her days completing her chores and roaming the gardens until her father sent her to an expensive boarding school in Musselburgh for a year when she was 10 to learn how to write and keep accounts.

She managed to teach herself some Latin and secretly confessed this to her uncle, author Thomas Somerville, who encouraged her with stories of elegant women scholars in ancient history. At 13, she continued to develop her writing at school in Edinburgh where she first heard about the fundamentals of arithmetic – a subject that would define the course of her future.

She began corresponding with the mathematics professor, William Wallace, who encouraged her to study the writings of the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace’s work summarised the theory of gravity and built on the mathematical results that had been developed since Newton’s Principia. Others began to take notice of her talent in 1811, when she won a silver medal for solving a diophantine problem and Laplace himself declared that Somerville was the only woman who could understand his work!

In 1826 Somerville published her first paper, "The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar spectrum", in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Her first book The Mechanism of the Heavens was published in 1831, a translation of Laplace's Mécanique Céleste. Her work was essentially a condensed version of Laplace’s exhaustive five-book series that summed up the current state of gravitational mathematics. Somerville succeeded in making the complex theories behind the working of the solar system accessible and she became instantly famous for it. The book remained the set textbook for undergraduates at the University of Cambridge until the 1880s.

Despite being largely self-taught, Somerville succeeded in making a name for herself in a world largely dominated by men. Her string of achievements led John Stuart Mill to ask Somerville to be the first person to add her name to the (unsuccessful) petition for women’s suffrage that he presented to parliament in 1868. After her death in 1872, Somerville College, which welcomed women when they were barred from attending Oxford University, was named after her because of her strong support for women's education.

In her obituary in The Morning Post Somerville was declared the “Queen of Science” – not a bad upgrade from ‘scientist’.