Everything about Henry Kater totally explained
Henry Kater (
April 16,
1777 –
April 26,
1835),
English physicist of
German descent, was born at
Bristol.
At first he purposed to study
law; but this he abandoned on his father's death in 1794, and entered the army, obtaining a commission in the 12th regiment of foot, then stationed in
India, where he rendered valuable assistance to
William Lambton in the
Great Trigonometric Survey. Failing health obliged him to return to England; and in 1808, being then a lieutenant, he entered on a distinguished student career in the senior department of the
Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Shortly after he was promoted to the rank of captain. In
1814 he retired on half-pay, and devoted the remainder of his life to scientific research.
His first important contribution to scientific knowledge was the comparison of the merits of the
Cassegrainian and
Gregorian telescopes, determining the latter to be an inferior design.
His most valuable work was the invention of
Kater's pendulum, enabling the strength of gravity to be determined, first at
London and subsequently at various stations throughout the country.
As the inventor of the floating
collimator, Kater rendered a great service to practical
astronomy (
Phil. Trans.,
1825,
1828). He also published memoirs (Phil. Trans., 1821, 1831) on British
standards of length and mass; and in 1832 he published an account of his labours in verifying the Russian standards of length. For his services to
Russia in this respect he received in
1814 the decoration of the
order of St. Anne; and the same year he was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society.
He won the
Copley Medal in 1817 and the
Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1831.
His attention was also turned to the subject of
compass needles, his Bakerian lecture "On the Best Kind of Steel and Form for a Compass Needle" (Phil. Trans., 1821) containing the results of many experiments. The treatise on "Mechanics" in
Lardner's
Cyclopaedia was partly written by him; and his interest in more purely astronomical questions was evidenced by two communications to the Astronomical Society's
Memoirs for 1831–
1833 — the one on an observation of
Saturn's outer ring, the other on a method of determining
longitude by means of
lunar eclipses.
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