On May 28, 1783, President of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks penned a letter to his friend and frequent correspondent Benjamin Franklin, giving him an update on the latest scientific innovations of the day. Franklin, then busy negotiating the Treaty of Paris that marked the end of the Revolutionary War, was a little too busy to keep up with the literature. Banks had much to tell Franklin, particularly about the sky. The Solar System, or at least the human perception of it, had changed forever.
“You will find I hope that we have not been idle a new Planet…mark[s] the progress of Active astronomy.” The new planet Banks described was one now commonly called Uranus, discovered in March 1781 by the British astronomer William Herschel. But that name was by no means certain in 1783.[1] Ten years later, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend Andrew Ellicot about Ellicot’s new almanac, lamenting that “you [have] adopted the name of Georgium sidus, which no nation but the English took up, while justice and all other nations gave it that of Herschel?” Jefferson was not alone in seeing the name as politically charged. Herschel, eager to curry favor with George III, a monarch who would indeed become his family’s patron, had named the new planet not for a Roman god, not for himself, but for his king.[2]
Uranus lacks the size of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, or the distinction of Neptune as the outermost planet. In today’s popular culture, the seventh planet is more likely to be a subject of puerile jokes than fascination. But in the early 1780s and the decades that followed, the fight for the identity of the seventh planet was a key moment of Enlightenment culture war, with British, French, Russian and American astronomers looking to shape the way the skies would be remembered forever. American astronomy was in its early infancy in the Revolutionary era and Early Republic, David Rittenhouse having completed the first American observatory in only in the 1760s. But Americans were nonetheless invested in the new science and had much to say during the fight to name the seventh planet. Ultimately, the preferred American name for the new planet – Herschel – did not survive, but neither did the name of George III.[3]