Page:Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography volume 3.djvu/263

 PROMINENT PERSONS

ill Europe he visited the observatory ot Lord Rosse and studied the construction and working of his celebrated colossal reflecting telescope. On his return home he constructed a telescope of this kind of fifteen and a half i:;ches aperture and with it took a photo- graph of the moon fifty inches in diameter — ■ the largest ever made. His success spurred him on, so that he became an adept in grind- ing, polishing and testing reflecting mirrors. An equatorial telescope was afterwards con- structed by him with an aperture of twenty- eight inches, for his observatory at Hast- ings-on-the-Hudson. The instrument was wholly the work of his own hands, and was at'signed mainly to photograph the spectra of the stars. After a long series of experi- ments, it was finished in 1872 and was pro- nounced by President Barnard as "probably the most difficult and costly experiment in •celestial chemistry ever made." He was the first to obtain a photograph of the fixed lines in the spectra of stars, and he continued the work until he had obtained impressions of the spectra of more than one hundred stars. In 1874 he was appointed superintendent of the photographic department of the commis- sion created by congress, for the purpose of observing the transit of Venus, and received from congress in recognition of his services, a gold medal bearing the inscription, "He adds lustre to ancestral glory." In 1876 he made a negative of the solar spectrum, and iii the following year announced, "the dis- covery of oxygen in the sun by photography, and a new theory of the solar spectrum," — the most brilliant discovery ever made by an American. He was a member of the principal scientific societies in America and Europe, and in 1882 was awarded the degree of LL. D. by both the University of New

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York and Wisconsin. Henry Draper died in New York City, November 20, 1882, leav- ing no children.

Bernard, George S., born at Culpeper Court House, Virginia, August 27, 1837, son of David Meade Bernard and Elizabeth Mildred Ashby, his wife. His father was for many years clerk of the corporation court of Petersburg. His colonial ancestry em- braces the Bernards and Ashbys and Stiths, v/ho were identified with Virginia from the latter part of the seventeenth century. Among them was Col. John Stith, ancestor of Rev. William Stith, the Virginia historian rnd president of the College of William and Mary, and Capt. John Ashby. Mr. Bernard's mother died when he was an infant, and he grew up under the care of his paternal grandmother. He attended the best schools of Petersburg until he was eighteen years old. In 1855, he entered the University of Virginia, where he remained for two ses- sions, graduating in three of its schools. He tlien taught for nine months in the family of United States Senator R. M. T. Hunter, I if Essex county, and while there, under Mr. Hunter's advice, and with access to his fine library, he made diligent study of his- tory. He studied law in the office of the late Judge William T. Joynes, was admitted to the bar in the city of Petersburg in 1859. Upon the breaking out of the civil war, in April, 1861, he entered the military service of the Confederate States ; and, with the exception of about five months, when in- capacitated by ill health, served faithfully until the surrender at Appomattox Court House in April, 1865. In the battle of Crampton Gap, Maryland, September 14, 1862, he was wounded, captured and made