94
6 Laboratory and Statistical Astronomy
The commissioner at that time, Carel Coenraad Geertsema (1843–1928),
already lived in Groningen, so he did not use the official residence. The building, at the address Oude Boteringestraat 44—the current offices of the University’s Governing Board; see Fig. 4.7 C—was only a temporary home for the
laboratory, and no reconstruction work was allowed to facilitate the measuring instruments and make them stable and free of vibrations, but still, it was
Kapteyn’s own laboratory. At the official convocation on January 16, 1896,
Kapteyn gave a public lecture in which he described the role of his ‘observatory without telescopes’ as complementary to that of the other observatories:
measuring and interpreting photographic data from elsewhere. Indeed, the fact
that Kapteyn never got his own observatory can be seen as a blessing in disguise.
Had Kapteyn been responsible for the operation of the Dutch photographic
telescope (which did not produce all that many prominent results in Leiden),
the discoveries that he was still to make and the very prominent international
role Kapteyn was to play would probably never have come about, or at best to
a much lesser extent.
When in 1904 the building had to be used again for its original purpose,
Kapteyn was housed in a building on the corner of the Oude Boteringestraat
and the Spilsluizen (see Fig. 4.7, D). Originally it was the home of the military
guard that defended the town; today it is home to the ‘Hotel Corps de Garde’.
This solution, too, was temporary. But in 1911 the Astronomical Laboratory
finally got its own permanent housing. Ironically, it was the same building in
which Dirk Huizinga had initially accommodated him. Huizinga had died in
1903 and was succeeded by Hartog Jacob Hamburger (1859–1924), whom
we will meet again later. Hamburger moved to a larger building and Kapteyn
was given the use of the vacated building (see Fig. 6.1) behind the Academy
Building.
The layout of the building is shown in Fig. 6.2. This map is taken from a
contribution by Kapteyn to a commemorative volume published on the occasion of the University’s three-hundredth anniversary in 1914. Kapteyn’s room
was number 10 on the first floor, his assistant was in room 9 and the library
was in room 15. The other rooms upstairs were for the (human) calculators.
The ground floor was for measuring equipment and the rooms there had a
separate foundation for stability. The rooms with the numbers 2 and 6 had
been for Kapteyn’s use at the time Huizinga had made them available for the
CPD. One of these rooms can be seen in the picture in Fig. 6.3, which comes
from the same publication from 1914. Later, in the 1930s, Kapteyn’s successor Pieter Johannes van Rhijn obtained a telescope on top of this building,
but it was removed at the end of the 1950s by his successor Adriaan Blaauw
(1914–2010). In the 1980s a part of the upper floor was damaged in a fire;
the university has (unfortunately) seized the opportunity to have the building
demolished.
6 Laboratory and Statistical Astronomy
The commissioner at that time, Carel Coenraad Geertsema (1843–1928),
already lived in Groningen, so he did not use the official residence. The building, at the address Oude Boteringestraat 44—the current offices of the University’s Governing Board; see Fig. 4.7 C—was only a temporary home for the
laboratory, and no reconstruction work was allowed to facilitate the measuring instruments and make them stable and free of vibrations, but still, it was
Kapteyn’s own laboratory. At the official convocation on January 16, 1896,
Kapteyn gave a public lecture in which he described the role of his ‘observatory without telescopes’ as complementary to that of the other observatories:
measuring and interpreting photographic data from elsewhere. Indeed, the fact
that Kapteyn never got his own observatory can be seen as a blessing in disguise.
Had Kapteyn been responsible for the operation of the Dutch photographic
telescope (which did not produce all that many prominent results in Leiden),
the discoveries that he was still to make and the very prominent international
role Kapteyn was to play would probably never have come about, or at best to
a much lesser extent.
When in 1904 the building had to be used again for its original purpose,
Kapteyn was housed in a building on the corner of the Oude Boteringestraat
and the Spilsluizen (see Fig. 4.7, D). Originally it was the home of the military
guard that defended the town; today it is home to the ‘Hotel Corps de Garde’.
This solution, too, was temporary. But in 1911 the Astronomical Laboratory
finally got its own permanent housing. Ironically, it was the same building in
which Dirk Huizinga had initially accommodated him. Huizinga had died in
1903 and was succeeded by Hartog Jacob Hamburger (1859–1924), whom
we will meet again later. Hamburger moved to a larger building and Kapteyn
was given the use of the vacated building (see Fig. 6.1) behind the Academy
Building.
The layout of the building is shown in Fig. 6.2. This map is taken from a
contribution by Kapteyn to a commemorative volume published on the occasion of the University’s three-hundredth anniversary in 1914. Kapteyn’s room
was number 10 on the first floor, his assistant was in room 9 and the library
was in room 15. The other rooms upstairs were for the (human) calculators.
The ground floor was for measuring equipment and the rooms there had a
separate foundation for stability. The rooms with the numbers 2 and 6 had
been for Kapteyn’s use at the time Huizinga had made them available for the
CPD. One of these rooms can be seen in the picture in Fig. 6.3, which comes
from the same publication from 1914. Later, in the 1930s, Kapteyn’s successor Pieter Johannes van Rhijn obtained a telescope on top of this building,
but it was removed at the end of the 1950s by his successor Adriaan Blaauw
(1914–2010). In the 1980s a part of the upper floor was damaged in a fire;
the university has (unfortunately) seized the opportunity to have the building
demolished.