Letter from Astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth (1849)

Manuscript letter to an unnamed recipient (probably William Mann) Cape Observatory. Four page autograph letter , from the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.

Charles Piazzi Smyth (3 January 1819 – 21 February 1900) was a British astronomer who was Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1846 to 1888; he is known for many innovations in astronomy and, along with his wife Jessica Duncan Piazzi Smyth, his pyramidological and metrological studies of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

At the age of 16, Charles Smyth started working as an assistant at the Cape of Good Hope observatory established by Thomas Maclear and William Herschel. He was a Fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh and Fellow of the Royal Society, from which he later resigned amidst the growing controversy regarding his pseudoscientific speculations about the pyramids in Giza

190mm x 160mm unfolded.

R4,500