William Lassell was born in
Bolton, Lancashire, on 18 June 1799. He received his early education in Bolton and later attended
Rochdale Academy.. After the death of his father, William Lassell was apprenticed to a merchant in Liverpool from 1814 to 1821. He later made his fortune as a beer
brewer, which afforded him the means to pursue his passion for
astronomy. He built an observatory at his house "Starfield" in
West Derby, a suburb of
Liverpool. There he had a
aperture metal mirror reflector
telescope (aka the "two-foot" telescope), for which he pioneered the use of an
equatorial mount for easy tracking of objects as the Earth rotates. He ground and polished the mirror himself, using equipment he constructed. The observatory was later (1854) moved further out of Liverpool, to Bradstones. In 1846, Lassell discovered
Triton, the largest
moon of
Neptune, just 17 days after the discovery of Neptune itself by German astronomer
Johann Gottfried Galle, using his self-built instrument. In 1848, he independently co-discovered
Hyperion, a moon of
Saturn. In 1851 he discovered
Ariel and
Umbriel, two moons of
Uranus. In 1855, he built a telescope, which he installed in
Malta because of the observing conditions that were better than in often-overcast England. While in Malta his astronomical observing assistant was
Albert Marth. On his return to the UK after several years in Malta, he moved to
Maidenhead and operated his telescope in an observatory there. The 48-inch telescope was dismantled and was eventually scrapped. The 24-inch telescope was later moved to
Royal Observatory, Greenwich in the 1880s, but eventually dismantled. He was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1849 and won their
Royal Medal in 1858. Lassell was also a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). He was furthermore elected an honorary
Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (HonFRSE) and of the Society of Sciences of Upsala, and received an honorary
LL.D. degree from the
University of Cambridge in 1874. Lassell died in
Maidenhead in 1880 and is buried at St. Luke's Church. Upon his death, he left a fortune of £80,000 (roughly ). His telescope was presented to the
Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The crater
Lassell on the
Moon, a
crater on
Mars, the
asteroid 2636 Lassell and a
ring of Neptune are named in his honour. At the
University of Liverpool the William Lassell prize is awarded to the student with the highest grades graduating the B.Sc. program in Physics with Astronomy each year. In
Alfred Bester's novel
The Stars My Destination, an inhabited moon of Neptune is named Lassell. ==Obituaries==