74. Similar requests must have been made by others, but his final decision to publish his ideas seems to have been due to the arrival at Frauenburg in 1539 of the enthusiastic young astronomer generally known as Rheticus[1] Born in 1514, he studied astronomy under Schoner at Nürnberg, and was appointed in 1536 to one of the chairs of mathematics created by the influence of Melanchthon at Wittenberg, at that time the chief Protestant University.
Having heard, probably through the Commentariolus, of Coppernicus and his doctrines, he was so much interested in them that he decided to visit the great astronomer at Frauenburg. Coppernicus received him with extreme kindness, and the visit, which was originally intended to last a few days or weeks, extended over nearly two years. Rheticus set to work to study Coppernicus's manuscript, and wrote within a few weeks of his arrival an extremely interesting and valuable account of it, known as the First Narrative (Prima Narratio), in the form of an open letter to his old master Schoner, a letter which was printed in the following spring and was the first easily accessible account of the new doctrines.[2]
When Rheticus returned to Wittenberg, towards the end of 1541, he took with him a copy of a purely mathematical section of the great book, and had it printed as a textbook of the subject (Trigonometry); it had probably been already settled that he was to superintend the printing of the complete book itself. Coppernicus, who was now an old man and would naturally feel that his end was approaching, sent the manuscript to his friend Giese, Bishop of Kulm, to do what he pleased with. Giese sent it at once to Rheticus, who made arrangements for having it printed at Nürnberg. Unfortunately Rheticus was not able to see it all through the press, and the work had to be entrusted to Osiander, a Lutheran preacher interested in astronomy. Osiander
- ↑ His real name was Georg Joachim, that by which he is known having been made up by himself from the Latin name of the district where he was born (Rhaetia).
- ↑ The Commentariolus and the Prima Narratio give most readers a better idea of what Coppernicus did than his larger book, in which it is comparatively difficult to disentangle his leading ideas from the mass of calculations based on them.
