JHA iii (1972), 136-138

NOTE

THE ORIGI;,\/AL FORMULATION OF THE TITIUS-BODE LAW

Concerning the Titius-Bode Law of planetary distances, the better histories, source-
books and textbooks of astronomy state that it was first proposed in 1772 by Johann
Daniel Titius (1729-1796), professor of mathematics in Wittenberg, in his translation
into German of Charles Bonnet's Contemplation de la natureF On a very few occasions,
the year 1766 is given as the date of Titius's discovery, though with no documentatlon.s
When the first discussion of the history of the law appeared in 1803 in the Annalen der
Physik, it was argued there that according to Titius this law "was nothing new, as
Wolff already 40 years earlier had similar ideas","
In his now rather rare book, Verniinftige Gedanken von den Absichten der natiir-
lichen Dinge, which went through five editions between 1724 and 1752, Christian Wolff
made lengthy efforts to show the orderly and purposeful arrangement of the whole and
of the parts of nature. The distances of planets were a case in point, which Wolff
described in the following words:
The planets that move around the Sun are located very far from one another. If
one divides the distance of the Earth from the Sun into 10 parts, the distance of
Mercury takes 4 of it up, that of Venus 7, that of Mars 15, that of Jupiter 52, that
of Saturn 95 (~ 486 Astron.). If one accordingly imagines that the centres of all
planets are in one line, which is drawn from the centre of the Sun to the centre of
Saturn, and the whole line is divided into 95 parts, then at the end of the fourth part
is Mercury, at the end of the seventh part is Venus, at the end of the tenth is the
Earth, at the end of the fifteenth is Mars, at the end of the fifty-second is Jupiter,
and finally at the end of the ninety-fifth is Saturn. Thus Mercury and Venus are
separated by 3 parts, Venus and the Earth also by 3, the Earth and Mars by 5,
Mars and Jupiter by 37, Jupiter and Saturn by 43 parts.'
All this proved for Wolff that the Creator saw to it that the planets should not disturb
one another either by their motion or by casting their shadows on one another.
Clearly what Wolff stated was not a law but he closely led up to one by his technique
of rounding off the true planetary distances. These distances, as actually computed by
astronomers before the observation of the transit of Venus in 1772, were not given by
Wolff either in his Verniinftige Gedanken or in the section on astronomy in the Third
Part of his Anfangs-Grunde aller mathematischen Wissenschaften to which he referred.!
Interestingly enough, the sequence 4, 7, 10, 15, 52, 95 was also given in Lalande's
Astronomle as a helpful device for remembering the approximate distances of the
planets.s Lalande's work could also serve in the 17605 as a most authoritative source.
for the precise values of the mean distances of the planets. In fact, he gave a compar-
ative tabulation of the values as computed by Kepler, Streete, Halley and himself,
taking the Earth-Sun distance as 100,000. Lalande's own data were stated as follows:
38709,88; 72333,24; 100000; 152369,27; 520097,91; 953936,83. 7 Clearly, the rounding
off could appear justified, and for it Lalande hardly needed encouragement from Wolff
or from any possible predecessor of Wolff.
In 1764, there appeared Charles Bonnet's Contemplation de la nature. 8 There the
famed naturalist sought to prove the existence of an order and purposefulness inscribed
into nature by its Creator. In the first part dealing with the universe as a whole,
Bonnet mentioned that the telescope increased the known number of planets and
satellites. He held out the hope that the "satellite of Venus vaguely sighted in the last
136
 The Titius-Bode Law 137
century, and seen again not long ago, augurs well for new conquest for astronomy't.t
The next sentence of Bonnet began a new paragraph and read as follows: "Not only
was it reserved for modern astronomy to enrich our sky with new planets, it was also
given to it to roll back the frontiers of our vortex [planetary system)." Then followed a
short discussion of comets.
In the German translation of 1766, the sequence of the two sentences quoted above
was interrupted by a paragraph of 22 lines. Since it has not previously appeared in
English, it deserves to be reproduced here in entirety:
Take notice of the distances of the planets from one another, and recognize that
almost all are separated from one another in a proportion which matches their
bodily magnitudes. Divide the distance from the Sun to Saturn into 100 parts;
then Mercury is separated by 4 such parts from the Sun, Venus by 4+3=7 such
parts, the Earth by 4+6=10, Mars by 4+12=16. But notice that from Mars to
Jupiter there comes a deviation from this so-exact progression. From Mars there
follows a space of 4+24=28 such parts, but so far no planet or satellite was
sighted there. But should the Lord Architect have left that space empty? Not at
all. Let us therefore assume that this space without doubt belongs to the still-
undiscovered satellites of Mars; let us also add that perhaps Jupiter still has around
itself some smaller ones which have not been sighted yet by any telescope. Next
to this for us still-unexplored space there rises Jupiter's sphere of influence at
4+48=52 parts; and that of Saturn at 4+96= 100 parts. What a wonderful
relation po
The correlation as proposed in the passage was wonderful at first sight, but also had
some grave shortcomings. Unquestionably, there was something wonderful in the
recognition by Titius of a progression in a sequence which he obtained by changing the
values of Wolff only for Mars and Saturn by one and five units respectively.
There was no effort on Titius's part to justify the reference to the bodily magnitudes of
the planets. Whether he meant by "korperliche Grossen" their masses or their sizes,
the analogy clearly broke down in the case of Mars and Saturn, to say nothing of the
hypothetical satellites of Mars: they could hardly be more massive or bigger than the
planet itself.
None of these details prevented Johann Elert Bode (1747-1826), the rising star of
German astronomy, from accepting wholeheartedly the foregoing speculation about
planetary distances. It certainly strengthened his belief in the existence of a planet
between Mars and Jupiter. After encountering that speculation early in 1772 in the
second edition of the translation of Bonnet's work, he hastened to add its substance in
a footnote to the second edition of his own Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten
Himmels which was ready for press: l l
This latter point [the existence of a planet between Mars and Jupiter] seems in
particular to follow from the astonishing relation which the known six planets
observe in their distances from the Sun. Let the distance from the Sun to Saturn
be taken as 100, then Mercury is separated by 4 such parts from the Sun. Venus
is 4+3=7. The Earth, 4+6=10. Mars, 4+12=16. Now comes a gap in this
so-orderly progression. After Mars there follows a space of 4+24=28 parts, in
which no planet has yet been seen. Can one believe that the Founder of the
universe had left this space empty? Certainly not. From here we come to the
distance of Jupiter by 4+48=52 parts, and finally to that of Saturn by 4+96= 100
parts.
To the very words of this footnote Bode added only one phrase in the third edition
(1777) which was followed by an "unaltered" fourth edition in 1778. The phrase read
138 Journal for the History of Astronomy
as follows: "That this chief planet [Hauptplanet] between Mars and Jupiter must
complete its revolution around the Sun in 4! years can be computed from a law dis-
covered by Kepler, namely that the squares of the orbital periods of two planets are
to one another as are the cubes of their distances from the Sun."12 It was only in 1784
that Bode disclosed that the contents of that footnote (at least in its original form) were
due to Titius. Bode did this in a book on the newly discovered planet Uranus, the
distance of which fitted very closely into the progression formulated by Titius.P By
applying the law to Uranus, Bode was original; Titius once more mishandled matters
as, a year earlier, he sent to press the fourth edition of his translation of Bonnet. By
then the distance of Uranus, which had been discovered in 1781, was well-enoughknown
to be easily exploited by Titius in support of the law he formulated. Instead he added
the following lines to his famous paragraph which, from the second edition on, he had
relegated into a footnote and designated with the letter T. Now he wrote: "This
progression, and its consideration, which Herr Bonnet believes to have been first
noticed by Herr Lambert, was already submitted more than forty years ago by Herr
von Wolff in his Deutsche Physik [Verniin[fige Gedanken]."l4 Even if Titius had wanted
to mislead historians of the law, he could not have done it more effectively.
The next twenty years saw several papers published on the law. They were motiv-
ated by a desire to devise for it a more exact formulation, and by the hopes of
sighting the missing planet between Mars and Jupiter. The law was of course much
discussed in the years immediately following the discovery in 1801 of the first asteroid
between Mars and Jupiter. But all this represents a second phase of the history of the
Titius-Bode Law, rich in surprising features, which I plan to present in detail in a
longer paper.
Seton Hall University STANLEY L. JAKI

REFERENCES
I. For a representative cross-section of such a view, see A. Pannekoek, A history of astronomy
(London, 1961), 352; E. Zinner, Astronomie : Geschichte ihrer Probleme (Munich, 1951),
214-216; H. Shapley and H. E. Howarth (eds), A source book in astronomy (New York, 1929),
180-181; A. Clerke, A popular history of astronomy during the nineteenth century (3d ed.,
London, 1893), 87; J. F. W. Herschel, Outlines of astronomy (11th ed., London 1871), 334;
and F. Arago, Astronomie populalre (Paris. 1857), iv, 142-143.
2. For instance F. L. Whipple and G. P. Kuiper in their article "Planet" in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica (1964), xvii, 1000, and R. Wolf, Handbuch der Astronomle, ihrer Geschichte und
Litteratur (Zurich, 1892), ii, 455.
3. xv, 169-193. Its author was Dr [J. F.] Benzenberg. For quotation, see p. 170.
4. The five editions appeared in 1724, 1726, 1732, 1741 and 1752. The editions of 1741 and 1752
are wholly identical with that of 1726, printed in Frankfurt and Leipzig. For quotation, see
p, 140 of that edition.
S. (Halle, 1710), 393.
6. See the 2d edition (Paris, 1771), ii, 18.
7. ibid., 17.
8. Amsterdam, 2 vols.
9. Ibid., I, 7.
10. Betrachtung fiber die Natur vom Herrn Karl Bonnet (Johann Friedrich Junius, Leipzig, 1766).
For quotation, 'lee pp, 7-8. The translator, Titius, was identified only at the end of the
dedicatory epistle, which gave no hint of additions to the original.
11. (Hamburg, 1772),461-462. Bode claimed that his source was the second edition of Titius's
translation, but it is more likely that he used the first, as a copy of the second edition of his
Anleitung reached Lambert in Berlin in January 1772.
12. J. E. Bode, Anleitung zur Kenntnlss des gestlrnten Himmels (4th ed., Berlin, 1778), 635.
13. Von dem neu entdeckten Planeten (Berlin, 1784),51. The figure for Uranus was 4+ 192= 196.
14. (Leipzig, 1783), 14, note.