As part of Donna Russo Morin week at HFBRT I have written an article on the character from THE SECRET OF THE GLASS who fascinated me the most: Galileo Galilei. One of the aspects of reading historical fiction I enjoy most is learning about real people, and I almost always end up researching the characters to separate fact from fiction.
Galileo was born in Pisa, the eldest of six children. His father was a professional lute player with published books on the subject of music under his belt. He was also an amateur mathematician, however he encouraged Galileo to pursue studies in the medical field. But, he found he had no aptitude for it and soon left school. He continued his studies in math via a tutor, built small machines and spent much time reading (specifically Ovid and Virgil). A few years later he managed to secure a position at the university at Pisa as a professor of mathematics, astronomy and poetry. The other teachers despised him for his contempt of their Aristotelian beliefs, which included dressing in togas and when his contract expired he lost his position. His next appointment was at the University of Padua near the very liberal and freethinking city of Venice.
Galileo never married, but had an extended liaison with a woman named Marina Gamba, who bore him 2 daughters and a son and later married. I was unable to find any information as to why he never married her, though it could have been either opposition from his father or the fact that he didn’t have the funds to support a proper family. As it was, his daughters went to convents and his son was eventually legitimized and attended university. It was his eldest daughter, Virginia, however, who was his favorite and became his confidante. The book Galileo’s Daughter is a biography on his life based on more than 100 translated letters from his ‘most affectionate daughter, Suor Maria Celeste’.
Supporting his siblings (after his father’s death in 1601), mistress and children was not easy for a mere professor, and Galileo found he needed to supplement his income. He heard about the instrument called a spyglass and decided to improve upon it and then market it. Whether it was truly his intent to trick the Venetian aristocrats into believing the entire invention was his idea is unclear, but there is a play that says as much. Regardless, his salary was doubled and he was given a permanent position at Padua. Galileo, however, had other uses in mind for his device. While the Venetians used it to upgrade their sea defenses, he pointed it to the night sky.

His major discovery, of course, was that the Copernican theory–that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe–is correct, despite the Catholic Church’s vehement argument otherwise. He also found the moon was not smooth, the sun has ’spots’, many of the planets have their own moons and Saturn has rings. At first he was quite vocal about his findings, but soon found the church officials knocking at his door and threatening him with heresy charges. In 1616 he was brought before the Papal court and reprimanded.

The next few years he spent on other projects, steering clear of the ‘heretical’ or, at least, keeping his experiments private. In 1623 a more open-minded cardinal became Pope–Urban VIII– and he was well acquainted with Galileo and agreed with at least some of his arguments. Galileo had no less than 6 audiences with the Pope and spent the next 4 years writing his book Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems. In it Galileo uses a derogatory character to voice the views of the church, and this angered the Pope. Thus, an investigation was held and ultimately Galileo was banned from publishing his works and put on house arrest for the remainder of his life.

Galileo continued to write and despite the ban he published Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences in Holland, outside the Papal jurisdiction. Sadly he spent the last 8 years of his life unable to view the glorious universe, as he lost his sight. His daughter, Maria Celeste, took care of him to the end.
This brief article does not cover much of Galileo Galilei’s discoveries and contributions to science. He fashioned a version of the compass, thermometer and an inclined plane. He discoursed on inertia, the speed of light and relativity. He famously dropped two objects of differing weights from the leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that they would fall at the same rate.
Unfortunately I couldn’t sift through all of the information at my disposal, but I hope I have enlightened and perhaps ignited an interest in this ‘usually dull’ scientist and astronomer.
Sources:
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris
Don’t Know Much about the Universe by Kenneth C. Davis
Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel
The Handy Space Answer Book by Phillis Engelbert and Diane L. Lupuis
GIVEAWAY: 1 paperback copy of GALILEO’S DAUGHTER
“Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of Galileo’s daughter, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has written a biography unlike any other of the man Albert Einstein called “the father of modern physics- indeed of modern science altogether.” Galileo’s Daughter also presents a stunning portrait of a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as “a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me.”
The son of a musician, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) tried at first to enter a monastery before engaging the skills that made him the foremost scientist of his day. Though he never left Italy, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. Most sensationally, his telescopes allowed him to reveal a new reality in the heavens and to reinforce the astounding argument that the Earth moves around the Sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend his last years under house arrest.
Of Galileo’s three illegitimate children, the eldest best mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensibility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante. Born Virginia in 1600, she was thirteen when Galileo placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her loving support, which Galileo repaid in kind, proved to be her father’s greatest source of strength throughout his most productive and tumultuous years. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from their original Italian and masterfully woven into the narrative, graces her father’s life now as it did then.
Galileo’s Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo’s grand public life and Maria Celeste’s sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity’s perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. In that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years’ War tipped fortunes across Europe, one man sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope.
With all the human drama and scientific adventure that distinguished Dava Sobel’s previous book Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter is an unforgettable story.”
Open to everyone. Ends March 1, 2010.