Ozzy Osbourne is “That Thing at the Door”

June 16, 2026June 16, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“There’s this thing at the door asking for you?” the brother of Terence Michael Joseph “Geezer” Butler informed him.

“What do you mean this thing?” Geezer asked.

“You’ll see.”

Geezer didn’t get the joke, until he answered the door, and he saw a rain-drenched man with no hair on his head standing on his family’s doorstop. The man at the door had no shoes or socks on his feet, and he was wearing a gown that Geezer assumed was a pair of overalls that the man’s dad probably wore at a factory job. The man also had a chimney brush over his shoulder and a single sneaker on a dog leash. “I’m Ozzy,” the man at the door said. Geezer would later say he thought the man “was not the full shilling. (AKA off his rocker/crazy)” Yet he invited him in anyway — and changed rock history forever.

We can only guess how this interaction proceeded from there, as the two men tried to feel each other out, but Geezer was intrigued enough to invite this disheveled man into his rock band Rare Breed. The thing standing at Geezer’s door posted an ad in the Birmingham musical instruments store that read “Ozzy Zig Needs a Gig.” Geezer saw the ad, went to Ozzy’s house, Ozzy wasn’t home, so Geezer left his home address — and John “Ozzy Zig” Osbourne, or as we now know him Ozzy Osbourne, showed up later as that thing at Geezer’s door.

Geezer, like Ozzy, grew up in a low income, working class neighborhood, and they both had six siblings, but the Butlers did not experience the level of poverty the Osbourne’s had. Those of us who grew up in similar neighborhoods know that we don’t meet many who are lower on the socioeconomic totem pole, and when we did, we looked down on them. Geezer and the Butlers were poor, but Ozzy grew up without basic comforts like indoor plumbing, and he and his siblings often used coats for bedding. As Geezer’s brother alluded, the Butlers probably viewed Ozzy as a lower life form. His appearance suggested he couldn’t even afford a decent pair of shoes.

When Geezer met Ozzy, he had a predicament. He had always been an avid reader with a strong background in English literature, especially Shakespeare, so writing song lyrics came easily for him, but he was not a strong, confident singer. He needed someone to deliver his lyrics to an audience. He had a message, in other words, but he needed a messenger to sell it properly. When Geezer imagined his messenger, he probably dreamt up a Robert Plant, Rod Stewart rock-god type who could seduce listeners into falling in love with Geezer’s lyrics. Every songwriter who can’t sing, dreams up bullet points for the singer of their songs, and we have to imagine that an overwhelming majority of them would’ve rejected “that thing at the door” on appearance alone. Is that what intrigued Geezer? As we now know, Geezer was not what we call a conventional songwriter, so Geezer may have thought that this thing at the door might have been able to attract an audience in the manner the lobster boy and the bearded lady attract an audience to the county fair?

We could say that Geezer was desperate, but by historical accounts, Geezer only had one other lead singer prior to Ozzy, and that man quit Rare Breed once he heard how bad the band was. So, Geezer didn’t exactly exhaust all possibilities before meeting Ozzy. Geezer dresses this decision up by saying he was blown away by Ozzy’s audition, and that might be a fact, but it’s more likely that Geezer didn’t think he’d find a better lead singer in Birmingham, and his aspirations likely didn’t extend beyond the city at the time. He probably enjoyed seeing Ozzy’s unfiltered confidence and he suspected that Ozzy’s economic limitations and resultant gratitude meant that Ozzy would show up and help Geezer build and grow, regardless how bad the rest of the band was. Geezer’s suggestion that he could see Ozzy’s talent from the very beginning not only compliments his lifelong friend, but it suggests Geezer was gifted at spotting talent. My guess is Geezer wasn’t lying, but he’s rewritten this memory in his mind so thoroughly that this is how he genuinely remembers it. We can speculate further, but at the end of that debate we’d be forced to acknowledge that Geezer obviously made the right choice, as the two of them joined forces to create something no one else tried before, and it worked so well that we still talk about them almost sixty years later.

Within two years of meeting the “thing at the door”, Geezer and Ozzy would be joined by two members of a band called Mythology, a guitarist missing the tips of his middle and ring fingers, named Tony Iommi, and an anatomically complete and relatively well groomed drummer named Bill Ward. They would change the band name from Rare Breed to Polka Tulk Blues Band, Polka Tulk, then Earth, and then Black Sabbath.

In case you don’t know the four of them would go on to sell roughly 60–68 million albums (including pure sales, streams, etc.) when they were all in Black Sabbath together. The music of Black Sabbath would also influence the creation of heavy metal and later the heavy, sludge side of the Seattle sound sometimes called grunge. They’ve also been called one of the influential rock bands of all time, and it all started with Geezer meeting “this thing” at the door.

***

“So, this Geezer Butler fella got lucky,” you might say. “He had one of the most influential front men in rock music history just show up at his door one day. That’s luck.” It’s true, undeniably true, that luck and/or chance played a role, but how often do these chance meetings happen in music? We could also say that it wasn’t exactly a chance meeting, as Ozzy posted an ad, and they both met before as fanatical fans of The Beatles. Still, it can be frustrating to learn that luck, and right place/right time elements play a role in defining history, but it happens. The counterpoint to this argument is that we have to be good to get lucky.

They, Ozzy and Geezer, also got lucky that their band, Rare Breed, broke up when it did, because another band named Mythology broke up at around the same time. The guitarist and the drummer, of that band, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, were looking for another band to join at the same time that Ozzy and Geezer were looking for a guitarist and a drummer. (Geezer switched to bass when he saw how talented Iommi was.) Ozzy and Geezer just happened to find a guitarist who is now considered a master of riff‑craft, creating heavy, memorable guitar lines that became the blueprint for metal, and they happened to land a drummer who was a jazz‑trained, gig‑tested drummer whose unique style became a core part of the band’s identity.

For all of the talent that existed in Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler was the conceptual architect and the primary lyricist behind the dark themes that defined early heavy metal. His style was heavy and melodic at the same time, and he was considered unusually expressive for the era. His bass lines often acted as a second lead instrument, weaving around Tony Iommi’s riffs rather than simply following them. Geezer also developed a rhythmic partnership with drummer Bill Ward to create the distinctive “swing” that underpinned many of the early Sabbath classics.

As Geezer described the relationship that would develop between he and Ozzy, Ozzy created vocal melodies during the band’s jam‑based writing sessions, and Geezer would write the lyrics to those vocal melodies. So, they used their talents, gifts, and creative energy to land in the right place and right time of music history.

If we examine Black Sabbath on an historical timeline, we could also say they got lucky to land in a right time/right place hole in time where no one had ever tried to make gloomy and depressing, as opposed to sad, music before. Yet, when we read the quotes from the members, they didn’t seek out a different form of music to carve out their own niche in the industry, and they didn’t plan on being pioneers, it was just who they were, where they came from, and what they knew. (All of the members of Black Sabbath grew up in the aftermath of WWII, and the war-torn, devastation influenced the gloomy themes of their sound and music that just happened to appeal to a large contingent in war-torn Brits of that era.)

In the era of upbeat harmonies, sunny melodies, and that breezy optimism sunshine pop, sunny melodies, and harmony‑rich 60s pop of The Beach Boys, The Monkees, and The Mamas & The Papas, Black Sabbath was viewed as a dumb idea by the fourteen labels who rejected them. The market is so stratified that we usually accept the idea that there’s no such thing as a dumb idea, but those labels all agreed that the gloomy, bleak, slow, and depressing music of Black Sabbath was a stretch too far. The basic sales pitch behind Geezer Butler’s presentation was that in a world that wants to listen to music that makes them smile, we have created a form of music that is so depressing we might lose a percentage of our fanbase to manic depression. In a world of feel-good music, we’ve created feel-bad. So, whaddya think?

For all of the luck, the right time/right place elements, and everything else that defined them, Black Sabbath shouldn’t have worked, not to the degree that some relatively anonymous writer would be writing about them nearly sixty years later. Even a qualified, quality writer would have trouble properly capturing how unlikely their success was. These were four kids who grew up in various levels of poverty who believed that the pinnacle of success would involve them playing in local pubs that would hopefully pay them enough for them to be able to afford a decent meal and a couple of beers to follow. These guys had no formal musical training, absolutely no industry connections, and they decided to play a style of music that didn’t exist yet — slow, heavy, ominous, and socially bleak and depressing.

We can imagine that their immediate success shocked the 14 major labels who rejected Black Sabbath before their first album was recorded and everyone else who worked with Sabbath before their first album was completed, but no one more surprised than the four members of the group. They knew they worked well together, and they gelled to create the type of sound they were seeking, but the idea that it clicked and/or appealed to listeners to the point that it reached #8 on 13 on the UK Albums Chart and #23 on the US Billboard Top LPs shortly after its US release stunned the four fellas. They didn’t really have to “pay their dues” in a relative sense. They compiled a selection of five songs for their first album Black Sabbath, recorded them in one 12-hour session, and they released it. They were just happy that a label signed them, and they were actually able to record an album. That, to that point, was beyond their expectations. The idea that it would chart with no radio play, combined with the critics dismissing it as a crude, simplistic, or derivative effort was beyond their comprehension. Another source notes that Black Sabbath remained on the charts for over a year and sold one million copies in its first run (US + UK combined).

All four members have said, in various ways, that they couldn’t believe it when some people initially started treating them like a real band, then when their album charted it scared them a little, because they didn’t know what to do with that. When they were asked to tour the United States of America, it wasn’t mild surprise, as none of them knew enough to know logical progressions of this sort. They were genuinely stunned. Ozzy described his genuine reaction to this insanity by saying he was constantly waiting for someone to tap him on the shoulder and say “There’s been a mistake, a huge mistake.” Tony Iommi said, “We never thought it would go anywhere. Our goal was to avoid factory work, and we thought we could do so with a few gigs here and there.” Ozzy said that their goal was to eventually get in pubs, so that the pubs would pay them enough to drink their beer. “We never thought we’d get out of Birmingham,” Ozzy added. Bill Ward said, “We didn’t know what we were doing — and suddenly it worked.” Geezer said, “We were just four poor kids. We didn’t think it would last.” All four members were from lower class to absolute poverty, as Geezer said, and that probably led to the level of desperation necessary to make whatever they did work.

Anyone who has ever read anything about the recording industry of this era, knows how this chapter of the Black Sabbath saga ends. As poor and uneducated as the four fellas who comprised this band were, in general, they probably knew less about the recording industry, recording industry contracts, and the manner in which their management team should be handling their financial matters. They wanted to focus on creating the music and let management take care of the financial matters, and their creations 4.9 million copies of the first album, and the second album, Paranoid, sold between 10-12 million copies, by global sales estimates, they were almost as broke as they were before they recorded their first album. They signed a horrible contract, because they were so elated that someone wanted them to sign them that they probably thought if they haggled over the details of the contract, the management team might not sign them.

“We were one of the biggest bands in the world,” Geezer said, “and we were penniless.” One example cited stated that Black Sabbath were paid $250,000 to play at a 1974 California Jam festival, and each member ended up receiving $1,000. As stated, management teams and recording labels ripped off most of the artists of the era, including the Rolling Stones and The Beatles, but music historians suggest that Black Sabbath’s management disputes were some of the ugliest and most damaging in rock history. When the fog cleared, the members discovered that not only were they almost as broke as they were when they started, but their cars, homes, and other personal possessions weren’t theirs. In the most crushing blow, they then discovered that their music, that which they worked their tails off to create, hone, and perfect wasn’t even theirs. After years of litigation and lawsuits, it is suspected that the four members may have recovered 10-20% of the money their manager stole.

Black Sabbath worked for a whole host of reasons, of course, but they were dumb enough and desperate enough to make it work on a certain level. They had a Beatles-obsessed lead singer, who learned the art of melody from his beloved mop tops, a Shakespeare-obsessed lyricist, a guitarist who was missing the most important finger tips required to play guitar, and a jazz drummer who helped develop a new form of musical expression. Their eventual success suggest that some ideas are such a load of crap that if it’s gathered together, it could be used as fertilizer. The four members didn’t know enough about the system to know how to succeed in it, and they got lucky. The fact that they got so lucky that they’re unicorns, should not be discounted here. Most of us should spend most of our young life trying to figure out the system works to see how we can succeed in it, but some of us weren’t built like that, and some of the ideas we have might appear like “that thing at the door” to others, but the question that we should ask ourselves, is a question I’m sure Geezer Butler asked himself on the day he met Ozzy Osbourne, ‘what would happen if I invited this man in?’ What would happen if we invited that weird, strange, and just plain different idea in and explored the possibilities? If we drop an adamant no to all of that, we’ll never know. The story of Black Sabbath teaches us that some of the times it’s better to say no, unless...

‘Good Boy!’

April 21, 2026April 22, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“Try saying something other than ‘Good boy’ to your dog the next time you reward them for good behavior,” said a human who claimed to know more about dogs than other humans. “Your dog gets tired of hearing the same phrases over and over again. Mix it up and keep it fresh to allow for greater stimulation of your dog’s mind.”

I am not an expert on dogs, but if this is expert advice, then I wonder how we qualify the term expert. “They spend a lot of time around dogs,” you say. Okay, but I spend a lot of time around my dogs, and I notice that they prefer that we keep it simple and consistent. This expert is basically suggesting that the best way to enhance our relationship with our dog is to complicate our relationship with them.

This expert is not talking to dogs here. He’s talking to us, trying to justify his title as an expert. If this expert said, “The next time you want to reward your dog for good behavior, say ‘Good boy!’” We would all question his title for saying what we already know. They know this, so they tweak our common knowledge in a harmless way that most of us won’t follow. If we do, we might try it once or twice and realize it doesn’tmake a difference, and we’ll all go back to saying “Good boy!” again to enjoy the simple, fun, and loving relationship we have with our dog.

My guess, if we could talk to our dogs, they’d say something along the lines of, “I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t know what you’re talking about 95% of the time, I don’t speak English, but I know tones. I’mperfectly happy with the arrangement we have right now, but if you feel the need to start messing with the five percent I understand, do what you need to do, but keep the tone the same.”

If I could gather a group of experts to comment on this situation, I’m sure they would all condemn this expert advice, and I’m sure that their condemnation would leave me feeling temporarily validated. Yet, the other thing we know about experts is that they get their validation condemning another expert’s advice.

The Suspect

If I walk into a public restroom, and it’s obvious that something awful happened there, you’re the primary suspect if you’re the one walking out. You’re guilty until proven innocent, and there’s really no effective defense. I thought this was pretty damned hilarious, until I realized, while conducting my affairs, that I would have to time my exit perfectly to avoid becoming someone else’s primary suspect.

The Relative Definition of Beauty

“If you’ve ever been to a male stripper’s joint,” Jane said. “You’ll see that nearly 100% of the female patrons of the joint are ugly, old, and out of shape women. There’s no way the males enjoy that?”

“Have you ever been fawned over?” I asked her. “Most women have. Most men haven’t. I’m sure gorgeous men get fawned over all the time, but most men don’t know they’re attractive, until it’s too late in life. They look back at pictures of themselves and realize that they were a lot better looking than they thought.” Women aren’t as generous with their praise. They seek to humble men. So, when a man gets fawned over by women, it doesn’t really matter to the man what the women look like.

Everything in its Right Place

I could never be a slob again. I’m not talking about the difference between clean and unclean as much as the difference between being organized and unorganized. Losing things bothers me more than being unclean. If I place a toothbrush on a bathroom sink, for instance, I’ll think about that toothbrush until I have a chance to put it in its proper place. If I don’t, I fear that it will somehow become lost before I need to use it.

The History of Propaganda

Most people have heard the phrase, “If we repeat the same thing often enough, people will believe it.” Evil historical figures have proven this is an effective tool to fool some of the people some of the times, but as Malcolm Gladwell wrote there is a tipping point to everything.

We’re all subjected to various forms of propaganda, everything from the more obvious political slogans to advertisements, but there is a moment somewhere between “I got it already” and “They’ve been pounding this drum SO often that I’m starting to think they’re up to something.” Some call this Message Fatigue and others call it the Backfire Point.

I don’t think this deduction requires a level of ingenuity or cleverness. It’s such a basic understanding of human nature that it’s kind of boring to read and write about. There’s one nugget that contributes to the survival of this myth, the stupidity of the man of yesteryear. Since most men of yesteryear lived without modern technology and conveniences, we all think they were a little dumber than we are. C’mon, admit it. We see old black and white daguerreotype photos of people, and we think hayseed, yokel types who barely knew how to read. “They fell for it,” we think, looking at them, and those of us who have iPhones, Google, and AI feel so much more advanced, even though we had nothing to do with those technological advancements, and we think we would never fall for propaganda. Or, if we did, we would have a tipping point, and they probably didn’t, because “Look at them. Look at what they wore.”

The ‘S’

I found a trivia question to stump the band: “What was the 18th president Ulysses S. Grant’s middle name at birth?” Answer, Ulysses. Wait a second, how did they get from Ulysses from ‘S’. Ulysses is his first name. His actual birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but everybody called him Ulysses. If you had the opportunity to choose between the name Hiram and the central figure of The Odyssey, wouldn’t you choose the latter? Some sources state that the young Hiram Ulysses Grant hated his name, because his initials were HUG, but that doesn’t answer the question of how his official name went from Hiram Ulysses Grant to Ulysses S. Grant.

The confusion began after “Grant was nominated to West Point in 1839 by Ohio Congressman Thomas Hamer, who wrote Grant’s name in the application as “Ulysses S. Grant.”” Everyone called him Ulysses, so Congressman Hamer just assumed that was Hiram’s first name. Middle names weren’t as common in this era as they are today, as evidenced by the fact that Abraham Lincoln did not have one, so we can only assume that Hamer assumed Ulysses Grant didn’t have a middle name. The problem for Congressman Hamer was that the West Point application required a middle initial, and due to the fact that Hamer couldn’t just text Hiram to sort matters out, or call him, he decided to just fill the blank in that application to get it done. Congressman Hamer found out that Hiram Grant’s mother’s maiden name was Simpson, so he just added that famous ‘S’ on the application.

Aside #1 Harry S Truman middle name is ‘S’. It’s not ‘S’ period, because it’s not an abbreviation. His parents couldn’t decide whether to name him after Solomon Young, Harry’s maternal grandfather, or Anderson Shipp Truman, his paternal grandfather, so they compromised and just gave him the middle name ‘S’.

Aside #2 Grant’s fellow cadets at Westpoint noted the patriotic arrangement of Ulysses S.’ initials, and they began calling him U.S. Grant, Uncle Sam, or just Sam.

Aside #3 “In an 1844 letter to his future wife Julia Dent, Grant wrote, “You know I have an ‘S’ in my name and don’t know what it stand (sic) for.”

“Grant made several efforts to correct the mistake [Ohio Congressman Thomas Hamer made], but the name Ulysses S. Grant stuck.” So, the correct answer to the trivia question what was Grant’s middle name was Ulysses at birth, but an error by a congressman permanently changed his middle name to ‘S.,’ which was an abbreviation for his mother’s maiden name: Simpson. So, the error by a bureaucrat was compounded by a bunch of lazy, incompetent bureaucrats who didn’t want to do more paperwork? I can only imagine that when Grant attempted to correct the record, the bureaucrats at West Point said, “Do you know how much paperwork changing a name involves? It’s incredibly tedious, and are you really going to fight for a name like Hiram?” My guess is Hiram Ulysses Grant didn’t give up easily, because he was a fighter, and the bureaucrats were talking about permanently changing his name on the record. My guess is the lazy bureaucrat pounded it home with a compelling argument along the lines of: “I think the congressman actually did you a favor by fixing the error your parents made by giving you the incredibly nerdy name of an accountant. Ulysses was the name of Homer’s warrior, and it could help you rise through the ranks of the military if you have the name of a warrior.”

Hiram Ulysses Grant did, in fact, rise through the ranks of the military, becoming General of the Army of the United States, a four‑star rank created for him in 1866. This rank made him the senior officer of the U.S. Army and the first person since George Washington to hold a comparable level of authority. Then, of course, he became the 18th president of the United States. If we could ask Abraham Lincoln how the Civil War would’ve progressed without General Grant, he probably would’ve said, “I don’t even want to think about that.” If Grant managed to correct the record and made Westpoint change his name back to Hiram Ulysses Grant, would Lincoln have trusted the fate of the nation to an accountant? I’m sure soldiers and generals offered testimonials to bolster Grant’s credentials, but Lincoln would’ve ended each reading with, “But his name is Hiram.” Some historians would suggest that the Civil War wouldn’t have ended as quickly as it did without the leadership, and some might add the utter brutality, of Ulysses Grant’s leadership, tactics, and strategies. Some suggest if it weren’t for him, the nation might not be united in the manner we know it today, and his stature might not have happened without the mistake of one bureaucrat and the probable laziness of a bunch of other ones. Now, you might say that I’m connecting and disconnecting a lot of dots to complete a story with ifs, buts, and what-ifs, but isn’t that how a number of stories of history were made and unmade?

Using the Force on Uranus

April 3, 2026May 28, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

Most of the planets in our universe were discovered by some guy looking up saying, “Hey, lookee there.” And another guy saying, “That right there, that ain’t no star, Jed, that’s a damned planet.” That’s how most planets were first discovered, as far back as 1,000 BC. Neptune was different. Neptune is too faint to be seen by the naked eye. Neptune had to be theorized and mathematically predicted.

This probably reads like a perfunctory narrative at this point, because we now have the tools, technology, and gadgets needed to uncover numerous mysteries of the universe. It reads less like a “Whodunit?” and more of a “Who cares now?” story because it’s so over that it’s over now, but some of the my favorite stories from history aren’t necessarily about the event in question, but the mind over matter quest to achieve the unachievable. In 1845, they weren’t about what button should I push, they were about human ingenuity and/or the pushing themselves beyond what others could only imagine.

Two men used the science and all of the data available at the time, a pencil and paper, some mathematical theory, and little more than their brains to declare that there should be a planet should be … right about there! And they were wrong, initially, and then they were wrong by one degree! They laid in a bathtub with a pencil, paper, and some Mozart playing in the background while they uncovered the mysteries of the universe, and they were off by one degree. My takeaway from this story is this it illustrates the beautiful idea that every problem we face is one genius away from resolution.

When it comes to the discovery of planets, there’s basically two stories. There’s the story that we learn from the record and the one from the unofficial record. The hard-to-verify unofficial record involved some guy spotting what we call Saturn, but he was an ancient who didn’t know anything about “the record”. Once we went about establishing a record, some other guy beat all the other guys to get his name on the record for being the “first to spot Saturn.” We went back and checked the unofficial record and made some corrections, but sometimes we didn’t.

“Crock of stuff is what it is,” the naysayers say whenever we talk about the first to discover celestial bodies. “There was always someone who discovered it first, before the record existed, AND, and someone would’ve discovered all of these planets eventually. Most of these names we applaud and memorialize were just right time, right place opportunists. We’re not talking dots of light in the sky when we talk about planets. We’re talking about massive complex bodies that have their own geology, weather, and sometimes even their own atmosphere or moons. They’re huge honking worlds in their own right that would’ve eventually been discovered by someone. The whole idea behind celebrating the humans who first discovered a planet is so ridiculous that it’s hardly even worth talking about.

“It’s like talking about the guy who, according to the record, discovered the moon,” the naysayers continue. “You discovered the moon? That right there? You discovered that?”

On July 26, 1609, Thomas Harriot discovered the moon. There is no record of the laughter, derision, or humiliation that followed Harriot’s discovery, but Harriot became the first known person in history to look at the moon through a telescope and draw what he saw. He made multiple maps, including recognizable features. Mr. Harriot either forgot to put his name on the record for his discovery, or his friends started mocking him so ruthlessly for trying to be the first guy to spot the moon that he decided not to submit his name for the discovery.

The father of modern observational astronomy, Galileo Galilei didn’t give a crud about all that. He knew how to bite that apple. Galileo was an ambitious fella who knew how to get history to celebrate his name, so months later he published findings that mirrored Harriot’s, and he got his name on the official, historical record as the first person to discover the moon.

How many of you have heard the name Thomas Harriot? How many of you have heard of the name Galileo? Exactly. Thomas Harriot fell prey to the “publish or perish” dictum that haunts history’s otherwise anonymous names, by failing to publish his detailed maps of the moon, and he died anonymously. In fact, Harriot’s July 26, 1609 findings stayed hidden in notebooks for centuries, until he received proper accreditation in the 19th–20th centuries. The Thomas Harriot story might sound like a miscarriage of justice, unless you’re one of those “I’m pretty sure someone would’ve eventually discovered the moon” naysayers.

The Perturbing Force

On March 13, 1781, a man named Sir William Herschel used his trusty telescope to discover the planet we now call Uranus. His observations found that it wasn’t a comet, but a planet, and after his findings were listed on the official record, the society of astronomists pretty much thought “Ok, that’s it, Woo Hoo and all that, we’ve discovered the end of the universe.” There was one problem; the astronomists who used Herschel’s findings to spot Uranus, could not correctly plot point Uranus’ orbital positions based on mathematical projections. Uranus was so all over the place that it made no sense.

Using all of the technology and data available to him at the time, Astronomer Alexis Bouvard made seventy-seven projections on where Uranus should be at any given time of the year, but his fellow astronomers called him out. They told him all of his projections were wrong. We can guess that Bouvard called them ordures (French for trash), but he went through the projections versus the reality, and he found that they were right. Much to Bouvard’s humiliation, this occurred after he published his seventy-seven projections. He probably could’ve simply corrected the record and published again, but that would’ve meant finding his initial errors and correcting them.

We can only imagine how much time, sweat, and passion Bouvard put into creating those tables, and we can guess that he tried to save face by saying, “Hey, I didn’t just throw that out there. These were precise projections based on all the data I had at my disposal, coupled with Newtonian laws. I didn’t just guess, then publish those guesses to subject myself to this level of humiliation. There’s something more going on.” He initially blamed the data, but when that didn’t satisfy anyone, including himself, he came up with a “Perturbing Force” theory.

Bouvard’s Perturbing Force theory suggested that there was something beyond Uranus pulling and pushing on Uranus in a way that caused such irregularities in its orbital path. We can only guess that the astronomers enjoyed the errors of the esteemed astronomers errors so much that they initially listed his follow up explanations as excuses for imprecise projections. When Bouvard furthered that the perturbing force might be another planet, they probably laughed at him, thinking that it was evidence of Bouvard squirming. Unfortunate for the legacy of Alexis Bouvard, after he submitted the idea that Uranus might not be the end of the universe to the Paris Observatory, the member of the astronomical society who received that request for a follow up left his position soon after, and no one followed up on Bouvard’s submitted request for further findings. Furthering the unfortunate nature of Bouvard’s legacy, he died before anyone would substantiate his idea of a perturbing force gravitationally pulling and pushing Uranus off what should have been the precise data points dictating its orbit. Thus, we can only guess that Alexis Bouvard probably died believing himself a failure, or at the very least that everything he accomplished in life ended with a huge stain, in the form of an exclamation point, at the end.

Skeptics argued that since Bouvard’s projections relied on Isaac Newton’s theories, Newton’s theories must be flawed. Mathematicians, like John Couch Adams, insisted that Newton’s theories were sound and after studying Bouvard’s projections, Adams insisted that he could use Bouvard’s projections, and all of the data the man compiled, coupled with Newton’s laws to deduce the mass, position, and orbit to discover Bouvard’s perturbing force.

Couch Adams devoted four years of his life to studying, calculating, and projecting where a possible perturbing force could be, and he submitted that work to British Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy. The esteemed Airy was understandably skeptical, as the mathematician submitting these findings was a twenty-four-year-old, and we can also guess that Airy was unwilling to put his reputation on the line without detailed computations. He did respond to Couch Adams, however, asking for greater precision, as Couch Adams’ findings turned out to be twelve degrees off, and unfortunate to the legacy of John Couch Adams he failed to respond. Some suggest that the failure to respond may have been due to Adams’s unprofessional demeanor, his nerves, procrastination, or that Adams did not have the numbers required for greater precision. Whatever the case was, Couch Adams’s failure to respond in a timely manner cost him sole credit on the official record for the discovery of the planet Neptune.

Some suggest that Frenchman, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, was unaware of John Couch Adams work, his subsequent submission, and his failure to complete the work, but Le Verrier was very aware of Alexis Bouvard’s work. He paid particular attention to Bouvard’s idea of a “perturbing force”, and it fascinated him. He thought he could find the missing link, and he thought he did. He thought he made the discovery of a lifetime, one that could make him famous.

He first sent those findings to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, but due to bureaucratic inertia and a lack of proactive observation, the Academy did not follow up. They did not reject Le Verrier’s math, as they found it rigorous, but his findings did not translate into instant acceptance as a confirmed discovery because it remained theoretical until it could be observed. The Academy also had “other concerns”, and they may have lacked the capacity to immediately follow up. Whatever the case was, Le Verrier took some of the complaints The Academy had about the absolute precision of his findings, and he refined his coordinates and submitted them to Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory on September 18, 1846. Berlin had a powerful new refractor telescope, and they provided a more agile response, partly because Galle and his assistant Heinrich d’Arrest were eager to test the hypothesis.

On September 23, 1846 Galle confirmed, through Verrier’s detailed calculations, that the perturbing force affecting the orbit of Uranus was possibly and probably a planet that we now call Neptune. Galle’s confirmation did note, however, that Le Verrier’s detailed calculations were one degree off. Here we reach another “think about it, before we move on” moment. The Frenchman took Alexis Bouvard’s precise projections, based on pre-discovery data, and he joined Bouvard’s mathematical calculations on his errors, coupled with some theoretical notion of a perturbing force, pushing and pulling Uranus off what should be its orbit, and it should be right there! And those calculating his math,using nothing more than their own math(!), found that he was one degree off! [Note: The international astronomy community eventually decided to settle the international dispute by giving credit to both the British Adams and the French Urbain for Neptune’s discovery, even though Adams unofficially discovered it first.] Astronomy.com also states that “Adams [eventually] completed his calculations first, but Le Verrier published first. Le Verrier’s calculations were also more accurate.” The lesson here for you kids looking to submit astronomical findings to a governing body, when they approach you for detailed calculations to support your astronomical findings make sure you either respond immediately, or maybe you should have your detailed calculations ready before declaring your findings. 

The naysayers have a point when they say someone would’ve eventually discovered something as massive as a planet, but Neptune is different. Someone would’ve eventually discovered it, as the technology advanced, but a couple of guys, we’llsay three in total with Bouvard paving the way with his perturbing force theory, located Neptune by mathematically predicting where it would be based on the irregularities in Uranus’s orbit. Is that phenomenal? No? How about we put ourselves in their era and learn that when they went to the office to complete their theories, they road a horse on a dirt road to get there, if they were lucky enough and rich enough to own a horse. Also, their definition of the heart of the city was often just a bunch of wooden store fronts, like the recreations we see on the old HBO show Deadwood. Most of what these 19th century astronomers and mathematicians saw in the nighttime sky is what we can see by stepping outside and looking up into the sky. They had some technological assistance back then, in the form of relatively weak telescopes, and some theorize that astronomers, like Galileo Galilei in 1613, Jerome Lalande in 1795, and John Herschel in 1830 may have used this technology to spot Neptune first, but they didn’t know they were seeing a planet, because their telescopes were not powerful enough for them to know that. Those of us who write articles about such topics and the geniuses who made ingenious discoveries or theories that proved slightly incorrect or somewhat flawed should asterisk our modern critiques by saying, “I am smart. No, really I am, really, really smart, but as ingenious as I am, I don’t know if I could’ve done what they did with the primitive technology they had, primitive when compared to ours. So, before I go about correcting and critiquing their findings with the technology I have at my disposal, thanks to those who developed it for me, I’d like to say how impressive it is that they came so close that it’s impressive that they did what they did with what they had.”