Johann Daniel Titius: Original Author Of Bode’s Law?

Even though he’s not a well known household name like Newton, did the astronomer and mathematician Johann Daniel Titius the original author of Bode’s Law?

By: Ringo Bones

It has since been rechristened as the Titius-Bode Law and in his honor, an asteroid – 1998 Titius - and a crater on the Moon was named after him, the 18^th Century German mathematician and astronomer Johann Daniel Titius never became a well-known household name like the Englishman Isaac Newton. But nonetheless, Titius did make some important contributions to mathematics, physics, astronomy and biology during his lifetime.

Johann Daniel Titius (1729 – 1796) was born on January 2, 1729 in Konitz Royal Prussia – a fiefdom of the Crown of Poland – to Jakob Tietz, a merchant and council member from Konitz, and Maria Dorothea, née Hanow. His original name was Johann Tietz, but as was customary in the 18^th Century, when he became a university professor, he Latinized his surname to Titius. Teitz attended school in Danzig (Gdansk) and studied at the University of Leipzig (1749-1752). He died in Wittenberg, Electorate of Saxony on December 16, 1796.

Titius proposed his law of planetary distances in an unsigned interpolation in his German translation of the Swiss philosopher Charles Bonnet’s Contemplation de la nature (“Contemplation of Nature”). Titius fixed the scale by assigning 100 to the distance of the planet Saturn from the Sun. On this scale, planet Mercury’s distance from the Sun is approximately 4. Titius therefore proposed that the sequence of planetary distances (starting from Mercury and moving outward) has the form:  4,4 + 3,4 + 6,4 + 12,4 + 24,4 + 48,4 + 96,…

There was an empty place at distance 28, or 4 + 24 (between the planets Mars and Jupiter), which Bode asserted, the Founder of the Universe surely has not left unoccupied. Titius’ sequence stopped with the planet Saturn, the most distant planet then known. His law was reprinted, without his credit, by Johann Elert Bode in the second edition of his Deutliche Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten Himmels (Clear Guide to Knowledge of the Starry Heaven) in 1772. In later editions, Bode did credit Titius, but this mostly escaped notice and during the 19^th Century the law was usually associated with Bode’s name.

Titius published a number of works on other areas in physics, such as a set of conditions and rules for performing experiments and he was particularly focused in thermometry. In 1765, he presented a survey of thermometry up to that date. He wrote about the metallic thermometer constructed by Hans Loeser. In his treatises on both theoretical and experimental physics, he incorporated the findings of other scientists, such as the descriptions of experiments written by Georg Wolfgang Kraft in 1738.

As a confirmed polymath, Titius was also active in biology, particularly in classification of organisms and minerals. His biological work was influenced by Carolus Linnaeus. Lehrbegriff der Naturgeschichte Zum ersten Unterrichte, his most extensive publication in biology, was on the systematic classification of plants, animals and minerals, as well as the elemental substances: ether, fire, air, water and earth. The standard author abbreviation Titius is used to indicate Johann Daniel Titius as the author when citing a botanical name.