Halley
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
EDMUND, an English astronomer and mathematician; born in Haggerston, near London, England, Oct. EDMUND HALLEY 29, 1656. He received his education at St. Paul's School , and Queen's College, Oxford, where he attained so great a proficiency in mathematical studies, that in 1676 he published observations on a spot in the sun, by which the motions of that body on its axis were determined. The same year he went to St. Helena, where he determined the positions of 350 stars. In 1680 he made the tour of Europe with Mr. Nelson; and on the passage to Calais was the first to observe the great comet -the same which visited the Western hemisphere again in 1835 (see COMET). After his return, he gave his attention to the theory of the planetary motions , which made him acquainted with Sir Isaac Newton, who intrusted to him the publication of his "Principia." To ascertain exactly the cause of the variation of the compass, he made several trips to the Western Ocean. In 1703 he was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford; in 1705 he made public his valuable researches on the orbits of comets ; in 1713 he became secretary to the Royal Society; and in 1719 he succeeded Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal . The remainder of his life theory of the motion of the moon. His was chiefly spent in completing the principal works are : "Catalogue of the Southern Stars," " Astronomical Tables," "An Abridgment of the History of Comets," etc. He died in 1742. ORCHARD, an English Shakespearean
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The biography Collier's printed in 1921 still stands in outline, though its comet note slips: the great comet Halley saw on the way to Calais in 1680 was a different object, while the comet that bears his name is the one he watched in 1682 and correctly predicted would return, as it did in 1835 and again in 1910. Since 1921 it has come back twice more, in 1910 having already been photographed and its tail spectroscopically examined, and in 1986, when the European probe Giotto flew within a few hundred kilometres of the nucleus and returned the first close images of a comet's dark, potato-shaped core; the next return is expected in 2061. Halley's other legacy has grown rather than shrunk: his 1716 method of measuring the Sun's distance by transits of Venus drove international expeditions in 1761 and 1769, and his life tables are still cited as a foundation of actuarial science.
Written for this edition, 2026.