Edmund Halley, 1656 to 1742

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Two tides daily prove that the moon acts via an intermediate substance

Edmund Halley made observations of the paths of comets, and encouraged Newton to mathematically explain their path. Mathematical equations were devised to calculate and describe reality, but they cannot explain the cause. Newton’s laws thus describe the action of force upon a mass and remain largely an accurate description. The planets though do not follow a fixed path. They wobble around an inconstant mean path. To be fair to Newton, he realised that gravity within the universe would lead to total instability and that the whole would collapse to a solid, but he chose to ignore those thoughts entirely.

Halley was born at Haggerston London, 8th November 1656. His father had a soap boiling establishment in that city. He was rich, and sent his only son to St. Paul's School, under the care of Dr Thomas Gale. He was distinguished in classics and mathematics, rose to be captain of the school, constructed dials, observed the change in the variation of the compass, and studied the heavens so closely that it was remarked by Moxon the globe maker "that if a star would (be) displaced in the globe he would presently find it out". He entered Queen's College Oxford in 1673.

He was competent in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and had "a curious apparatus of instruments". With a telescope of 24 ft he observed a lunar eclipse on a 27th June, 1675 in Winchester Street and at Oxford a remarkable sunspot in July and August 1676. He also noted the a cultivation of Mars by the Moon on 21st August, 1676. Before the age of 20 he communicated to the Royal Society a direct and geometrical method of finding the aphelia and eccentricity of the planets.

He abolished the notion of a centre of uniform motion, invented shortly afterwards an improved construction for solar eclipses, and noted defects in the theories of Jupiter's and Saturn's orbits. For the correction of these he perceived that a revision of the places of the fixed stars was indispensable. He supplemented the labours of Flamsteed and Hevelius and left university without a degree and embarked for St Helena in November 1676. His father allowed him an allowance of £300 a year and a recommendation from Charles the second to the East India company procured him facilities of transport but the climate proved unfavourable.

By assiduous observations during 18 months with a five 1/2 ft sextant he succeeded in determining only 341 stars. His enterprise however laid the foundation of austral stellar astronomy, and and for him from Flamsteed the title of the Southern Tycho.

The course of their voyage he improved the sextant, collected a number of valuable facts relative to the ocean and atmosphere, noted the equatorial retardation of the pendulum, and made at St Helena on 7th November, 1677, the first complete observation of a transit of Mercury.

On his return to England in October 16 78 Halley presented to the King a planisphere of the Southern constellations and was rewarded with a mandamus to the University of Oxford for a degree of M A conferred on 3rd December, 1678. Catalogue of Australian stars was laid before the Royal Society on 7th November, 1678 and translated into French but due his dependence upon Tycho, as fundamental point, it was of little practical value. Halley appended to his catalogue a proposal for amending lunar theory by the introduction of an annual equation and an account of the transit of Mercury, from which he deduced a Solar Parallax of 45 minutes.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 30th 16th November, 1678 at the age of 22.

He was six months later sent by the Royal Society to Danzig as arbiter of a dispute between Hooke and Hevelius on the respective advantages of telescopic and fixed sights.

Towards the end of 1680 he started on a continental tour with his school friend Robert Nelson and caught sight near Calais of the Great Comet of that year, on which he made with Cassini at Paris, observations of great service to Newton in fixing its orbit.

He spent most of 1681 in Italy and married in England in 1682, Mary, daughter of Mr Took, Auditor of the Exchequer. He took a house at Islington where his instruments excited much curiosity but shortly moved to Golden Lion Court, Aldersgate Street. He lost no time in entering upon his favourite project of perfecting the lunar theory by means of observations continued through a period of 223 lunations or a little more than 18 years.

Keenly alive to the importance of the problem of gravity, Halley obtained from Kepler's third law in January 1684 the law of inverse squares, but failed to deduce from it the planetary motions. Having fruitlessly applied to Wren and Hooke, he in August 1684 paid a visit to Newton at Cambridge and learned from him the good news that he had brought this demonstration to perfection. He undertook in 2nd June, 1686 to print Newton's work at his own charge and in a letter to him of 5th July 16th, 1987 was able to announce its completion. His outlay was eventually reimbursed by the sale of copies. A discourse concerning gravity was read by Halley before the Royal Society on 21st April, 1686, by way of preparation for the incomparable treatise of motion almost ready for the press.

Numerous contributions to the transactions are of the Royal Society were "an historical account of the trade winds and monsoons"; "An account of the circulation of the watery vapours of there sea, and the cause of springs" ; "A discourse tending to prove at what time and place Julius Caesar made his first descent upon Britain"; "A new and general method of finding the roots of equations".

He was appointed with Newtons influence as deputy controller of the Mint at Chester in 1696. He ascended Snowdon for the purpose of testing his method of determining heights by the barometer. His theory of the variation of the compass was proposed in 1683, and further developed in 1692. It assumed the direction of the needle to be governed by the influence of four magnetic poles. Two fixed in the outer shell of the earth, two revolving with an inner nucleus in a period roughly estimated at 700 years. This hypothesis explained with surprising success the mystery of secular magnetic changes.

The mass of Halley's observations are preserved in manuscript at the Royal Observatory in four small volumes and a 5th not in this collection was found at his death. They were copied for the astronomical Society in 1832. Halley's discovery of the long inequality of Jupiter at and Saturn was published at the end of his tables. He first had treated their opposite discrepancies from theory to the effect of mutual perturbation assigning each planet a secular equation increasing as the square of the time. From a comparison of ancient with modern eclipses he inferred in 1693 a progressive acceleration of the Moon's mean motion, explained on gravitational principles by Laplace in 1787.

Extracted from the "Dictionary of National Biography" see Copresumy, the new theory of everything