John Flamsteed was born in Denby in Derbyshire on the evening of 19 August 1646. Brought up by his father following the death of his mother when he was three years old, he became an enthusiastic reader from a young age. Starting off with romances, he moved on to histories and tragedies and began to absorb even more of the world around him, reading geography and classical books. At the age of 14, when his school friends made their next step to university, John became ill, and his father thought it best not to send him. During this time he managed to get hold of a copy of Sacrobosco's De Sphcera, a mathematical work written in Latin. Naturally curious about the night sky and encouraged by his father, John watched the stars and applied everything he had learned up to that point in attempting to understand the growing academic discipline of astronomy.
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| John Flamsteed, Wellcome Collection. Public Domain |
Gradually, he made links with other like-minded men, such as George Linacre and William Litchford. In 1665 a comet raced above London, and Charles II and his queen Catherine of Braganza stayed up to watch it. Samuel Pepys tried to see it too but grumbled that he could see only cloud. But Flamsteed in Derbyshire was watching too. He soon calculated timings of the year, the distance of the Earth from the Sun and catalogued 70 different stars. In his first paper for the Royal Society, established by Charles II on his accession, he apologised in advance for his ‘juvenile heat’ and published it under an alias. The Society loved it so much that they tracked him down and praised his work, Flamsteed travelling to London, where he was gifted a micrometer and ordered some telescope lenses.
Flamsteed was quickly noticed by other eminent scientists of the era, such as Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Jonas Moore and completed the university education at Cambridge that had, as a teenager, been stalled. It was through his links with Moore, as well as his precise calculations concerning the stars and the moon, that Flamsteed was put in charge of the new Royal Observatory in Greenwich at the age of 29.
By 1675, Flamsteed was Astronomer Royal with a salary of £100 a year and lodging rooms within the observatory itself, built by Sir Christopher Wren. He worked incessantly. In 1683 he built a mural quadrant, privately instructed students on mathematics and astronomy and stared for long hours at the night sky. Between 1677 and 1689 he made 20,000 observations and in 1688 had an assistant to help him, called Abraham Sharp. Sharp also made instruments to assist Flamsteed in his observations and calculations, all which Flamsteed paid for, perhaps explaining why after his death, his widow hurried to the Observatory and took them all away.
In 1694 Sir Isaac Newton visited Flamsteed at the Observatory to discuss his recent theory of gravity and ask for help applying its findings to that of the moon. Newton calculated, while Flamsteed provided him with new observations. Newton urged his colleague to publish his findings on the stars, even though Flamsteed insisted his lists were not complete. They were eventually printed in 1707, although Flamsteed was not happy with them, considering them full of errors. By 1712 he was in ill-health, suffering from headaches and pain in the joints. In a letter, he wrote of finding himself so tired when travelling to church that he bought a sedan chair ‘and am carried thither in state on Sunday mornings and back’. He died on 31 December 1719 and was buried in Burstow Church in Surrey. He was 73 years old.
Not only had Flamsteed documented dozens of stars, made thousands of observations and assisted Newton with his work on gravity, he worked on the lunar cycles and the axis of the Sun. He worked at a time of great excitement in science and networked with some of the most well-known scientists and astronomers, and was known too to Charles II, William and Mary and Queen Anne.
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Sources
Maunder, Edward Walter. The Royal Observatory, Greenwich; a glance at its history and work. The Religious Tract Society, London, 1900.
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