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Bible Encyclopedias
Edmund Halley
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or EDMUND HALLEY (1656-1742), English astronomer, was born at Haggerston, London, on the 29th of October 1656. His father, a wealthy soapboiler, placed him at St Paul's school, where he was equally distinguished for classical and mathematical ability. Before leaving it for Queen's College, Oxford, in 1673, he had observed the change in the variation of the compass, and at the age of nineteen, he supplied a new and improved method of determining the elements of the planetary orbits ( Phil. Trans. xi. 683). His detection of considerable errors in the tables then in use led him to the conclusion that a more accurate ascertainment of the places of the fixed stars was indispensable to the progress of astronomy; and, finding that Flamsteed and Hevelius had already undertaken to catalogue those visible in northern latitudes, he assumed to himself the task of making observations in the southern hemisphere. A recommendation from Charles II. to the East India Company procured for him an apparently suitable, though, as it proved, ill-chosen station, and in November 1676 he embarked for St Helena. On the voyage he noticed the retardation of the pendulum in approaching the equator; and during his stay on the island he observed, on the 7th of November 1677, a transit of Mercury, which suggested to him the important idea of employing similar phenomena for determining the sun's distance. He returned to England in November 1678, having by the registration of 341 stars won the title of the "Southern Tycho," and by the translation to the heavens of the "Royal Oak," earned a degree of master of arts, conferred at Oxford by the king's command on the 3rd of December 1678, almost simultaneously with his election as fellow of the Royal Society. Six months later, the indefatigable astronomer started for Danzig to set at rest a dispute of long standing between Hooke and Hevelius as to the respective merits of plain or telescopic sights; and towards the end of 1680 he proceeded on a continental tour. In Paris he observed, with G. D. Cassini, the great comet of 1680 after its perihelion passage; and having returned to England, he married in 1682 Mary, daughter of Mr Tooke, auditor of the exchequer, with whom he lived harmoniously for fifty-five years. He now fixed his residence at Islington, engaged chiefly upon lunar observations, with a view to the great desideratum of a method of finding the longitude at sea. His mind, however, was also busy with the momentous problem of gravity. Having reached so far as to perceive that the central force of the solar system must decrease inversely as the square of the distance, and applied vainly to Wren and Hooke for further elucidation, he made in August 1684 that journey to Cambridge for the purpose of consulting Newton, which resulted in the publication of the Principia. The labour and expense of passing this great work through the press devolved upon Halley, who also wrote the prefixed hexameters ending with the well-known line Nec fas est propius mortali attingere divos.
In 1696 he was, although a zealous Tory, appointed deputy comptroller of the mint at Chester, and (August 19, 1698) he received a commission as captain of the "Paramour Pink" for the purpose of making extensive observations on the conditions of terrestrial magnetism. This task he accomplished in a voyage which lasted two years, and extended to the 52nd degree of S. latitude. The results were published in a General Chart of the Variation of the Compass in 1701; and immediately afterwards he executed by royal command a careful survey of the tides and coasts of the British Channel, an elaborate map of which he produced in 1702. On his return from a journey to Dalmatia, for the purpose of selecting and fortifying the port of Trieste, he was nominated, November 1703, Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford, and received an honorary degree of doctor of laws in 1710. Between 1713 and 1721 he acted as secretary to the Royal Society, and early in 1720 he succeeded Flamsteed as astronomer-royal. Although in his sixty-fourth year, he undertook to observe the moon through an entire revolution of her nodes (eighteen years), and actually carried out his purpose. He died on the 14th of January 1742. His tomb is in the old graveyard of St Margaret's church, Lee, Kent.
Halley's most notable scientific achievements were - his detection of the "long inequality" of Jupiter and Saturn, and of the acceleration of the moon's mean motion (1693), his discovery of the proper motions of the fixed stars (1718), his theory of variation (1683), including the hypothesis of four magnetic poles, revived by C. Hansteen in 1819, and his suggestion of the magnetic origin of the aurora borealis; his calculation of the orbit of the 1682 comet (the first ever attempted), coupled with a prediction of its return, strikingly verified in 1759; and his indication (first in 1679, and again in 1716, Phil. Trans., No. 348) of a method extensively used in the 18th and 19th centuries for determining the solar parallax by means of the transits of Venus.
His principal works are Catalogus stellarum australium (London, 1679), the substance of which was embodied in vol. iii. of Flamsteed's Historia coelestis (1725); Synopsis astronomiae cometicae (Oxford, 1705); Astronomical Tables (London, 1752); also eighty-one miscellaneous papers of considerable interest, scattered through the Philosophical Transactions. To these should be added his version from the Arabic (which language he acquired for the purpose) of the treatise of Apollonius De sectione rationis, with a restoration of his two lost books De sectione spatii, both published at Oxford in 1706; also his fine edition of the Conics of Apollonius, with the treatise by Serenus De sectione cylindri et coni (Oxford, 1710, folio). His edition of the Spherics of Menelaus was published by his friend Dr Costard in 1758. See also Biographia Britannica, vol. iv. (1757); Gent. Mag. xvii. 455, 503; A. Wood, Athenae Oxon. (Bliss), iv. 536; J. Aubrey, Lives, ii. 365; F. Baily, Account of Flamsteed; Sir D. Brewster, Life of Newton; R. Grant, History of Astronomy, p. 477 and passim; A. J. Rudolph, Bulletin of Bibliography, No.14 (Boston, 1904); E. F. McPike, "Bibliography of Halley's Comet," Smithsonian Misc. Collections, vol. xlviii. pt. i. (1905); Notes and Queries, 9th series, vols. x. xi. xii., 10th series, vol. h. (E. F. McPike). A collection of manuscripts regarding Halley is preserved among the Rigaud papers in the Bodleian library, Oxford; and many of his unpublished letters exist at the Record Office and in the library of the Royal Society. (A. M. C.) HALLGRIMSSON, JONAS (1807-1844), the chief lyrical poet of Iceland, was born in 1807 at Steinsstaoir in Eyjafjaroarsysla in the north of that island, and educated at the famous school of Bessastaor. In 1832 he went to the university of Copenhagen, and shortly afterwards turned his attention to the natural sciences, especially geology. Having obtained pecuniary assistance from the Danish government, he travelled through all Iceland for scientific purposes in the years 1837-1842, and made many interesting geological observations. Most of his writings on geology are in Danish. His renown was, however, not acquired by his writings in that language, but by his Icelandic poems and short stories. He was well read in German literature, Heine and Schiller being his favourites, and the study of the German masters and the old classical writers of Iceland opened his eyes to the corrupt state of Icelandic poetry and showed him the way to make it better. The misuse of the Eddic metaphors made the lyrical and epical poetry of the day hardly intelligible, and, to make matters worse, the language of the poets was mixed up with words of German and Danish origin. The great Danish philologist and friend of Iceland, Rasmus Rask, and the poet Bjarni Thorarensen had done much to purify the language, but Jonas Hallgrimsson completed their work by his poems and tales, in a purer language than ever had been written in Iceland since the days of Snorri Sturlason. The excesses of Icelandic poetry were specially seen in the so-called rimur, ballads of heroes, &c., which were fiercely attacked by Jonas Hallgrimsson, who at last succeeded in converting the educated to his view. Most of the principal poems, tales and essays of JOnas Hallgrimsson appeared in the periodical Fj olnir, which he began publishing at Copenhagen in 183 5, together with Konr65 Gislason, a well-known philologist, and the patriotic Thomas Saemundsson. Fj olnir had in the beginning a hard struggle against old prejudices, but as the years went by its influence became enormous; and when it at last ceased, its programme and spirit still lived in N5' Filagsrit and other patriotic periodicals which took its place. JOnas Hallgrimsson, who died in 1844, is the father of a separate school in Icelandic lyric poetry. He introduced foreign thoughts and metres, but at the same time revived the metres of the Icelandic classical poets. Although his poetical works are all comprised in one small volume, he strikes every string of the old harp of Iceland. (S. BL.)
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Edmund Halley'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/e/edmund-halley.html. 1910.
