Edmund Halley was a British astronomer and mathematician who first calculated the orbit of a comet later named after him. He is also known for his role in the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica.
Early biography and family
Edmund Halley was born November 8, 1656 in Haggerston (London) in the family of a we althy soap manufacturer. From childhood he was interested in mathematics. Halley's education began at St. Paul's School in London. He was lucky to live during the scientific revolution that laid the foundation for modern thought. Halley was 4 when the monarchy was restored under Charles II. After 2 years, the new king granted a charter to an unofficial organization of natural philosophers, originally called the "invisible college". It was the Royal Society of London, of which Edmund Halley later became an eminent member. In 1673 he entered Queen's College, Oxford University, and there he was introduced to John Flamsteed, who in 1676 was appointed the first Astronomer Royal. Once or twice he visited the Greenwich Observatory where Flamsteed worked, and this influenced his decision to study astronomy.
Halley married Mary Tooke in 1682 and settled in Islington. The couple had three children.
Star Catalog
Influenced by Flamsteed's work on using the telescope to accurately catalog the northern stars, Edmund Halley proposed doing the same for the Southern Hemisphere. With the financial support of his father, and after being introduced by the king to the East India Company in November 1676, he sailed on the ship of this company (leaving Oxford without a diploma) to St. Helena, the southernmost British possession. The bad weather did not live up to his expectations. But by the time he returned home in January 1678, he had recorded the celestial longitudes and latitudes of the 341st star, had witnessed the transit of Mercury across the solar disk, had repeatedly made observations of the pendulum, and noticed that some stars seemed to have become weaker than the way ancient astronomers described them. Halley's stellar catalogue, published late in 1678, was the first publication of a telescopically determined position of the southern stars and established his reputation as an astronomer. In 1678 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and, at the request of the monarch, received a master's degree from Oxford University.
Explanation of planetary motions
The biography of Edmund Halley was marked by the visit of Isaac Newton to Cambridge in 1684, and this event led him to play a significant role in the development of the theory of gravity. The scientist was the youngest of the 3 members of the Royal Society of London, which included the inventor andmicroscopist Robert Hooke and renowned architect Sir Christopher Wren. Together with Newton in Cambridge, they tried to find a mechanical explanation for planetary motion. The problem was to determine what forces keep the planet in its movement around the Sun from flying into space or falling into the sun. Since the scientific status of scientists was both a means of their existence and the achievement of goals, each of them showed a personal interest in being the first to find a solution. This desire to be the first, the driving motive in science, was the cause of a lively discussion and competition between them.
Role in publishing Newton's Elements
Although Hooke and Halley believed that the force holding a planet in orbit should decrease in inverse proportion to the square of its distance from the Sun, they were unable to deduce from this hypothesis a theoretical orbit that would correspond to observed planetary motions, despite the reward, proposed by Ren. When Edmund visited Newton, he told him that he had already solved the problem: the orbit would be an ellipse, but he lost his calculations to prove it.
Encouraged by Halley, Newton translated his research into celestial mechanics into one of the greatest masterpieces created by the human mind, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The Royal Society decided that Edmond would take care of the preparation of the book for publication and print it at his own expense. He consulted with Newton, tactfully resolved the priority dispute with Hooke,edited the text of the work, wrote a verse preface in Latin honoring the author, corrected the evidence, and published the work in 1687.
Halley's Research
The British scientist had the ability to bring large amounts of data into meaningful order. In 1686, his world map showing the distribution of the prevailing winds over the oceans became the first meteorological publication. His mortality tables for the city of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), published in 1693, included one of the early attempts to relate mortality to population age. This later led to the creation of actuarial tables in the life insurance industry.
In 1690 Edmund Halley's diving bell was built, in which atmospheric air was replenished from the surface with weighted barrels. During the demonstration, the scientist and 5 of his companions plunged 18 m into the Thames and stayed there for more than an hour and a half. The bell was of little use for practical rescue work, as it was very heavy, but over time the scientist improved it, and then increased the time people spent under water by more than 4 times.
When the British decided to re-mint their devalued silver coins, Edmund Halley served for 2 years as controller of one of the country's five mints, which was located in Chester. So he could cooperate with Isaac Newton, who was appointed to the senior post of caretaker in 1696.
Scientific expedition
By order of the Admir alty in 1698-1700gg. he commanded the USS Paramore Pink on one of the first voyages undertaken solely for scientific purposes, to measure the declination (the angle between magnetic and true north) of a compass in the South Atlantic and determine the exact coordinates of ports of call. In 1701, the results of Edmund Halley's research were published - magnetic maps of the Atlantic and some parts of the Pacific Oceans. They were compiled from all available observations, supplemented by his own, and intended for navigation and, perhaps, solving the big problem of determining longitude at sea. But because the declination of the compass was difficult to determine with sufficient accuracy, and because the change in declination over time was soon discovered, this method of geolocation was never widely used. Despite resistance from Flamsteed, Halley was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford in 1704.
Description of comet orbits
In 1705, Edmund Halley published The Code of the Astronomy of Comets. In it, the author described parabolic orbits - 24 of them were observed from 1337 to 1698. He showed that 3 historical comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682 were so similar in characteristics that they must have been successive returns of the one now known as Halley's comet, and accurately predicted its return in 1758.
Innovator of observational astronomy
In 1716, Halley developed a method for observing the transits of Venus predicted in 1761 and 1769 across the disk of the Sun in order toAccurately determine the solar parallax - the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In 1718, by comparing the recently observed positions of the stars with data recorded by the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy Almagest, he found that Sirius and Arcturus had slightly changed their positions in relation to their neighbors. This was the discovery of what modern astronomers call proper motion. Edmund Halley incorrectly reported proper motions for two other stars, Aldebaran and Betelgeuse, but this was the result of errors by ancient astronomers. In 1720 he succeeded Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, where he determined the time of the moon's passage through the meridian, which he hoped would be useful in determining longitude. In order to devote himself entirely to this work, he had to leave the post of Secretary of the Royal Society. In 1729 Halley was elected a foreign member of the Paris Royal Academy of Sciences. Two years later, he published his work on determining longitude at sea using the position of the moon.
The British crown awarded him a pension for serving as a captain during expeditions to the Atlantic, which ensured a comfortable existence for him in subsequent years. At 80, he continued to make careful observations of the moon. The paralysis that afflicted Halley's hand spread over time, until he almost completely lost the ability to move. Apparently, this condition was the cause of his death at the age of 86. Halley was buried in the church of St. Margaritas at Leigh in South East London.
Meaningscientist
Halley's preoccupation with practical applications of science, such as problems of navigation, reflects the influence on the Royal Society of British author Francis Bacon, who believed that science should bring relief to mankind. Despite the wide range of interests of Edmund Halley and his studies, he showed a high degree of professional competence, which foreshadowed scientific specialization. His wise participation in the emergence of Newton's work and his persistence in bringing it to completion has secured him an important place in the history of Western thought.
In addition to the comet, craters on the Moon and Mars, as well as an Antarctic research station, are named after Halley.
