John Flamsteed | Biography

John Flamsteed was born in 1646 in Derbyshire, England. He was imbued with a deep interest in astronomy from his early boyhood, but in his early teenage years he became plagued with poor health and was not able to attend university. Undaunted, Flamsteed pursued astronomy on his own, despite the objections of his father, a businessman who seemingly wanted his 16-year-old son to either join the family business or look after the home.

Flamsteed knew what it took to be successful as a scientist: he established connections. Although he was not a flamboyant man, he was aggressive enough to send some of his observations of eclipses to the Royal Society, London. His subsequent numerous correspondences, combined with the obvious quality of his work, won him important friends. In 1674, at the urging of his patron Jonas Moore, he was awarded a degree from Jesus College, Cambridge, by King Charles II.

With typical verve, Flamsteed then pushed his connection-making right to the King himself, meeting with Charles to lobby for a Royal Observatory. Charles agreed, the Observatory was completed by 16756 and the 30-year-old Flamsteed was appointed its director. This effectively made him England's first Astronomer Royal, though the title had yet to be officially created.

Here Flamsteed would spend the rest of his career, accumulating a long list of achievements in observational astronomy. His interests in positional astronomy led to highly accurate tabulations of the movements of the Sun, planets, and comets. He also determined the length of the sidereal day, which is some four minutes shorter than the solar day, and from observations of sunspots he deduced an accurate rotation period for the Sun.

Flamsteed's later years were marred by a tremendous controversy. An excruciatingly meticulous man, Flamsteed would not allow publication of any of his observations until he had checked and rechecked them; as the volume of data he amassed was huge, this was a slow and laborious process. Isaac Newton, seeing the tremendous value in Flamsteed's data, urged him repeatedly to publish them, but Flamsteed demurred, only privately giving Newton a portion of his data. Newton passed the data on to Edmond Halley, who published them. This infuriated Flamsteed, who felt not only that he was the victim of a monstrous intellectual theft, but that the published work was well below his meticulous standards. Flamsteed and Halley became bitter enemies in the ensuing row, and Flamsteed died without any reconciliation with his former colleague.

Perhaps the most enduring of Flamsteed's works is his Atlas Coelestis. It was not published until 1729, ten years after his death, primarily because the Royal Observatory personnel who published it took the time to recheck Flamsteed's measurements and produce his star maps to a level of detail they felt would satisfy the dead Astronomer Royal. The stellar numbering scheme Flamsteed devised in his atlas is still in use today, although it encompasses only the brighter stars and has been largely supplanted by more comprehensive numbering schemes.

Flamsteed died in 1719, the first in a long line of distinguished astronomers to hold the title of Astronomer Royal, and a figure whose work propagates into astronomy to this day.