Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 4.4 Edmond Halley
(1656-1742) (from John Francis
Waller (ed.) The Imperial
Dictionary of Universal
Biography, vol. 11 (Glasgow:
William Mackenzie, c. 1857)).
Courtesy of John Wyse
Jackson.
after its publication. In terms of ideas on geochronology, it is an
important work.
Edmond Halley, along with Sir Isaac Newton, ranks as one of the
best-known English scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. His father Edmond was a soapboiler who had extensive prop-
erty interests in London, and who died a wealthy man reputed to be
worth £4000 (£1.6 million in today's currency). Living in London,
Edmond junior (born in 1656) survived the Great Plague in 1665 and
the Great Fire in 1666 but his school, St Paul's, did not. In 1673 he
went up to Oxford, where he studied at Queen's College. After gradu-
ating he spent a year on St Helena (later to find fame as Napoleon
Bonaparte's final exile home), where he set up an observatory. In 1680
he observed a comet while travelling to Paris: this comet now bears his
name. In 1686 he was appointed Clerk to the Royal Society and his
Principia, which contained his theory of comet movements, was pub-
lished the following year. By 1695 he was making further calculations
about the trajectories and timings of various comets and mapping the
positions of stars, and then in the next four years undertook a number
