John Flamsteed (1646–1719)

John Flamsteed was born near Derby on 19 August 1646, the son of Stephen Flamsteed (c. 1615–1688) and his first wife, Mary Spateman (d. 1649). As a youth, he suffered from an undiagnosed ailment, the symptoms of which were (in his own words) ‘weakenesse in my knees and Joynts‘; in consequence, he left Derby Grammar School at the age of fifteen and did not attend university, undergoing instead a variety of medical treatments, including ‘stroking’ by the Irish healer Valentine Greatrakes.

Within months of leaving the school at Derby, Flamsteed began to focus his attention on astronomy, encouraged by local mathematicians and astronomers and assisted through the loan of relevant books. In September 1662 he observed a solar eclipse and in 1667 he began a correspondence with Vincent Wing. Having worked on an improved annual almanac, he prepared, in 1669, a document on ‘the Eclipse and Appulses’ and sent this to the astrologer John Stansby, who passed it to Elias Ashmole. The latter presented it, in turn, at a meeting of the Royal Society, where it was well received and was published subsequently by Henry Oldenburg in the Philosophical Transactions. Following this, both Oldenburg and John Collins corresponded with Flamsteed and in 1670 the young man visited London, where Collins introduced him to Jonas Moore (1617–1679), surveyor-general of the ordnance. On 21 December 1670, a record was made of Flamsteed’s admittance to Jesus College, Cambridge, to study under Dr Richard Wroe, and where he proceeded MA by royal mandate on 5 June 1673. He was ordained deacon in 1675 and priest in 1685. He married Margaret Cooke (c. 1670–1730), the daughter of a lawyer, Ralph Cooke, on 23 October 1692, at St Lawrence Jewry. Margaret was well educated, interested in mathematics, and she helped her husband in his work as his amanuensis and, following his death, she oversaw posthumous publication of his work. Although the marriage was childless, Flamsteed’s niece Ann Heming lived with the couple from c. 1694.

In Derby in the early 1670s, Flamsteed conducted work on the stars in the Pleiades cluster, measured planetary diameters, and—in imitation of the work of Jean Dominique Cassini—observed Jupiter’s satellites. He contributed to John Wallis’s 1673 edition of the work of Jeremiah Horrocks, and, in the same year initiated a correspondence with Cassini at the request of the Royal Society.

From September 1674, Flamsteed’s correspondence reflect his participation in the work of Jonas Moore to found a royal observatory and he was appointed ‘astronomical observator’ by warrant on 4 March 1675 with a brief ‘to apply himselfe with the most exact care and diligence, to the rectifieing the Tables of the motions of the Heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so much desired Longitude of places for the perfecteing the Art of Navigation’. A suitable site at Greenwich was selected for the new observatory building and its inauguration was celebrated with the observation of a partial solar eclipse on 1 June 1676. After a troubled period immediately following the death of Jonas Moore in 1679, the observatory began to garner recognition, largely thanks to Flamsteed’s correspondence with such continental astronomers as Cassini, Roemer, and Hevelius, as well as to his publications in the Philosophical Transactions.

The last decades of Flamsteed’s life were blighted by bitter controversy. In 1676, he had begun producing a new catalogue of the fixed stars, but this work proved too slow for Newton and Halley who coveted access to the Astronomer Royal’s observations. With the help of Prince George of Denmark, who undertook to cover the cost of publishing the catalogue, they engineered the appropriation of the project for their own purposes. The first volume of the Historia coelestis Britannica was published by Halley in 1712 without Flamsteed’s permission. Not only was the work badly flawed, containing hundreds of incomplete or garbled observations, Newton went so far as to substitute Flamsteed’s preface with one of his own making. Fortunately for Flamsteed he was able to get hold of three hundred copies of the volume, which he destroyed subsequently on a bonfire—fittingly in Greenwich Park.

Flamsteed died at the Royal Observatory on 31 December 1719. His estate, including his books and manuscripts, passed to his wife Margaret and to Ann Heming, and thereby to latter’s husband, James Hodgson. Margaret Flamsteed and James Hodgson served as joint editors of Flamsteed’s Historia coelestis Britannica, the three volumes of which were published in 1725.