Edmond Halley: The Astronomer Who Discovered Halley’s Comet

Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript:

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Welcome back to Biographics! I’m your host, Eric Malachite, and today, Ru Alexander has provided us with a nice little bite-sized bio for you all to enjoy. Let’s get into it!

Everyone here has heard of Hal’s Comet, or Haley’s Comet as most people pronounce it. It is undoubtedly the most famous comet in the world, although some people might not know why. They might also not be familiar with the man it is named after: English astronomer Edmund Halley, who did not discover the comet but calculated its trajectory and successfully predicted its return, proving to the world that such celestial objects have elliptical orbits. But that was only one of Halley’s impressive achievements. He was also an inventor, cartographer, mathematician, a student of geomagnetism, and even a daring explorer.

So today, we are taking a closer look at the life and career of the man behind the comet, Edmund Halley. Sir Edmund Halley was born on November 8th, 1656, in Haggerston, which was just outside of London at the time. Right off the bat, we reach one of the more controversial aspects related to the famed astronomer: just how do you pronounce his name? Here’s the good news: however you pronounce it, you’re probably doing it correctly. Halley himself used various spellings throughout his lifetime.

Let’s start with his first name: is it Edmond or Edmund? He used both, even using the Latinized “Edmundas” on occasion. As for his surname, contemporary accounts used no fewer than seven different spellings with different pronunciations too. So, just do your own thing because he certainly did. And lastly, we made another tiny but common mistake when we refer to him as Sir Edmund Halley. A lot of places do this, but even though he certainly deserved it, Edmund Halley was never knighted.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s get back to it. Edmund was the eldest of three children of Edmund Senior and Anne Halley. He came from a rich and prominent family; his grandfather had served as Alderman and Master of the Vintners’ Company, while his father was a successful soapmaker and a member of the Salters’ Company, one of the oldest guilds in London. Thanks to his privileged upbringing, Edmund received the finest education that money could buy. First, he was tutored at home before being sent to St. Paul’s School, where his interests in mathematics and astronomy began developing in earnest.

By the time he enrolled at Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1673, the 17-year-old Halley was already an accomplished amateur astronomer. At college, he made the acquaintance of a man who would have a great influence over his life: John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal. It was clear from the outset to the professor that Halley possessed an enthusiastic and brilliant mind, so he took the student under his wing and served as his mentor.

Under Flamsteed’s guidance, Halley published his first scientific paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. It was obviously written by a novice, and Halley made corrections to the paper several times throughout his life, but still, there he was: a published scientist at the age of 20. Despite his early successes, or perhaps because of them, Halley never bothered to graduate college. As a young man, he was more the adventurous type of scientist who wanted to go out and do things instead of spending his time in a dusty old library or laboratory.

In 1677, Halley decided to sail to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to do some science, inspired by his mentor John Flamsteed, who compiled the star catalog of the northern sky. Halley wanted to do the same thing in the southern hemisphere. So, in late 1676, he packed up his gear and traveled to the South Atlantic Ocean to the island of St. Helena. He spent over a year there making his observations, returning home in January 1678 and publishing his “Catalogus Stellarum Australium” the following year. It contained the latitudes and longitudes of 341 stars, the recording of a total lunar eclipse, as well as the rare transit of Mercury across the sun’s disk. This basically turned Halley into a rockstar of the astronomy world, and at age 22, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society.

Despite this achievement, Oxford still regarded Halley as just another dropout and refused to give him his degree on the basis that he did not fulfill his residency. However, it helped to have friends in high places, and King Charles II himself wrote a letter to Oxford requesting that they grant Halley his degree without any conditions. They, of course, did.

Now that he got his degree out of the way, Halley spent the next five years or so traveling and making astronomical observations. He went to Gdansk in Poland and Lithuania to study with Johannes Hevelius and then moved on to Paris, where he worked with none other than Giovanni Cassini, the man after whom the Cassini space probe was named.

In 1686, Halley became Secretary of the Royal Society. It was a promotion, but it also forced him to be more stationary since he had extra duties in London, such as editing their scientific journal. That editing experience came in handy, thanks to a new connection he made at Cambridge: a young, antisocial oddball named Isaac Newton. Yes, that Isaac Newton! Just like Flamsteed did for him, Halley recognized Newton’s genius and wanted to support him. He encouraged Newton to expand his work on the laws of motion and universal gravitation and then published it with Halley editing his manuscript and paying for the whole thing. The result was “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” or simply known as “Principia,” one of the most important scientific books in history.

Of course, Halley’s world did not revolve only around his work; his personal life had plenty of ups and downs too. His mother died while he was still in college, and his father remarried, but the marriage was not a happy one and caused a lot of financial problems for both Edmund Halley Senior and Junior, since the latter still mainly relied on his father’s support to carry on his studies unimpeded. Halley’s financial burdens increased in 1682 when he married Mary Tooke, and the two started a family together. Things got even worse in 1684 when his father mysteriously disappeared without a trace and was found dead five weeks later. His financial security, or lack thereof, was one of the main reasons why Halley mostly stayed in London for the next two decades instead of traveling the world as he would have liked.

Like many scientific geniuses of his time, Edmund Halley did not constrain himself to a single area of study. Sure, he was mainly an astronomer, but his contributions were hardly limited to that field. In 1686, he produced what might be the world’s first meteorological chart, mapping the trade winds and monsoons that were known at the time. He also designed a rudimentary liquid compass and built a diving bell that allowed him to stay underwater for up to four hours at a time. He even dabbled in actuarial science for a bit by writing a paper on life annuities that was later used in the development of life tables in academia. He served as the civilian professor of geometry at Oxford beginning in 1703 and later became the Astronomer Royal, a position he maintained until his death.

By the end of the century, he even got the opportunity to resume his life as an explorer. In 1698, he sailed off into the Atlantic Ocean again, this time as captain of the HMS Paramore. Even though he had no experience captaining a ship, he took to the position, although not in the way you would expect. He was always a bit rougher around the edges compared to his fellow academics. Later in life, his former mentor John Flamsteed wrote that Halley now “talks, swears, and drinks brandy like a sea captain,” which just makes him sound awesome.

His goal on the voyage was to try and solve the pesky problem of magnetic declination, which is the variation between magnetic north and true north. Unfortunately, his first trip didn’t go very well; his men felt Halley wasn’t competent enough to command a vessel and refused to obey his orders. It wasn’t on the level of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” though; the ship simply reached Barbados and then returned home. The following year, he set off again, this time with a temporary commission as an actual captain of the Royal Navy. He made thorough observations of terrestrial magnetism and came up with the idea of depicting magnetic declination as contour lines on a map. As a result of his work in 1700, he developed the first declination chart of the Atlantic Ocean, which soon became commonplace in navigation. Not only that, but it’s essential to know in astronomy as well.

As you can see, Edmund Halley accomplished a lot in his career, but it was one achievement that secured his immortality. Let’s settle one question: why was Halley’s Comet such a big deal compared to all other comets in space? As NASA puts it, it was because it marked the first time astronomers understood that comets could be repeat visitors to our night skies. Up until that point, comets were thought to be divine omens, atmospheric anomalies, signs of an impending apocalypse, or simply celestial travelers briefly shining in our night sky to say hello. They all had one thing in common, though: people thought they showed up once and then were gone forever.

But then came Edmund Halley, who first studied the comet that would make him famous in 1682. It was interesting to him, but there wasn’t much he could do at the time. However, after meeting Isaac Newton and learning about gravity and motion, Halley was able to chart the paths of dozens of comets and reach a bold new conclusion. He later published his ideas in 1705 in “Synopsis Astronomiæ Cometæ,” where he proclaimed that the comet of 1531 observed by Apianus was the same as that described by Kepler and Longomontanus in 1607, which he again observed when it returned in 1682. He confidently predicted its return in 1758.

Unfortunately, Halley never got to see his prediction come true; he died on January 25th, 1742, at the age of 85. But you all know what happened next: on Christmas night 1758, Halley’s Comet appeared once again in the night sky, proving Edmund Halley correct and cementing his legacy as one of history’s greatest astronomers. It then returned in 1835, 1920, and 1986, with a roughly 76-year gap between visits. It is scheduled to come again in July 2061, and you can bet I’ll be there!

If you want to go in-depth about each past visit and what people at the time thought it meant, you can check out our video on Halley’s Comet on Geographics, presented by the esteemed Simon Whistler.

I certainly hope you enjoyed that bite-sized bio! If you did, be sure to do all that algorithmic jazz, praise your kitty overlord, and keep it tuned here to Biographics for more videos just like this. I’m your host, Eric Malachite, and I’ll see you next time!

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