Edmond Halley Facts
Edmond Halley Facts
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| Interesting Edmond Halley Facts: |
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| Halley was studied at St Paul's School and in 1673, entered The Queen's College, Oxford. |
| While still at college he published papers on the Solar System and sunspots. |
| In 1675 he became an assistant to John Flamseed, the astronomer Royal at the Greenwich Observatory. |
| In 1676 Halley set up an observatory on the south Atlantic island of St Helena to catalogue the stars of the southern hemisphere. |
| It was at St Helena that he observed a transit of Mercury and realized that a transit of Venus could be used to determine the absolute size of the solar system. |
| Halley received his M.A. degree at Oxford and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1678. |
| Halley was interested in lunar observations and problems of gravity and Kepler's laws of planetary motion. |
| In 1691 Haley built a diving bell which used weighted barrels of air sent from the surface to maintain a breathable atmosphere. |
| Halley and five companions took the bell to 60 feet in the Thames and remained there for more than 90 minutes. |
| In 1691 Halley demonstrated a rudimentary working model of a magnetic compass that used a liquid-filled housing to minimize the wobble of the magnetic needle compass. |
| In 1693 Halley published a paper on life annuities which strongly influenced the development of actuarial science. |
| The Royal Society censured Halley for his suggestion that Noah's flood might be related to a comet impact. |
| In 1706 Halley published Synopsis Astronomia Cometicae in which he stated that the comet sightings of 1456, 1531, 1607 and 1682 were the same comet and that it would return in 1758. |
| He did not live to see his prediction come true but when it did, the comet was named for him. |
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