Simon Newcomb was born in Wallace, Nova Scotia in 1835. His
mother was Emily Prince, daughter of a New Brunswick magistrate. His father,
John Burton Newcomb, was a teacher who traveled to teach in different parts of
the country. Simon received no education apart from his father but, from this,
was provided foundation for his future studies. At the age of 16, Simon became
apprentice to a herbalist named Dr. Forshay, but became fed up with how
unscientific Forshay’s practices seemed and walked out on the apprenticeship
after two years. From there he kept
walking, and was said to have walked 120 miles to the port of Calais in Maine
and where he met the captain who agreed to take him to Salem Maine in return
for his work as a sailor on board of the ship.
From Salem he journeyed to Maryland. In Maryland, he taught for two
years and studied a variety of subjects in his spare time, mathematics and
astronomy, most deeply. Newcomb began his first job for astronomy in 1857, he began a position in the American
Nautical Almanac Office . His job was to produce new astronomical tables to be
used for navigation at sea. While working there, he studied at the Lawrence
Scientific School of Harvard University and graduated in 1858. He then
continued working at the Almanac Office but also began deeper astronomical
research at Harvard. One of his first research topics was to examine the orbits
of the asteroids in an attempt to learn something of their origin.
Simon Newcomb spent the years
1861-1871 determining the positions of celestial objects using various
telescopes, most favoring a 26-inch refractor telescope-the largest telescope
of its kind in the United States, built under Newcomb’s supervision. He was most fascinated by the orbits of the
planets and their moon and aimed to improve on the existing knowledge of their
positions by calculating the changes in their orbit caused by gravitational
attraction of other bodies. Newcomb discovered that the currently used tables
for the moon, compiled by Hansen, were inaccurate. Hansen used data that went
back to 1750, but Newcomb felt that even older data could be of value. When in
Paris to observe the solar eclipse of 1870, he had found that they had kept
data dating back to 1672. Newcomb used this data to discover that Hansen’s tables
were preceding 1750 were badly inaccurate. For this and his work on the
positions of Uranus and Neptune, Newcomb was awarded with a gold medal from the
Royal Astronomical Society in 1874 and offered the post of Director of Harvard
College Observatory (which he declined, for he preferred computation to
observation.)
In 1877 Newcomb became director of
the American Nautical Almanac Office and was given a position where the
emphasis was on computation rather than observation. Newcomb also became
professor of mathematics and astronomy at John Hopkins University, served as president
of the American Mathematics Society from 1897-1898, founded and was first president
of the American Astronomical Society. Newcomb wrote many popular astronomy
books including: Popular astronomy (1878), Astronomy for schools and
colleges (1880), Elements of astronomy (1890), The stars
(1901), Astronomy for everyone (1903), and Spherical astronomy
(1906). He completed his last book, Motion
of the Moon just before he died of bladder cancer in 1908. Simon Newcomb
was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, President Taft
and representatives of several foreign governments attended the funeral.
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