Royal Greenwich Observatory: Astronomers' Royal Papers: Flamsteed

RGO 1

1638-c1731

Microfilm copies of the papers of John Flamsteed, Astronomer Royal 1675-1719.

Flamsteed's observations, made with the various instruments that he acquired, are preserved both in their original note books and in the form in which he eventually put them together to be published posthumously in his Historiae Coelestis of 1725 and his Atlas Coelestis of 1729. There is also correspondence with contemporaries including Isaac Newton, James Gregory, Edmond Halley, Johannes Hevelius and Giovanni Domenico Cassini as well as amateur astronomers. The collection also contains correspondence and documents involving aspects of Flamsteed's life outside astronomy: as rector of the parish of Burstow and as the inheritor of his father's lead mining interests.

Some of the microfilm in this series was formerly in PRO 28

They papers were rearranged in the nineteenth century by Francis Baily whose biography of Flamsteed was published in 1835.

PRO 28/50-73

Royal Greenwich Observatory Archives

Public Record(s)

English

76 microform

Topics

Research

Mining and quarrying

When Flamsteed died, the records of his work and correspondence passed first to his wife and then possibly to his son-in-law, James Hodgson, who died intestate in 1755. The collection then passed into obscurity until 1771 when the Observatory purchased all the surviving papers.

John Flamsteed, was appointed Astronomical Observator in 1676, later to be known as the first Astronomer Royal. Charles II had been persuaded that his navy and his merchants would never be able to navigate safely until a reliable method for calculating longitude at sea could be evolved. At the instigation of Jonas Moore, Surveyor General of the Ordnance, he ordered the building of an Observatory in Greenwich Park using money from the sale of decayed gunpowder and he endowed the post of Astronomical Observator with a salary of £100 per year. John Flamsteed, self taught son of a Derby maltster, accepted the post through the recommendation of his friend Jonas Moore and held it for forty three years.

Flamsteed employed a variety of assistants and calculators and with the available instruments was able to improve greatly on contemporary standards of accuracy in his tables and charts. In addition to his central work of measurement he entered into contemporary issues such as the detection of stellar parallax, refraction, cometary motion, the unequal motions of Sun, Moon and planets and many issues in mathematics and optics.