Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann · 11 Apr 2016 · 695pp · 194,693 words
solution. A more precise answer to the annuity valuation problem would actually emerge from something quite strange: games and play. 15 THE DISCOVERY OF CHANCE Edmond Halley’s graphic representation of the mortality probabilities for a tontine with three claimants. The annuity contract was one of Europe’s greatest contributions to humanity
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groups. Instead of sharing this data with Bernoulli, Leibnitz forwarded it to the Royal Academy in London, where it piqued the interest of the astronomer, Edmund Halley. Halley used the Breslaw data to construct mortality tables, that is, frequencies of death by age group. He published his findings in 1693 in the
Money for Nothing
by Thomas Levenson · 18 Aug 2020 · 495pp · 136,714 words
with another. The Domesday records may have aspired to precision but didn’t come close to achieving it. CHAPTER THREE “Very probable Conjectures” In 1693, Edmond Halley, age thirty-seven, was, for all his relative youth, recognized as one of the Royal Society’s most formidable talents. Like many of his contemporaries
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to be lost to memory. Neumann’s accounts could easily have fallen prey to that common fate but for chance. When Justel died in 1693, Edmond Halley had a rummage through his papers. What he encountered in Neumann’s “curious Tables of the Bills of Mortality at the City of Breslaw” inspired
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the calculation of the odds for each person reaching any age—for example, our chances of making fifty, from a current age of twenty-five. Edmond Halley in the early 1720s This far, Halley remained within the bounds of what Petty and his heirs had been doing for more than thirty years
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range of questions with very little contact with the virtuosos in London. That near isolation lasted until that day in the summer of 1684 when Edmond Halley paid his fellow comet enthusiast a visit. Halley had come to Trinity College to settle a question of the sort more commonly associated with the
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—and here the play came as an unanticipated consequence of the birth of life insurance. For all that London’s insurers paid little attention to Edmond Halley’s paper about death in Breslau, life insurance itself was readily available in Britain from the early decades of the eighteenth century. The key historical
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age, everyone took care of his friends—even Isaac Newton, for example, who as warden of the Mint placed his fellow comet lover and disciple Edmond Halley in an official post. Newton had honored the principle: a man with gifts to give would be expected to take care of his own and
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, quoted in McCormick, William Petty, pp. 294–95. CHAPTER 3 HE WAS AN INVENTOR Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 239. HE WAS A COURAGEOUS EXPLORER Cook, Edmond Halley, p. 256. HE MASTERED ARABIC G. A. Russell, The “Araibick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in
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in Latin: https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20190828095830/https://genius.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/exhibits/browse/conics/. HE GENERATED A “SOLUTION OF A PROBLEM” Edmond Halley, “A Discourse Concerning Gravity […] Together with the Solution of a Problem of Great Use in Gunnery,” Philosophical Transactions 16 (January 1687): 3–21, https://royalsocietypublishing
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.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1686.0002. THE CAUSE OF NOAH’S FLOOD Edmond Halley, “Some Considerations About the Cause of the Universal Deluge, Laid Before the Royal Society, on the 12th of December 1694,” Philosophical Transactions 33 (1724): 118
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. (Note: The dates refer to time of publication, not the date of the Royal Society meeting at which the papers were read.) EDMOND HALLEY HAD A RUMMAGE THROUGH HIS PAPERS Edmond Halley, “An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind […],” Philosophical Transactions 17, no. 196 (December 3, 1693): 597. Some accounts suggest
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THE LIVES OF STRANGERS HUNDREDS OF MILES DISTANT In this summary of Halley’s insights, I follow the breakdown of his paper in James Ciecka, “Edmond Halley’s Life Table and its Uses,” Journal of Legal Economics 15, no. 1 (2008): 68. See also David Bellhouse, “A New Look at Halley’s
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the Distant Future in the Early-Modern Past,” Financial History Seminar, Stern School of Business, New York University, April 12, 2013. “HOW UNJUSTLY WE REPINE” Edmond Halley, “Some Further Considerations on the Breslau Bills of Mortality,” Philosophical Transactions 17, no. 198 (March 1693): 655. For a statistician’s evaluation of Halley’s
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South Sea; or, The Biters Bit. London: J. Roberts, 1720. ———. The Stock-Jobbers; or, The Humours of Exchange-Alley. London: J. Roberts, 1720. Ciecka, James. “Edmond Halley’s Life Table and Its Uses.” Journal of Legal Economics 15, no. 1 (2008): 65–74. Clapham, Sir John. The Bank of England. 2 volumes
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: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Cole, Arthur H. “The Bancroft Collection.” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 9, no. 6 (December 1935): 93–96. Cook, Alan. Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Cowper, Mary. Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper. London: John Murray, 1864. Coxe, William. Memoirs
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris · 30 Jun 1988 · 661pp · 169,298 words
’s honor all must turn, each in its track, without a sound, forever tracing Newton’s ground.* —Einstein Nearer the gods no mortal may approach. —Edmond Halley, on Newton’s Principia Newton created a mathematically quantified account of gravitation that embraced terrestrial and celestial phenomena alike. In doing so he demolished the
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occult qualities, as to a refuge from ignorance.10 This clear new cast of mind was personified by the three members of the Royal Society—Edmond Halley, Christopher Wren, and Robert Hooke—who lunched together in a London tavern one cold January afternoon in 1684. Wren, who had been president of the
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in front of the sun. During these transits, as they are called, the planet appears as a black circle silhouetted against the blazing solar disk. Edmond Halley, who had observed a transit of Mercury during his expedition to St. Helena, realized that the distance to Venus might be determined by timing, from
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correct value. Time: 1675 Noteworthy Events: Olaus Römer determines, from studying the satellites of Jupiter, that light has a finite velocity. Time: 1684 Noteworthy Events: Edmond Halley visits Isaac Newton at Trinity College, resurrects line of research that leads Newton to write the Principia. Time: 1686 Noteworthy Events: Bernard de Fontenelle’s
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, 1985, p. 123. 2. Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, 1598, in Landes, 1983, p. 110. 3. In Howse, 1980, p. 12. 4. Edmond Halley, “A Unique Method by which the Parallax of the Sun, or its Distance from the Earth, may be Securely Determined by Means of Observing Venus
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. Armitage, Angus. Copernicus, the Founder of Modern Astronomy. New York: Barnes, 1962. —————. Sun, Stand Thou Still: The Life and Work of Copernicus. London: Sigma, 1947. —————. Edmond Halley. London: Nelson, 1966. —————. The World of Copernicus. New York: Mentor, 1951. Asimov, Isaac. Understanding Physics, Vol. Ill, The Electron, Proton, and Neutron. New York: Mentor
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and Times. New York: American Scholar Publications, 1966. Hall, A.R. The Scientific Revolution 1500–1800. Boston: Beacon, 1966. Halley, Edmond. The Three Voyages of Edmond Halley in the Paramare 1698–1701, ed. Norman J.W. Thrower. London: Hakluyt Society, 1981. Hanson, Norwood Russell. The Concept of the Positron. London: Cambridge University
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: University of Chicago Press, 1982. MacPherson, Hector. Makers of Astronomy. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Colorful, hyperbolic history. MacPike, Eugene Fairfield. Correspondence and Papers of Edmond Halley. London: Oxford University Press, 1932. McCrea, M.J. Rees et al. The Constants of Physics. London: Royal Society, 1983. McCuster, Brian. The Quest for Quarks
Isaac Newton
by James Gleick · 1 Jan 2003 · 244pp · 68,223 words
full length of King’s College Chapel. He tracked it almost nightly through the first months of 1681.1 A young astronomer traveling to France, Edmond Halley, a new Fellow of the Royal Society, was amazed at its brilliance.2 Robert Hooke observed it several times in London. Across the Atlantic Ocean
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’s superior powers. He set forth a procedure: find the mathematical curve, suggest a physical reason. But he never received a reply. Four years later Edmond Halley made a pilgrimage to Cambridge. Halley had been discussing planetary motion in coffee-houses with Hooke and the architect Christopher Wren. Some boasting ensued. Halley
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account for the data. I. Bernard Cohen, “Prop. 24: Theory of the Tides; The First Enunciation of the Principle of Interference,” in Principia 240; Ronan, Edmond Halley, pp. 69f. 29. Galileo, Dialogue, pp. 445 and 462. 30. These explicitly became rules in the second edition; in the first, they were called “hypotheses
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-Existence, or Impossiblity, of an External World. London: Robert Gosling, 1713. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945. Cook, Alan. Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Costello, William T. The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
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of Wisconsin Press, 1965–73. Hall, Marie Boas. Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Halley, Edmond. Correspondence and Papers of Edmond Halley. Edited by E. F. MacPike. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937. Harman, P. M.; and Shapiro, Alan E., eds. The Investigation of Difficult Things: Essays on
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: Norton, 1999. Raphson, Joseph. The History of Fluxions. London: William Pearson, 1715. Rattansi, Piyo M. Isaac Newton and Gravity. London: Wildwood, 1974. Ronan, Colin A. Edmond Halley: Genius in Eclipse. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. Royal Society. Newton Tercentenary Celebrations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947. Russell, Bertrand. Mysticism and Logic. New
Longitude
by Dava Sobel · 1 Jan 1995 · 128pp · 38,963 words
and practicability. Renowned astronomers approached the longitude challenge by appealing to the clockwork universe: Galileo Galilei, Jean Dominique Cassini, Christiaan Huygens, Sir Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley, of comet fame, all entreated the moon and stars for help. Palatial observatories were founded at Paris, London, and Berlin for the express purpose of
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were further contaminated by the vagaries of terrestrial magnetism, the strength of which waxed or waned with time in different regions of the seas, as Edmond Halley found during a two-year voyage of observation. In 1699, Samuel Fyler, the seventy-year-old rector of Stockton, in Wiltshire, England, came up with
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to act quickly, the committee members sought expert advice from Sir Isaac Newton, by then a grand old man of seventy-two, and his friend Edmond Halley. Halley had gone to the island of St. Helena some years earlier to map the stars of the southern hemisphere—virtually virgin territory on the
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of the method’s merits. Harrison, however, knew the identity of one of the most famous members of the Board of Longitude—the great Dr. Edmond Halley—and he headed straight for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich to find him. Halley had become England’s second astronomer royal in 1720, after John
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drawn plans for a nearly identical device, but the description got lost until long after Newton’s death in a mountain of paperwork left with Edmond Halley. Halley himself, as well as Robert Hooke before him, had sketched out similar designs for the same purpose.) Most British sailors called the instrument Hadley
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precision of the census by several orders of magnitude. Limited as he was to the skies over Greenwich, Flamsteed was glad to see the flamboyant Edmond Halley take off for the South Atlantic in 1676, right after the founding of the Royal Observatory. Halley set up a mini-Greenwich on the island
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—and to demonstrate the value of the tables for navigation. Maskelyne voyaged to the tiny island of St. Helena, south of the Atlantic Equator, where Edmond Halley had journeyed in the previous century to map the southern stars, and where Napoleon Bonaparte would be condemned, in the following century, to live out
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, Nathaniel Bliss broke the long tradition of longevity associated with the title of astronomer royal. John Flamsteed had served in that capacity for forty years, Edmond Halley and James Bradley had each enjoyed a tenure of more than twenty, but Bliss passed away after just two years at the post. The name
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chronometers— without resorting to lunars more than once every few weeks at sea. Inside Flamsteed House, where Harrison first sought the advice and counsel of Edmond Halley in 1730, the Harrison timekeepers hold court in their present places of honor. The big sea clocks, H-1, H-2, and H-3, were
The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI
by Edward Dolnick · 8 Feb 2011 · 439pp · 104,154 words
story is quite likely a myth. Before anyone knew of his mathematical genius, Newton had dazzled the Royal Society with this compact yet powerful telescope. Edmond Halley (known today for Halley’s Comet) was a brilliant astronomer and, just as surprisingly, a man so congenial that he could get along with Isaac
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years he gave most of his attention to optics, alchemy, and theology instead. Late on a January afternoon in 1684, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, and Edmond Halley left a meeting of the Royal Society and wandered into a coffeehouse to pick up a conversation they had been carrying on all day. Coffee
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Book III, which was destined to make the Principia immortal. Chapter Forty-Eight Trouble with Mr. Hooke If not for the Principia’s unsung hero, Edmond Halley, the world might never have seen Book III. At the time he was working to coax the Principia from Newton, Halley had no official standing
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!, p. 58. 280 taverns with Peter the Great: Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 318. 280 he would invent a diving bell: Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 11, 140–41, 281. 280 “Sir Isaac replied immediately”: Westfall, Never at
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: Telescope belonging to Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), 1671 by English School. Royal Society, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library. Page 15 Top: Portrait of Edmond Halley, c.1687 (oil on canvas) by Thomas Murray (1663–1734). Royal Society, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library. Bottom: Wellcome Library, London. Page 16 © Werner
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century
by Geoffrey Parker · 29 Apr 2013 · 1,773pp · 486,685 words
‘northern lights’ caused when highly charged electrons from the magnetosphere interact with elements in the earth's atmosphere) became so rare that when the astronomer Edmond Halley saw an aurora in 1716 he wrote a learned paper describing the phenomenon – because it was the first he had seen in almost fifty years
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lunar atlas (see Plate 1), had studied at Leiden and met scholars in England and France; became a Fellow of the Royal Society; and welcomed Edmond Halley and other prominent scientists to his impressive observatory in Danzig. In Spain, Miguel Marcelino Boix y Moliner asserted in a book entitled Hippocrates illuminated (1716
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descriptions of comets that he found in Aristotle, medieval chronicles and more modern accounts, as well as the observations made by his contemporaries – not only Edmond Halley (who travelled to several European observatories to check their records) and John Flamsteed (the astronomer royal) but also the Jesuit Valentin Stansel from Brazil, the
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1680 comet had previously appeared in 1577 and would therefore reappear in 1784. None of them won the prize set up by ex-Queen Christina. Edmond Halley would also have reached the wrong conclusion if he had decided to study the 1680 comet, but instead he focused on the fireball that appeared
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etc’. Four years later, in Tuscany, papal pressure ended the Grand Duke's efforts to gather and study serial data on the climate. In England, Edmond Halley's doubts about the veracity of the Bible (for example, questioning the existence of a single act of Creation) cost him the chair of astronomy
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. Rabb, ‘Introduction’, 149; Rabb, ‘The Scientific Revolution’, 509. I thank Mircea Platon for alerting me to the second item. 75. Skippon, An account, 607; Ronan, Edmond Halley, 124, Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed to Isaac Newton in 1691. Thirteen years later Halley became professor of geometry at Oxford, despite another critical letter from
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Amérique latine (Geneva, 1992) Rommelse, G., ‘The role of mercantilism in Anglo-Dutch political relations, 1650–1674’, EcHR, LXIII (2010), 591–611 Ronan, C. A., Edmond Halley: Genius in eclipse (New York, 1969) Roper, L., Witch craze: Terror and fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, 2004) Rosental, Paul-André, ‘The novelty of
A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson · 5 May 2003 · 654pp · 204,260 words
, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available, and partly with a practical problem that had first arisen with the English astronomer Edmond Halley many years before—long before Bouguer and La Condamine dreamed of going to South America, much less had a reason for doing so. Halley was
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in a project to measure an astronomical event of great importance: the passage of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun. The tireless Edmond Halley had suggested years before that if you measured one of these passages from selected points on the Earth, you could use the principles of triangulation
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the Earth was ancient. The question was simply how ancient. One of the better early attempts at dating the planet came from the ever-reliable Edmond Halley, who in 1715 suggested that if you divided the total amount of salt in the world's seas by the amount added each year, you
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to his attention, he recalculated using the same data and put the figure at 153 million years. John Joly, also of Trinity, decided to give Edmond Halley's ocean salts idea a whirl, but his method was based on so many faulty assumptions that he was hopelessly adrift. He calculated that the
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a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year. The impulse of the atmosphere to seek equilibrium was first suspected by Edmond Halley—the man who was everywhere—and elaborated upon in the eighteenth century by his fellow Briton George Hadley, who saw that rising and falling columns
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real master race, Homo sapiens. Things would never be the same again. 30 GOOD-BYE IN THE EARLY 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually
The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars
by Jo Marchant · 15 Jan 2020 · 544pp · 134,483 words
all the distances in the solar system are related: find just one and they would know them all. In 1716, England’s second Astronomer Royal, Edmond Halley, suggested how to measure a planet’s parallax more accurately than ever before, by watching Venus as it passed in front of the Sun—an
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True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker & Co., 1995). measure a planet’s parallax: Edmund Halley, “A New Method of Determining the Parallax of the Sun,” Philosophical Transactions 29 (1716): 454; Michael Chauvin, “Astronomy in the Sandwich Islands: The 1874 Transit
Is God a Mathematician?
by Mario Livio · 6 Jan 2009 · 315pp · 93,628 words
and vindictively erased every single reference to Hooke’s name from the last part of his book on the subject. To his friend the astronomer Edmond Halley (1656–1742), Newton wrote on June 20, 1686: Figure 27 He [Hooke] should rather have excused himself by reason of his inability. For tis plain
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mathematical understanding of the use of statistics. Surprisingly perhaps, the person who made the most significant improvements to Graunt’s life table was the astronomer Edmond Halley—the same person who persuaded Newton to publish his Principia. Why was everybody so interested in life tables? Partly because this was, and still is
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Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1685–1753). In a pamphlet entitled The Analyst; Or a Discourse Addressed to An Infidel Mathematician (the latter presumed to be Edmond Halley), Berkeley criticized the very foundations of the fields of calculus and analysis, as introduced by Newton (in Principia) and Leibniz. In particular, Berkeley demonstrated that
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