Thomas Harriot
Thomas Harriot | |
---|---|
Born | c. 1560 Oxford, England |
Died | 2 July 1621 London, England | (aged 60–61)
Alma mater | St Mary Hall, Oxford |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Astronomy, mathematics, ethnography |
Thomas Harriot (
Biography
Early life and education
Born in 1560 in Oxford, England, Thomas Harriot attended St Mary Hall, Oxford. His name appears in the hall's registry dating from 1577.[8]
Harriot started to study navigation shortly after receiving a bachelor's degree from Oxford University.[4] The study of navigation that Harriot studied concentrated on the idea of the open seas and how to cross to the New World from the Atlantic Ocean.[3] He used instruments such as the astrolabe and sextants to aide his studies of navigation.[3] After educating himself by incorporating ideals from his astronomic and nautical studies, Harriot taught other captains his navigational techniques in Raleigh.[4] His findings were recorded in the Articon but were later never found.[3]
Roanoke
After his graduation from Oxford in 1580, Harriot was first hired by Sir
Harriot and Manteo spent many days in one another's company; Harriot interrogated Manteo closely about life in the New World and learned much that was to the advantage of the English settlers.[10] In addition, he recorded the sense of awe with which the Native Americans viewed European technology:
- "Many things they sawe with us...as mathematical instruments, sea compasses...[and] spring clocks that seemed to goe of themselves – and many other things we had – were so strange unto them, and so farre exceeded their capacities to comprehend the reason and meanes how they should be made and done, that they thought they were rather the works of gods than men."[10]
He made only one expedition, around 1585–86, and spent some time in the New World visiting
His account of the voyage, named A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, was published in 1588 (probably written a year before). The True Report contains an early account of the Native American population encountered by the expedition; it proved very influential upon later English explorers and colonists. He wrote: "Whereby it may be hoped, if means of good government be used, that they may in short time be brought to civility and the embracing of true religion."[13] At the same time, his views of Native Americans' industry and capacity to learn were later largely ignored in favor of the parts of the "True Report" about extractable minerals and resources.[citation needed]
As a scientific adviser during the voyage, Harriot was asked by Raleigh to find the most efficient way to stack cannonballs on the deck of the ship. His ensuing theory about the
Later years
Harriot was employed for many years by
The Duke was surrounded by many scholars and learned men and provided a more stable form of patronage than Raleigh, In 1595 the Duke of Northumberland made property in Durham over to Harriot, moving him up the social ladder into 'the landed gentry'. Not long after the Durham transactions, the Duke gave Harriot the use of one of the houses on the estate at Syon, to work on optics and the sine law of refraction.[14]
Harriot's sponsors began to fall from favor: Raleigh was the first, and Harriot's other patron Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, was imprisoned in 1605 in connection with the Gunpowder Plot as he was closely connected to one of the conspirators, Thomas Percy. Harriot himself was interrogated and briefly imprisoned but was soon released.[3] Walter Warner, Robert Hues, William Lower, and other scientists were present around the Earl of Northumberland's mansion as they worked for him and assisted in the teaching of the family's children.[8]
While this was occurring, Harriot continued his work involving mainly astronomy, and in 1607 Harriot used his notes from the observations of Halley's Comet to elaborate on his understanding of its orbit.[3] Soon after, in 1609 and 1610 respectively, Harriot turned his attention towards the physical aspects of the Moon and his observations of the first sightings of sunspots.[4]
In early 1609, he bought a "Dutch trunke" (telescope), invented in 1608, and his observations were among the first uses of a telescope for astronomy. Harriot is now credited as the first astronomer to draw an astronomical object after viewing it through a telescope: he drew a map of the Moon on 5 August 1609 [O.S. 26 July 1609], preceding Galileo by several months. By 1613, Harriot had created two maps of the whole Moon, with many identifiable features such as lunar craters depicted in their correct relative positions that were not to be improved upon for several decades.[15][16] He also observed sunspots in December 1610.[17]
Death
From 1614 Harriot was consulting
He died on 2 July 1621, three days after writing his will (discovered by Henry Stevens).[19] His executors posthumously published his Artis Analyticae Praxis on algebra in 1631; Nathaniel Torporley was the intended executor of Harriot's wishes, but Walter Warner in the end pulled the book into shape.[20] It may be a compendium of some of his works but does not represent all that he left unpublished (more than 400 sheets of annotated writing). It is not directed in a way that follows the manuscripts and it fails to give the full significance of Harriot's writings.[8]
Thomas Harriot was buried in the church of St Christopher le Stocks in Threadneedle Street, near where he died. The church was subsequently damaged in the Great Fire of London, and demolished in 1781 to enable expansion of the Bank of England.
Legacy
Harriott also studied
His algebra book Artis Analyticae Praxis[23] (1631) was published posthumously in Latin. Unfortunately, the editors did not understand much of his reasoning and removed the parts they did not comprehend such as the negative and complex roots of equations. Because of the dispersion of Harriot's writings the full annotated English translation of the Praxis was not completed until 2007.[24] A more complete manuscript, De numeris triangularibus et inde de progressionibus arithmeticis: Magisteria magna, was finally published in facsimile form with commentary by Janet Beery and Jackie Stedall in 2009.[25]
The first biography of Harriot was written in 1876 by Henry Stevens of Vermont but not published until 1900[19] fourteen years after his death. The publication was limited to 167 copies and so the work was not widely known until 1972 when a reprint edition appeared.[26] Prominent American poet, novelist and biographer Muriel Rukeyser wrote an extended literary inquiry into the life and significance of Hariot (her preferred spelling), The Traces of Thomas Hariot (1970, 1971). Interest in Harriot continued to revive with the convening of a symposium at the University of Delaware in April 1971 with the proceedings published by the Oxford University Press in 1974.[27] John W. Shirley the editor (1908-1988) went on to publish A Sourcebook for the Study of Thomas Harriot[28] and his Harriot biography (1983).[29] The papers of John Shirley are held in Special Collections at the University of Delaware.[30]
Harriot's accomplishments remain relatively obscure because he did not publish any of his results and also because many of his manuscripts have been lost; those that survive are in the British Museum and in the archives of the Percy family at Petworth House (Sussex) and Alnwick Castle (Northumberland). He was frequently accused of being an atheist, and it has been suggested that he deliberately refrained from publishing for fear of intensifying such attacks; as the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt writes "... he preferred life to fame. And who can blame him?"[31]
An event was held at Syon House, West London, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Harriot's first observations of the Moon on 26 July 2009. This event, Telescope400,[32] included the unveiling of a plaque to commemorate Harriot by Lord Egremont. The plaque can now be seen by visitors to Syon House, the location of Harriot's historic observations. His drawing made 400 years earlier is believed to be based on the first observations of the Moon through a telescope. The event (sponsored by the Royal Astronomical Society) was run as part of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA).
The original documents showing Harriot's Moon map of c. 1611, observations of Jupiter's satellites, and first observations of sunspots were on display at the Science Museum, London, from 23 July 2009 until the end of the IYA.[33]
The observatory in the campus of the College of William & Mary is named in Harriot's honor. A crater on the Moon was named after him in 1970; it is on the Moon's far side and hence unobservable from Earth.[citation needed]
In July 2014 the International Astronomical Union launched NameExoWorlds, a process for giving proper names to certain exoplanets and their host stars. The process involved public nomination and voting for the new names. In December 2015, the IAU announced the winning name was Harriot for this planet. (55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer). The winning name was submitted by the Royal Netherlands Association for Meteorology and Astronomy of the Netherlands. It honors the astronomer.[citation needed]
The Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC is named in recognition of this Harriot's scientific contributions to the New World such as his work A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.[10]
In fiction
An alternate history short story, "Harriott Publishes", depicts the consequences of Harriott publishing his observations before Galileo. It appears in anthology of similar stories, Altered Times, pages 13–15.
Telescope and Moon mapping
Harriot's 5 August [O.S. 26 July] 1609 drawings of his observations of the Moon have been noted as the first recorded telescopic observations ever made, predating
Sunspots
Thomas Harriot is recognized as the first person to observe
Compounding
Around 1620, Harriot's unpublished papers include the early basis of continuous compounding.[39] Harriot uses modern mathematical concepts to explain the process behind continuous compounding.[39] The concept of compounded interest occurs when the more times interest is added within the year assuming the rate stays the same then the final interest will be larger.[39] Based on this observation, Harriot created mathematical equations that included logarithms and series calculations to illustrate his concepts.[39]
See also
References
- ^ "A Tale of Two Portraits. A Note on Two Alleged Images of Thomas Harriot". April 2000.
- ^ "Pronunciation Guide for Mathematics". ceadserv1.nku.edu. Archived from the original on 4 September 2019. Retrieved 17 July 2022.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Moran, Michael (2014). "Thomas Hariot (ca. 1560–1621)". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
- ^ Bibcode:2008JBAA..118..315C.
- ^ "Sir Walter Raleigh – American colonies". Archived from the original on 26 May 2012.
- . Retrieved 17 May 2023.
- ^ "Celebrating Thomas Harriot, the world's first telescopic astronomer (RAS PN 09/47)". Royal Astronomical Society. 2011. Archived from the original on 27 June 2013. Retrieved 4 March 2011.
- ^ ISBN 0-19-852602-4.
- ISBN 0-415-91903-7.
- ^ a b c Milton 2000, p. 73.
- ^ Milton 2000, p. 89.
- ^ Ley, Willy (December 1965). "The Healthfull Aromatick Herbe". For Your Information. Galaxy Science Fiction. pp. 88–98.
- ^ Hariot, Thomas (1588). A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588). University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
- ^ "Thomas Harriot - Biography". Maths History. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
- ^ McGourty, Christine (14 January 2009). "English Galileo' maps on display". BBC.
- ^ Van Helden, Al (1995). "Thomas Harriot's Moon Drawings". The Galileo Project. Retrieved 14 May 2019.
- ^ Van Helden, Al (1995). "Thomas Harriot (1560–1621)". The Galileo Project. Retrieved 14 May 2019.
- H. R. Trevor-Roper; Blair Worden, ed., Europe's physician: the various life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) pp. 206-207 and note 1
- ^ a b Stevens, Henry (1900). Thomas Hariot, the Mathematician, the Philosopher and the Scholar. London: Privately printed at the Chiswick press. p. 142.
- ISBN 978-0-521-02740-3.
- ISBN 978-1-4008-5052-5.
- LCCN 2008062108.
- LCCN 43022232.
- LCCN 2006938536.
- S2CID 202575019.
- LCCN 72082483.
- LCCN 74176704.
- LCCN 80002111.
- LCCN 83003961.
- ^ Guide to the John Shirley papers related to Thomas Harriot, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware. Retrieved 10 May 2020.
- ISBN 978-0-393-06447-6.
- ^ "Telescope400 – celebrating Thomas Harriot's first ever use of the Telescope in Astronomy".
- ^ Devlin, Hannah (24 July 2009). "Galileo was beaten to the Moon by a shy Englishman". The Times.
- ^ JSTOR 40647255.
- S2CID 125625494.
- ^ .
- ^ a b Voss, David (2015). "March 9, 1611: Dutch astronomer Johannes Fabricius observes sunspots". APS News. 24.
- ^ S2CID 39401037.
- ^ S2CID 53586313.
Sources
- ISBN 0801482828.
- Mancall, Peter C. (2007). Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300164220.
- ISBN 9780312420185.
- Rukeyser, Muriel (1971). The Traces of Thomas Hariot. NY: Random House.
- Vaughan, Alden T. (2002). "Sir Walter Ralegh's Indian Interpreters, 1584–1618". The William and Mary Quarterly. 59 (2): 341–376. JSTOR 3491741.
External links
- Thomas Harriot: Trumpeter of Roanoke
- Thomas Harriot
- John Shirley papers related to Thomas Harriot, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.
Works by Thomas Harriot
- Works by Thomas Harriot at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Thomas Harriot at Internet Archive
- A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia by Thomas Hariot; Reproduced in Facsimile from the First Edition of 1688; with an Introduction by Luther S. Livingston. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. 1903. Retrieved 30 April 2018 – via Internet Archive.
- A Brief and True Report online pdf text edition
- A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
- Annotated Translation of Harriot's Praxis by Ian Bruce
Works or sites about Thomas Harriot
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Thomas Harriot", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- Harriot, Thomas
- The Englishman who beat Galileo Archived 16 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine
- The Soft Logic of Thomas Harriot
- The Thomas Harriot Seminar
- Searching for the Lost Colony Blog
- The Harriot Voyages of Discovery Lecture Series at East Carolina University Archived 20 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine
- The Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University, Greenville, NC
- Thomas Harriot Quintessential Renaissance Scholar
- Account of the Roanoke settlements Retrieved April 2011