GREENWICH OBSERVATORY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3800, 26 August 1936, Page 7

GREENWICH OBSERVATORY

Customs die hard, but they sometimes change -with the passage of time. For instance (our London correspondent writes), the annual inspection which the “Board of Visitors” made of Greenwich Observatory recently was a very friendly affair, at which the Astronomer Royal (Dr Spender Jones) showed his callers all over the premises and explained in detail the apparatus on the spot which sets the time for the world. But it was not ever thus, and particularly it wasn’t in the time of Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal. Flamsteed, when appointed to that post by Charles 11. was allowed a. salary of £lOO per annum, out of which meagre sum he had to find his own scientific equipment. In these circumstances he not unnaturally took the view that all his innumerable observations made with his own instruments were his own, and not the public’s property. Sir Isaac Newton badly wanted Flamsteed’s data to work out his own theories, and took an opposite view. He made such a fuss, and pulled so many strings that finally the Royal Society was instructed to appoint this Board of Visitors, who annually visited Greenwick, extracted the results of his work from the irate and unwilling Flamsteed, and had them published.