Think of maths lessons at school think of Logarithms then think of
Henry Briggs 1561-1631, if you didn’t like log tables he would be
the man to blame and he was a Yorkshire man. Although he didn’t
invent the logarithm he made them more useable in the scientific
community. He was also a damn good astronomer!
Born at Warleywood
near Halifax, he would become a mathematical astronomer; Briggs went
to a local grammar school before going on to St John’s College
Cambridge in 1577. During the 1590s he was working closely with the
mathematician and map maker Edward Wright who in the 1580s had been
ordered by Elizabeth I to go with an expedition to attack the
Portuguese Azores to carry out navigational studies, he also helped
Emery Molyneux to produce the first celestial globes in England in
1593. Briggs and Wright who came from Norfolk collaborated with their
astronomical studies; we know their observations included those of
the Sun and his was very interested in the study of eclipses which
took up much of his time. He was also a great believer in the idea of
Copernicus that the Sun was at the centre of the solar system and not
the Earth.
Briggs was also
fortunate enough to obtain a copy in English of one of the most
important books in the history of astronomy shortly after it was
published. Don’t forget most books at this time will be written in
Latin. Astronomia Nova or New Astronomy was written by Johann Kepler
who for ten years had observed the path of Mars around the sky and
his observations confirmed that the path of Mars across the sky only
worked if the Sun was at the centre.
Astronomers use
globes and maps with their studies today, but the first person from
Yorkshire to have one was Henry Briggs in the early 1590s!
And it is amazing to
think that it was with his work with Wright that Briggs met the
astronomer Thomas Harriot who 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 26 July 1609, this was several months
before Galileo.
In an age where
astrology was an important topic for most men of learning, Briggs
strongly opposed it however that did not stop him working with
astrologers for example when in 1603 there was a conjunction of the
planets Saturn and Jupiter. A conjunction of planets occurs when two
or more planets appear to be very close to each other in the sky.
This is of course just a line of sight effect because the planets are
all many millions of miles apart from each other. They tried to put
an astrological interpretation but had observed the event so the
astronomical observations they made were very useful.
An event then
occurred for which Briggs is probably better known. In 1616 he
visited John Napier at Edinburgh who had invented the Logarithm in
order to discuss some changes he wanted to make; he proposed that the
original logarithms that Napier had introduced should be changed into
common (base 10) logarithms, which are sometimes known as Briggsian
logarithms in his honour.
The common
logarithms were more useful and a great aid to Briggs when he
published his works on navigation, astronomy, and mathematics. In
fact it was Briggs who was the man most responsible for scientists'
acceptance of logarithms.
In 1596, he became
first professor of Geometry in the recently founded Gresham College,
London; where he taught geometry, astronomy and navigation. He would
lecture there for nearly 23 years, in 1619 he was appointed Savilian
professor of geometry at Oxford.
There is even a
little bit of Yorkshire on the Moon! Henry Briggs has a crater on the
Moon named after him; Briggs is located in the western part of the
Oceanus Procellarum or Ocean of Storms. He died on January 26th
1631
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