January 18: Arthur Scott King

Arthur Scott King

January 18, 1876 – April 17, 1957

Arthur Scott King was an American physicist and astrophysicist.

In 1895 Arthur graduated from Fresno High School, then attended the University of California, Berkeley. He developed an interest in physics, and in 1899 he was admitted into their graduate school. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1903, the first ever Ph.D. in physics awarded by that university.

After winning a Whiting Fellowship, he spent two years in Germany, studying at Bonn and Berlin and travelling in Europe. His academic interests were focused on spectroscopy, and at the time these institutions were leaders in the field.

In 1905 he returned to Berkeley and became an instructor. The following year published a paper describing the use of an electric furnace for use in spectroscopy.

He was offered a position at Mt. Wilson Observatory in 1907, and took his leave from Berkeley. He spent much of the remainder of his career studying the spectra of elements and molecules, with particular focus on rare earth elements. He also performed studies of meteors, including their spectra and directional paths. In 1929, he collaborated with Dr. Raymond T. Birge to discover the isotope Carbon-13, based on differences in the spectrum.

Between 1901 and his retirement he published well over 200 papers in scientific journals. He served as president of the American Meteorical Society for a period, and also as president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1941. In 1943 he retired, but he became involved in war research at CalTech. There he studied the ballistics of torpedoes launched from aircraft.

The crater King on the far side of the Moon was co-named for him and Edward S. King.

Today in Astronomy: January 18: Warren De la Rue

The Astronomy Compendium: January 18

January 11: Lunar Prospector

Lunar Prospector entered lunar orbit on January 11, 1998.

The Lunar Prospector mission was the third selected by NASA for full development and construction as part of the Discovery Program. At a cost of $62.8 million, the 19-month mission was designed for a low polar orbit investigation of the Moon, including mapping of surface composition and possible polar ice deposits, measurements of magnetic and gravity fields, and study of lunar outgassing events. The mission ended July 31, 1999, when the orbiter was deliberately crashed into a permanently shadowed area of the Shoemaker crater near the lunar south pole in an unsuccessful attempt to detect the presence of water.

Data from the mission allowed the construction of a detailed map of the surface composition of the Moon, and helped to improve understanding of the origin, evolution, current state, and resources of the Moon. Several articles on the scientific results were published in the journal Science.

Lunar Prospector was managed out of NASA Ames Research Center with the prime contractor Lockheed Martin. The Principal Investigator for the mission was Dr. Alan Binder. 

The probe also carried a small amount of the remains of Dr. Eugene Shoemaker (April 28, 1928 – July 18, 1997), astronomer and co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, to the moon for a space burial.

January 11: William Tyler Olcott

The Astronomy Compendium: January 11

January 10: Eugène Joseph Delporte

The Amor group of asteroids.

Eugène Joseph Delporte

January 10, 1872 – October 19, 1955

Eugène Joseph Delporte was a Belgian astronomer.

He discovered a total of sixty-six asteroids. Notable discoveries include 1221 Amor (which lent its name to the Amor asteroids) and the Apollo asteroid 2101 Adonis. He discovered or co-discovered some comets as well, including periodic comet 57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte.

He worked in the Observatoire Royal de Belgique (Belgian Royal Observatory), situated in the town of Uccle (after which the asteroid 1276 Ucclia is named).

In 1930 he fixed the modern boundaries between all of the constellations in the sky, along lines of right ascension and declination for the epoch B1875.0.

The Lunar crater Delporte is named in his honor.

January 10: Simon Marius

The Astronomy Compendium: January 10

January 8: Johannes Fabricius

Johannes Fabricius

January 8, 1587 – March 19, 1616

Johannes Fabricius, eldest son of David Fabricius (1564-1617), was a German astronomer and a discoverer of sunspots, independently of Galileo Galilei.

Johannes was born in Resterhafe (Friesland). He returned from university in the Netherlands with telescopes that he and his father turned on the Sun. Despite the difficulties of observing the sun directly, they noted the existence of sunspots, the first confirmed instance of their observation (though unclear statements in East Asian annals suggest that Chinese astronomers may have discovered them with the naked eye previously, and Fabricius may have noticed them himself without a telescope a few years before). The pair soon invented camera obscura telescopy so as to save their eyes and get a better view of the solar disk, and observed that the spots moved. They would appear on the eastern edge of the disk, steadily move to the western edge, disappear, then reappear at the east again after the passage of the same amount of time that it had taken for it to cross the disk in the first place.

Copies of a map he made of Frisia in 1589 are also still extant. He is also named in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon as someone who claimed to have seen lunar inhabitants through his telescope, though that particular fact is merely part of Verne's fiction.

The Lunar crater Fabricius is named after his father, David Fabricius.

January 8: Galileo Galilei

January 8: Stephen Hawking

The Astronomy Compendium: January 8

January 7: Francesco Carlini

Carlini crater on the Moon

Francesco Carlini

January 7, 1783 – August 29, 1862

Francesco Carlini was an Italian astronomer.

Born in Milan, he became director of the observatory there in 1832. He published Nuove tavole de moti apparenti del sole in 1832. In 1810, he had already published Esposizione di un nuovo metodo di construire le taole astronomiche applicato alle tavole del sole. Together with Giovanni Antonio Amedeo Plana, he participated in a geodetic project in Austria and Italy. During this trip in 1821 he took pendulum measurements on top of Mount Cenis, Italy, from which he calculated one of the first estimates of the density and mass of the Earth.

The Lunar crater Carlini is named in his honor.

January 7: Jovian Moons

The Astronomy Compendium: January 7

December 20: Walter Sydney Adams

Walter Sydney Adams

December 20, 1876 – May 11, 1956

Walter Sydney Adams was an American astronomer.

He was born in Antioch, Syria to missionary parents, and was brought to the U.S. in 1885. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1898, then continued his education in Germany. After returning to the U.S., he began a career in Astronomy that culminated when he became director of the Mount Wilson Observatory.

His primary interest was the study of stellar spectra. He worked on solar spectroscopy and co-discovered a relationship between the relative intensities of certain spectral lines and the absolute magnitude of a star. He was able to demonstrate that spectra could be used to determine whether a star was a giant or a dwarf.

In 1915 he began a study of the companion of Sirius and found that despite a size only slightly larger than the Earth, the surface of the star was brighter per unit area than the Sun and it was about as massive. Such a star later came to be known as a white dwarf.

Along with Theodore Dunham, he discovered the strong presence of carbon dioxide in the infrared spectrum of Venus.

Adams received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1917), the Henry Draper Medal (1918), the Bruce Medal (1928) and the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1947).

The asteroid 3145 Walter Adams and a crater on Mars are named in his honor. The crater Adams on the Moon is jointly named after him, John Couch Adams and Charles Hitchcock Adams.

December 19: Albert Michelson

Albert Michelson

December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931

Albert Abraham Michelson was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson-Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in sciences.

Michelson was born in Strzelno, Provinz Posen in the Kingdom of Prussia (now Poland). He moved to the United States with his parents in 1855, when he was two years old.

President Ulysses S. Grant awarded Michelson a special appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1869. During his four years as a midshipman at the Academy, Michelson excelled in optics, heat and climatology as well as drawing. After his graduation in 1873 and two years at sea, he returned to the Academy in 1875 to become an instructor in physics and chemistry until 1879. In 1879, he was posted to the Nautical Almanac Office, Washington, to work with Simon Newcomb, but in the following year, he obtained leave of absence to continue his studies in Europe. He visited the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, and the Collège de France and École Polytechnique in Paris.

Michelson was fascinated with the sciences and the problem of measuring the speed of light in particular. While at Annapolis, he conducted his first experiments of the speed of light, as part of a class demonstration in 1877. After two years of studies in Europe, he resigned from the Navy in 1881. In 1883 he accepted a position as professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio and concentrated on developing an improved interferometer. In 1887 he and Edward Morley carried out the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which seemed to rule out the existence of the aether. He later moved on to use astronomical interferometers in the measurement of stellar diameters and in measuring the separations of binary stars.

In 1907, Michelson had the honor of being the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and meteorological investigations carried out with their aid". He also won the Copley Medal in 1907, the Henry Draper Medal in 1916 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1923.

The Lunar crater Michelson is named in his honor.

December 18: Gottfried Kirch

Gottfried Kirch

December 18, 1639 — July 25, 1710

Gottfried Kirch was a German astronomer. He first worked as a calendar-maker in Saxonia and Franconia. He began to learn astronomy in Jena, and studied under Hevelius in Danzig. In Danzig in 1667, Kirch published calendars and built several telescopes and instruments.

In 1686, Kirch went to Leipzig. There, he observed the great comet of 1686, together with Christoph Arnold. At Leipzig, Kirch also met his second wife, Maria Winckelmann (1670-1720), who had learned astronomy from Arnold. In 1688, he invented and charted the now obsolete constellation Sceptrum Brandenburgicum, the Brandenburg Scepter. Later, in 1699, he observed comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle but this observation was not recognized until later analysis by Joachim Schubart.

In 1700, Kirch was appointed by Frederick I of Prussia as the first astronomer of the Prussian Royal Society of Sciences.

Kirch studied the double star Mizar, and discovered both the Wild Duck Cluster (Messier 11) (1681) and Globular Cluster M5 (May 5, 1702). He also discovered the variability of the Mira variable Chi Cygni in 1686.

The Lunar crater Kirch and the asteroid 6841 Gottfriedkirch are named in his honor.

December 6: Yoshio Nishina

Yoshio Nishina

December 6, 1890 – January 10, 1951

Yoshio Nishina was the founding father of modern physics research in Japan. He co-authored the well-known Klein-Nishina Formula. He was a principal investigator of RIKEN and mentored generations of physicists, including two Novel Laureates: Hideki Yukawa and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. During World War II he was the head of the Japanese atomic program.

Nishina was born in Satosho, Okayama and graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1918. After graduation, he became a staff member at RIKEN. In 1921 he was sent to Europe for research. He visited some European universities and institutions, including Cavendish Laboratory, Georg August University of Göttingen, and University of Copenhagen. In Copenhagen he did research with Niels Bohr and they became good friends. In 1928 he wrote a paper on incoherent or Compton scattering with Oskar Klein in Copenhagen, from which the Klein-Nishina formula derives.

In the same year he returned to Japan, where he endeavored to foster an environment for the study of quantum mechanics. He invited some Western scholars to Japan including Heisenberg, Dirac and Bohr to stimulate Japanese physicists. He detected what turned out to be the muon in cosmic rays, independently of Anderson et al.

His research was concerned with cosmic rays and particle accelerator development.

In 1946 he was awarded the Order of Culture by the Emperor of Japan.

The Lunar crater Nishina is named in his honor.

December 4: Wilhelm Tempel

Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel

December 4, 1821 – March 16, 1889

Wilhelm Tempel, was a German astronomer who worked in Marseille until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, then later moved to Italy.

He was a prolific discoverer of comets, discovering or co-discovering 21 in all, including Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, now known to be the parent body of the Leonid meteor shower, and 9P/Tempel, the target of the NASA probe Deep Impact in 2005.

Other periodic comets that bear his name include 10P/Tempel and 11P/Tempel-Swift-LINEAR.

The asteroid 3808 Tempel and the Lunar crater Tempel are named in his honor.

November 20: Edwin Powell Hubble

Edwin Powell Hubble

November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953

Edwin Hubble was an American astronomer. He profoundly changed our understanding of the universe by demonstrating the existence of other galaxies besides the Milky Way. He also discovered that the degree of redshift observed in light coming from a galaxy increased in proportion to the distance of that galaxy from the Milky Way. This became known as Hubble's law, and would help establish that the known universe is expanding.

In 1919, Hubble was offered a staff position in California by George Ellery Hale, the founder and director of the Carnegie Institution's Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California, where he remained on the staff until his death. Shortly before his death, Mount Palomar's giant 200-inch (5.1 m) reflector Hale Telescope was completed, and Hubble was the first astronomer to use it. Hubble continued his research at the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar Observatories, where he remained active until his death.

Edwin Hubble's arrival at Mount Wilson, California, in 1919 coincided roughly with the completion of the 100-inch (2.5 m) Hooker Telescope, then the world's largest telescope. At that time, the prevailing view of the cosmos was that the universe consisted entirely of the Milky Way Galaxy. Using the Hooker Telescope at Mt. Wilson, Hubble identified Cepheid variables (a kind of star; see also standard candle) in several spiral nebulae, including the Andromeda Nebula. His observations, made in 1922–1923, proved conclusively that these nebulae were much too distant to be part of the Milky Way and were, in fact, entire galaxies outside our own. This idea had been opposed by many in the astronomy establishment of the time, in particular by the Harvard University-based Harlow Shapley. Hubble's discovery, announced on January 1, 1925, fundamentally changed the view of the universe.

Hubble also devised the most commonly used system for classifying galaxies, grouping them according to their appearance in photographic images. He arranged the different groups of galaxies in what became known as the Hubble sequence.

Hubble was awarder the Bruce Medal (1938) and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1940).

The Lunar crater Hubble, asteroid 2069 Hubble and the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope are named in his honor.

October 30: Marcin Poczobutt

Marcin Odlanicki Poczobutt

October 30, 1728 – February 7, 1810

Marcin Poczobutt was a Polish-Lithuanian astronomer, jesuit and mathematician.

He became mathematics professor and rector of the Vilnius University where he organized the construction of the university's observatory and the purchase of the equipment. He also made observations of solar and lunar eclipses, comets and asteroids. In addition, he made measurements of Mercury to compute an orbit, and also determined the geographic coordinates of locations in Lithuania, including Vilnius.

He was granted the title of the King's Astronomer and became a member of the British Royal Academy of Science.

The Lunar crater Poczobutt is named in his honor.

October 29: Richard Hawley Tucker

Richard Hawley Tucker

October 29, 1859 – March 31, 1952

Richard Tucker was an American astronomer.

He was born in Wiscasset, Maine to a ship-owning and sea-faring family. After a brief stint at sea starting at age 14, he attended Lehigh University where he studied civil engineering but became interested in the study of astronomy. He graduated in 1879 and became an assistant at Dudley Observatory. He remained there for four years, and briefly worked with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.

In 1883 he joined Lehigh as an instructor of mathematics and astronomy. A year later he was offered a position with the Argentine National Observatory, where he would assist in a survey of the southern night sky. He remained there for nine years, then joined the staff of Lick Observatory in 1893. He remained at Lick until 1908, operating the Meridian Circle program to make precise measurements of star positions.

In 1908 he would travel to San Louis, Argentina as part of an expedition to measure the positions of stars in the southern part of the sky. These measurements were to be incorporated into a catalog for Dudley Observatory. During his time there he made 20,800 observations of stars.

After his work in Argentina, he returned to Lick Observatory. In 1914 he married Ruth Standen, a secretary at Lick. He remained at the observatory until he retired in 1926, when he became Astronomer Emeritus. He spent his retirement years in Palo Alto, California.

During his career he published fifty three scientific articles.

The Lunar crater Tucker is named in his honor.

October 27: Thomas Gwyn Elger

Image Credit: C.A. Wood Collection

Thomas Gwyn Empy Elger

October 27, 1836 – January 9, 1897

Thomas Elger was an English lunar mapper and the first director of the Lunar Section of the British Astronomical Association (BAA).

He was born in Bedford, where the family had been established for several generations. His father Thomas Gwyn Elger (1794–April 4, 1841) was an architect and builder. Grandfather, father and son engaged in the town politics, and all held the post of mayor.

He studied at University College London and adopted the profession of a civil engineer. He was engaged in several important works, including the Metropolitan Railway and the Severn Valley Railway. His surveys for railway construction in Holstein were put to a stop by the war with Prussia and Austria in 1864.

Soon afterwards he relinquished the active pursuit of his profession and devoted himself to scientific studies. He had developed a strong taste for astronomy already at an early age and erected his first observatory in Bedford. Elger observed with an 8.5 inch reflector. His sketches from 1884 to 1896 are now in the possession of the BAA. He is best known as a careful and indefatigable selenographer, and for this work his artistic skill eminently qualified him.

He is most remembered for his book The Moon: A full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features. Published in 1895, its maps are still highly regarded by lunar observers due to their uncluttered nature.

Elger was member of several astronomical associations, as the Royal Astronomical Society, the short-lived Selenographical Society and the British Astronomical Association. Besides his astronomical work, he was an ardent archaeologist and founded the Bedfordshire Natural History Society and Field Club.

The Lunar crater Elger is named in his honor.

October 26: Lewis Boss

Lewis Boss

October 26, 1846 - October 12, 1912

Lewis Boss was an American astronomer. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1870 he graduated from Dartmouth College, then went to work as a clerk for the U.S. Government. He served as an assistant astronomer for a government expedition to survey the U.S-Canadian border. In 1876 he became the director of the Dudley Observatory in Schenectady, New York.

He became editor of the Astronomical Journal in 1909, but responsibility passed to his son, Benjamin Boss, upon his death in 1912. Benjamin continued to edit the journal until 1941.

Lewis Boss is noted for his work in cataloguing the locations and proper motions of stars. He also led an expedition to Chile in 1882 to observe the transit of Venus, and also catalogued information concerning cometary orbits.

In 1910, he published Preliminary General Catalogue of 6188 Stars for the Epoch 1900, a compilation of the proper motions of stars. This catalog was later expanded after his death by his son Benjamin Boss.

His most significant discovery was the calculation of the convergent point of the Hyades star cluster.

Boss was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1905.

The Lunar crater Boss is named in his honor.

October 25: Henry Norris Russell

Henry Norris Russell

October 25, 1877 – February 18, 1957

Henry Norris Russell was an American astronomer who, along with Ejnar Hertzsprung, developed the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (1910). In 1923, working with Frederick Saunders, he developed Russell-Saunders coupling which is also known as LS coupling.

Russell was born in 1877 in Oyster Bay, New York. He studied astronomy at Princeton University, obtaining his B.A. in 1897 and his doctorate in 1899, studying under Charles Augustus Young. From 1903 to 1905, he worked at the Cambridge Observatory with Arthur Robert Hinks as a research assistant of the Carnegie Institution and came under the strong influence of George Darwin.

He returned to Princeton to become an instructor in astronomy (1905-1908), assistant professor (1908-1911), professor (1911-1927) and research professor (1927-1947). He was also the director of the Princeton University Observatory from 1912 to 1947.

He co-wrote an influential two-volume textbook in 1927 with Raymond Smith Dugan and John Quincy Stewart: Astronomy: A Revision of Young’s Manual of Astronomy (Ginn & Co., Boston, 1926–27, 1938, 1945). This became the standard astronomy textbook for about two decades. There were two volumes: the first was The Solar System and the second was Astrophysics and Stellar Astronomy. The textbook popularized the idea that a star's properties (radius, surface temperature, luminosity, etc.) were largely determined by the star's mass and chemical composition, which became known as the Vogt-Russell theorem (including Hermann Vogt who independently discovered the result). Since a star's chemical composition gradually changes with age (usually in a non-homogeneous fashion), stellar evolution results.

The Lunar crater Russell is named in his honor.

October 24: Wilhelm Eduard Weber

Wilhelm Eduard Weber

October 24, 1804 – June 23, 1891

Wilhelm Weber was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph.

During 1831, on the recommendation of Carl Friedrich Gauss, he was hired by the University of Göttingen as professor of physics, at the age of twenty-seven. His lectures were interesting, instructive, and suggestive. Weber thought that, in order to thoroughly understand physics and apply it to daily life, mere lectures, though illustrated by experiments, were insufficient, and he encouraged his students to experiment themselves, free of charge, in the college laboratory.

As a student of twenty years he, with his brother, Ernst Heinrich Weber, Professor of Anatomy at Leipzig, had written a book on the Wave Theory and Fluidity, which brought its authors a considerable reputation. Acoustics was a favourite science of his, and he published numerous papers upon it in Poggendorffs Annalen, Schweigger's Jahrbücher für Chemie und Physik, and the musical journal Carcilia. The 'mechanism of walking in mankind' was another study, undertaken in conjunction with his younger brother, Eduard Weber. These important investigations were published between the years 1825 and 1838. Gauss and Weber constructed the first electromagnetic telegraph during 1833, which connected the observatory with the institute for physics in Göttingen.

Dismissed by the Hanoverian Government for his liberal political opinions, Weber travelled for a time, visiting England, among other countries, and became professor of physics in Leipzig from 1843 to 1849, when he was reinstalled at Göttingen. One of his most important works was the Atlas des Erdmagnetismus ("atlas of geomagnetism"), a series of magnetic maps, and it was chiefly through his efforts that magnetic observatories were instituted. He studied magnetism with Gauss, and during 1864 published his Electrodynamic Proportional Measures containing a system of absolute measurements for electric currents, which forms the basis of those in use.

He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences during 1855.

The Lunar crater Weber and the SI unit of magnetic flux, the weber (symbol: Wb) are named in his honor. He is also known for first use of 'c' for speed of light.

October 23: Gustav Spörer

Friederich Wilhelm Gustav Spörer

October 23, 1822 – July 7, 1895

Gustav Spörer was a German astronomer.

He is noted for his studies of sunspots and sunspot cycles. In this regard he is often mentioned together with Edward Maunder. Spörer was the first to note a prolonged period of low sunspot activity from 1645 to 1715. This period is known as the Maunder Minimum.

Spörer was a contemporary of Richard Christopher Carrington, an English astronomer. Carrington is generally credited with discovering Spörer's law, which governs the variation of sunspot latitudes during the course of a solar cycle. Spörer added to Carrington's observations of sunspot drift and is sometimes credited with the discovery.

The Spörer minimum was a period of low sunspot activity from roughly 1420 to 1570.

The Lunar crater Spörer is named in his honor.

October 20: Christopher Wren

Sir Christopher Wren

October 20, 1632 – February 25, 1723

Christopher Wren was one of the best known and highest acclaimed English architects in history, responsible for rebuilding 55 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including his masterpiece St Paul's Cathedral, completed in 1710.

Educated in Latin and Aristotelian physics at the University of Oxford, Wren was a notable astronomer, geometer, mathematician-physicist as well as an architect. He was a founder of the Royal Society (president 1680–82), and his scientific work was highly regarded by Sir Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal.

One of Wren's friends, another great scientist and architect in his time, Robert Hooke said of him "Since the time of Archimedes there scarce ever met in one man in so great perfection such a mechanical hand and so philosophical mind."

When a fellow of All Souls, Wren constructed a transparent beehive for scientific observation; he began observing the moon, which was to lead to the invention of micrometers for the telescope. He experimented on terrestrial magnetism and had taken part in medical experiments, performing the first successful injection of a substance into the bloodstream (of a dog).

In Gresham College, he did experiments involving determining longitude through magnetic variation and through lunar observation to help with navigation, and helped construct a 35-foot (11 m) telescope with Sir Paul Neile. Wren also studied and improved the microscope and telescope at this time. He had also been making observations of the planet Saturn from around 1652 with the aim of explaining its appearance. His hypothesis was written up in De corpore saturni but before the work was published, Huygens presented his theory of the rings of Saturn. Immediately Wren recognized this as a better hypothesis than his own and De corpore saturni was never published. In addition, he constructed an exquisitely detailed lunar model and presented it to the king.

A year into Wren's appointment as a Savilian Professor in Oxford, the Royal Society was created and Wren became an active member. As a Savilian Professor, Wren studied thoroughly in mechanics, especially in elastic collisions and pendulum motions, which he studied extensively. He also directed his far-ranging intelligence to the study of meteorology, and fabricated a "weather-clock" that recorded temperature, humidity, rainfall and barometric pressure, which could be used to predict the weather.

Another topic to which Wren contributed was optics. He published a description of an engine to create perspective drawings and he discussed the grinding of conical lenses and mirrors. Out of this work came another of Wren's important mathematical results, namely that the hyperboloid of revolution is a ruled surface. These results were published in 1669. In subsequent years, Wren continued with his work with the Royal Society, although after the 1680s his scientific interests seem to have waned: no doubt his architectural and official duties absorbed all his time.

Mentioned above are only a few of Wren’s scientific works. He also studied in other areas not mentioned, ranging from agriculture, ballistics, water and freezing, to investigating light and refraction only to name a few. Thomas Birch's History of the Royal Society is one of the most important sources of our knowledge not only of the origins of the Society, but also the day to day running of the Society. It is in these records that the majority of Wren’s scientific works are recorded.

October 16: Frederick Eugene Wright

Dr. Frederick Eugene Wright

October 16, 1877 – August 25, 1953

Frederick Wright was an American optician and geophysicist. He was the second president of the Optical Society of America from 1918-1919.

He was born in Marquette, Michigan, and his father was a state geologist. In 1895 his mother took Frederick and his two brothers to Germany where he would complete his education. He was awarded his Ph.D. summa cum laude from the University of Heidelberg.

After returning to the United States, he taught at the Michigan College of Mines and became the Assistant State Geologist. He moved to Washington D.C. in 1904, joining the United States Geological Survey. He then spent some time in exploration of Alaska. In 1906 he joined the Carnegie Institution as a member of their Geophysical Laboratory. He remained on the staff until his retirement in 1944.

In 1906 he met Kathleen Finley and in 1909 they were married. Their daughter Helen Wright (1914-1997) who became a pioneer in the study of science history.

Among his contributions were studies in the military uses of optical glass; physical study of lunar features based on the properties of the reflected light, and the precambrian geology of the region near Lake Superior. At the time of his death he was considered the foremost authority on the Moon.

Wright was co-author of a major 1963 summary: "The Lunar Surface: Introduction" in The Moon, Meteorites and Comets (Edited by Middlehurst and GP Kuiper). F.E. Wright also was responsible for creating one of the most remarkable - and rare - lunar globes ever. Photographic emulsions were deposited on globes and then telescopic images were projected onto the globes. Some globes were made of glass and had light bulbs within - apparently, they "beautifully and realistically simulate the Moon."

He served as the home secretary of the National Academy of Sciences for two decades. He was a member of the Optical Society of America, and was president for three years. In 1941 he became president of the Mineralogical Society of America. He was also a member of the London Physical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The crater Wright on the Moon is co-named for him and two others.