Astronomer and mathematician, born in Wallace, Nova Scotia, Canada. Born to New England parents who had moved to Nova Scotia, he immigrated to the USA in his teens. Eventually finding work at the office of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac then located at Harvard College, he took a degree from the college's Lawrence Scientific School (1858). Appointed a professor of mathematics by the US Navy in 1861, he was assigned to the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. He remained affiliated there until 1897 and also served as professor at Johns Hopkins University (188494, 18981900). Although he made telescopic observations, his major contributions came through his complex mathematical calculations; with these he effectively recalculated and corrected all the known positions and motions of the bodies of the Solar System and the major celestial reference objects, a monumental accomplishment that was accepted throughout the world. He also did pioneer work in calculating the Sun's parallax and, with A A Michelson, determined the velocity of light. In addition to his scientific writing he published popular texts, Reminiscences of an Astronomer (1903), and three novels. He helped found and was first president of the American Astronomical Society (18991905) and was the recipient of many honours abroad as well as in the USA.
Born in the town of Wallace, Nova Scotia, Newcomb appears to have enjoyed no formal education beyond his short apprenticeship to a charlatan herbalist in 1851.Life
Son of Emily Prince and itinerant school teacher John Burton Newcomb, Newcomb studied mathematics and physics privately and supported himself with some school-teaching before becoming a computer (a functionary in charge of calculations) at the Nautical Almanac Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1857.
In the prelude to the American Civil War, many US Navy staff of Confederate sympathies left the service and, in 1861, Newcomb took advantage of one of the ensuing vacancies to become professor of mathematics and astronomer at the United States Naval Observatory, Washington D.C.. Newcomb set to work on the measurement of the position of the planets as an aid to navigation, becoming increasingly interested in theories of planetary motion.
By the time Newcomb visited Paris, France in 1870, he was already aware that the table of lunar positions calculated by Peter Andreas Hansen was in error. Newcomb managed to escape from the city during the ensuing rioting that led up to the formation of the Paris Commune and which engulfed the Paris Observatory. Newcomb was able to use the "new" data to revise Hansen's tables.
In 1877 he became director of the Nautical Almanac Office where, ably assisted by George William Hill, he embarked on a program of recalculation of all the major astronomical constants. By the time he attended a standardisation conference in Paris, France in May 1896, the international consensus was all ephemerides should be based on Newcomb's calculations. A further conference as late as 1950 confirmed Newcomb's constants as the international standard.
In 1878, Newcomb had started planning for a new and precise measurement of the speed of light that was needed to account for exact values of many astronomical constants. In 1880, Michelson assisted at Newcomb's initial measurement with instruments located at Fort Myer and the United States Naval Observatory, then situated on the Potomac River. Though Michelson published his first measurement in 1880, Newcomb's measurement was substantially different. In 1883, Michelson revised his measurement to a value closer to Newcomb's.
In 1881, Newcomb discovered the statistical principle now known as Benford's law, when he observed that the earlier pages of logarithm books, used at that time to carry out logarithmic calculations, were far more worn than the later pages.
In 1891, within months of Seth Carlo Chandler’s discovery of the 14 month variation of latitude, now referred to as the Chandler wobble, Newcomb explained the apparent conflict between the observed motion and predicted period of the wobble. Newcomb used the variation of latitude observations to estimate the elasticity of Earth, finding it to be slightly more rigid than steel.
Newcomb was an autodidact and polymath.
Newcomb died in Washington, DC of bladder cancer and was buried with military honours in Arlington National Cemetery with President William Howard Taft in attendance.
Quotes
It is often repeated that Newcomb believed it impossible to build a “flying machine.” But that is not true. Newcomb was specifically critical of Samuel Pierpont Langley’s work, who claimed that he could build a flying machine powered by a steam engine. Newcomb argued that, “Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird. whether, with such materials as we possess, a combination of steel, cloth and wire can be made which, moved by the power of electricity of steam, shall form a successful flying machine, the outlook may be altogether different.” Newcomb favored the development of rotating wing (helicopter) and airships that would float in the air (blimps). Newcomb crater on the Moon is named after him.
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