Bradley’s birth and early life.

He was born at Sherbourn, in Gloucestershire, in 1693. We know little of his boyhood except that he went to the Grammar School at Northleach, and that the memory of this fact was preserved at the school in 1832 when Rigaud was writing his memoir. [The school is at present shut up for want of funds to carry it on; and all inquiries I have made have failed to elicit any trace of this memory.] Similarly we know little of his undergraduate days at Oxford, except that he entered as a commoner at Balliol in 1710, took his B.A. in the regular course in 1714, and his M.A. in 1717. As a career he chose the Church, being ordained in 1719, and presented to the vicarage of Bridstow in Monmouthshire; but he only discharged the duties of vicar for a couple of years, for in 1721 he returned to Oxford as Professor of Astronomy, an appointment which involved the resignation of his livings; and so slight was this interruption to his career as an astronomer that we may almost disregard it, and consider him as an astronomer from the first.Brief clerical career. But to guard against a possible misconception, let me say that Bradley entered on a clerical career in a thoroughly earnest spirit; to do otherwise would have been quite foreign to his nature. When vicar of Bridstow he discharged his duties faithfully towards that tiny parish, and moreover was so active in his uncle’s parish of Wansted that he left the reputation of having been curate there, although he held no actual appointment. And thirty years later, when he was Astronomer Royal and resident at Greenwich, and when the valuable vicarage of Greenwich was offered to him by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he honourably refused the preferment, “because the duty of a pastor was incompatible with his other studies and necessary engagements.”

Learnt astronomy not at Oxford,

But now let us turn to Bradley’s astronomical education. I must admit, with deep regret, that we cannot allow any of the credit of it to Oxford. There was a great astronomer in Oxford when Bradley was an undergraduate, for Edmund Halley had been appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry in 1703, and had immediately set to work to compute the orbits of comets, which led to his immortal discovery that some of these bodies return to us again and again, especially the one which bears his name—Halley’s Comet—and returns every seventy-five years, being next expected about 1910. But there is no record that Bradley came under Halley’s teaching or influence as an undergraduate. In later years the two men knew each other well, and it was Halley’s one desire towards the close of his life that Bradley should succeed him as Astronomer Royal at Greenwich; a desire which was fulfilled in rather melancholy fashion, for Halley died without any assurance that his wish would be gratified. But Bradley got no astronomical teaching at Oxford either from Halley or others.but from his uncle, James Pound. The art of astronomical observation he learnt from his maternal uncle, the Rev. James Pound, Rector of Wansted, in Essex. He is the man to whom we owe Bradley’s training and the great discoveries which came out of it. He was, I am glad to say, an Oxford man too; very much an Oxford man; for he seems to have spent some thirteen years there migrating from one Hall to another. His record indeed was such as good tutors of colleges frown upon; for it was seven years before he managed to take a degree at all; and he could not settle to anything. After ten years at Oxford he thought he would try medicine; after three years more he gave it up and went out in 1700 as chaplain to the East Indies. But he seems to have been a thoroughly lovable man, for news was brought of him four years later that he had a mind to come home, but was dissuaded by the Governor saying that “if Dr. Pound goes, I and the rest of the Company will not stay behind.” Soon afterwards the settlement was attacked in an insurrection, and Pound was one of the few who escaped with his life, losing however all the property he had gradually acquired. He returned to England in 1706, and was presented to the living of Wansted; married twice, and ended his days in peace and fair prosperity in 1724. Such are briefly the facts about Bradley’s uncle, James Pound;Pound a first-rate observer. but the most important of all remains to be told—that somehow or other he had learnt to make first-rate astronomical observations, how or when is not recorded; but in 1719 he was already so skilled that Sir Isaac Newton made him a present of fifty guineas for some observations; and repeated the gift in the following year; and even three years before this we find Halley writing to ask for certain observations from Mr. Pound.

With this excellent man Bradley used frequently to stay. To his nephew he seems to have been more like a father than an uncle. When his nephew had smallpox in 1717, he nursed him through it; and he supplemented from his own pocket the scanty allowance which was all that Bradley’s own father could afford. But what concerns us most is that he fostered, if he did not actually implant, a love of astronomical observation in his nephew.Bradley worked with him. The two worked together, entering their observations one after the other on the same paper; and it was to the pair of them together, rather than to the uncle alone, that Newton made his princely presents, and Halley wrote for help in his observations. There seems to be no doubt that the uncle and nephew were about this time the best astronomical observers in the world. There was no rivalry between them, and therefore there is no need to discuss whether the partnership was one of equal merit on both sides; but it is interesting to note that it probably was. The ability of Pound was undoubted; many were keenly desirous that he, and not his nephew, should be elected to the Oxford Chair in 1721, but he felt unequal to the duties at his advanced age. On the other hand, when Bradley lost his uncle’s help, there was no trace of faltering in his steps to betray previous dependence on a supporting or guiding hand. He walked erect and firm, and trod paths where even his uncle might not have been able to follow.

The work done by Pound and Bradley.

A few instances will suffice to show the kind of observations made by this notable firm of Pound and Bradley. They observed the positions of the fixed stars and nebulæ: these being generally the results required by Halley and Newton. They also observed the places of the planets among the stars, and especially the planet Mars, and determined its distance from the Earth by the method of parallax, thus anticipating the modern standard method of finding the Sun’s distance; and though with their imperfect instruments they did not obtain a greater accuracy than 1 in 10, still this was a great advance on what had been done before, and excited the wonder and admiration of Halley. They also paid some attention to double stars, and did a great deal of work on Jupiter’s satellites. We might profitably linger over the records of these early years, which are full of interest, but we must press on to the time of the great discoveries, and we will dismiss them with brief illustrations of three points: Bradley’s assiduity, his skill in calculation, and his wonderful skill in the management of instruments. Of his assiduity an example is afforded by his calculations of the orbits of two comets which are still extant. One of them fills thirty-two pages of foolscap, and the other sixty; and it must be remembered that the calculations themselves were quite novel at that time. Of his skill in calculation, apart from his assiduity, we have a proof in a paper communicated to the Royal Society rather later (1726), where he determines the longitudes of Lisbon and New York from the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites, using observations which were not simultaneous, and had therefore to be corrected by an ingenious process which Bradley devised expressly for this purpose.Use of very long telescopes. And finally, his skill in the management of instruments is shown by his measuring the diameter of the planet Venus with a telescope actually 212¼ feet in length. It is difficult for us to realise in these days what this means; even the longest telescope of modern times does not exceed 100 feet in length, and it is mounted so conveniently with all the resources of modern engineering, in the shape of rising floors, &c., that the management of it is no more difficult than that of a 10-foot telescope. But Bradley had no engineering appliances beyond a pole to hold up one end of the telescope and his own clever fingers to work the other; and he managed to point the unwieldy weapon accurately to the planet, and measure the diameter with an exactness which would do credit to modern times.Reason for great length. A few words of explanation may be given why such long telescopes were used at all. The reason lay in the difficulty of getting rid of coloured images, due to the composite character of white light. Whenever we use a single lens to form an image, coloured fringes appear. Nowadays we know that by making two lenses of different kinds of glass and putting them together, we can practically get rid of these coloured fringes; but this discovery had not been made in Bradley’s time. The only known ways of dealing with the evil then were to use a reflecting telescope like Newton and Gregory, or if a lens was used, to make one of very great focal length; and hence the primary necessity for these very long telescopes. They had another advantage in producing a large image, or they would probably have given way to the reflector. This advantage is gradually bringing them back into use, and perhaps in the eclipse of 1905 we may use a telescope as long as Bradley’s; but we shall not use it as he did in any case. It will be laid comfortably flat on the ground, and the rays of light reflected into it by a coelostat.

Bradley appointed at Oxford,

In 1721 Bradley was appointed to the Savilian Professorship of Astronomy at Oxford, vacant by the death of Dr. John Keill. Once it became clear that there was no chance of securing his uncle for this position, Bradley himself was supported enthusiastically by all those whose support was worth having, especially by the Earl of Macclesfield, who was then Lord Chancellor; by Martin Foulkes, who was afterwards the President of the Royal Society; and by Sir Isaac Newton himself. He was accordingly elected on October 31, 1721, and forthwith resigned his livings. His resignation of the livings was necessitated by a definite statute of the University relating to the Professorship, and not by the existence of any very onerous duties attaching to it; indeed such duties seem to have been conspicuously absent,but continues to work at Wansted. and after Bradley’s election he passed more time than ever with his uncle in Wansted, making the astronomical observations which both loved; for there was not the vestige of an observatory in Oxford. His uncle’s death in 1724 interrupted the continuity of these joint observations, and by an odd accident prepared the way for Bradley’s great discovery. He was fain to seek elsewhere that companionship in his work which had become so essential to him, and his new friend gave a new bent to his observations.

Samuel Molyneux.