Simon Newcomb (1835-1909) Newcomb was born in Wallace, Nova Scotia, and was apprenticed to a quack doctor at the age of 16. Apart from the two or three years he spent as an apprentice, Newcomb received little or no formal education. At 16 he ran away to Maryland in the US, where he became a country schoolmaster. Deciding that he wanted to work with mathematics, he enrolled and received his degree from the Lawrence science school of Harvard University in 1858. In 1861, Newcomb worked at the Naval Observatory at Washington, DC, and in the 16 years he was there he worked at determining the position of celestial bodies. When, in 1877 he was put in charge of the American Nautical Almanac office, he began calculating the motions of the bodies in the solar system. This work was to prove outstandingly accurate, and was used as a daily reference around the world for over 50 years. Newcomb's greatest contribution was to establish with Arthur Matthew Weld Downing, a universal standard system of astronomical constants. This system, which was mostly Newcomb's is still in practical use today, as are his tables of data concerning various celestial bodies. |