Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy

The history of Airy's life, and especially the history of his life's work, is given in the chapters that follow. But it is felt that the present Memoir would be incomplete witho...

George Biddell Airy was born at Alnwick in Northumberland on July 27th 1801. His father was William Airy of Luddington in Lincolnshire, the descendant of a long line of Airys wh...

Latin prose, and then employed myself on the subject which I was reading for the time: usually taking mathematics at this hour. At 2 or a little sooner I went out for a long wal...

"On Jan. 30th, 1823, I returned to Cambridge. I had already heard that I had gained the 1st Smith's Prize, and one of the first notifications to me on my return was that the Wal...

"I attended a meeting of the Board of Longitude on Apr. 3rd. And again on June 4th; this was the last meeting: Sheepshanks had previously given me private information of the cer...

"Through the last quarter of 1835 I had kept everything going on at the Greenwich Observatory in the same manner in which Mr Pond had carried it on. With the beginning of 1836 m...

"On Nov. 7th I proposed a change in the form of Estimates for the Observatory. The original astronomical part was provided by the Admiralty, and the new magnetical and meteorolo...

"In the Report to the Visitors there is an interesting account of the difficulties experienced with the Reflex Zenith Tube in consequence of the tremors of the quicksilver trans...

In this year the cube of the Transit Circle was pierced, to permit reciprocal observations of the Collimators without raising the instrument. This involved the construction of i...

"At the door from the Front Court to the staircase of the Octagon Room (the original entrance to the Observatory as erected by Sir Christopher Wren), a small porch-shelter has b...

On the 16th of August 1881 Airy left the Observatory which had been his residence for nearly 46 years, and removed to the White House. Whatever his feelings may have been at the...