Wanstead should be proud of its connection with the Astronomer Royal James Bradley, says Dr John Fisher in the first of a series of articles celebrating a man admired by many
Three centuries ago, Wanstead was a small township, where the wealthy and the well-to-do lived to escape the noise and diseases prevalent in the City of London. Amongst the inhabitants were the rector James Pound (1669–1724) and his nephew James Bradley (1692–1762). Both were astronomers of note, close friends of Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and Edmond Halley (1656–1742).
Bradley was elected as the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford in 1721 and appointed as the third Astronomer Royal by Sir Robert Walpole in 1742. Newton referred to Bradley as “the finest astronomer in Europe,” being the first to discern that the three innermost of Jupiter’s large moons were in gravitational resonance with each other, constantly repeating their mutual perturbations in accord with Newton’s universal law of gravitation.
From August 1727 to December 1728, Bradley observed the annual motions of 70 circumpolar stars from Wanstead, discovering the aberration of starlight, the earliest proof of the motion of the Earth in orbit around the Sun, first proposed by Copernicus and supported by Galileo, thus vindicating both. Continuing his observations to 1747, Bradley also discovered the nutation of the Earth’s axis, a wobble induced by the action of the moon on the Earth’s equatorial bulge.
As Astronomer Royal, he completely reformed the Royal Greenwich Observatory, root and branch. He acquired the finest astronomical instruments in the world and built the New Observatory, the building through which the Prime Meridian passes. Here, Bradley, together with assistants trained to the same high standards as himself, produced precise and accurate observations of every notable star visible from Greenwich.
James Bradley was of modest origins, the third son of an obscure steward on a Cotswolds estate. He became the most celebrated astronomer in Europe. He was reader in Experimental Philosophy (Physics) at Oxford. He was admired all over Europe, being made a member of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences, of the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris, and remarkably, that most Catholic of institutions, the Institute of Bologna, revealing the motion of the Earth had been accepted by the Church of Rome.
He was a kind, gentle man, much admired at Oxford, where he was given an Oration. He was a brilliant teacher of mathematics and loved by many in the university. He had an ability to explain difficult subjects in plain language. Bradley was admired by kings and statesmen all over Europe. He is buried in Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire, and memorialised by a headstone in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Wanstead.
For more information on Dr Fisher’s book, The Life and Work of James Bradley, visit wnstd.com/fisher
