John Flamsteed was born on August 19, 1646, in Derby, Derbyshire, England. He was the only son to Stephen Flamsteed. John was educated at the free school of Derby, but had to leave it in May 1662 before his education was finished because of a rheumatic affection of the joints caused by a chill he caught while taking a bath. By 1665, John had given up on medical aid, and even started trying mystical cures, but to no avail. During his downtime, he studied the astronomy findings of the day. He read everything on the subject that he could get his hands on legally, saw a partial solar eclipse on September 12 1662, and tried to make some measuring instruments. Pretty soon, this public-school drop-out was very well versed in astronomy, and felt ready to make his debut into the scientific community.
When he first thought of publishing a scientific paper, he was a little cautious. After personally deciding that some of his ideas were a little too advanced for most people, John Flamsteed finally submitted an anonymous paper on lunar occultation to the Royal Society. This paper won Flamsteed acceptance and wide praise, but it was a later choice encounter that won him great respect and the credit he deserved for being a great astronomer.
One day during the winter of 1674-5, while John was Sir Jonas Moore’s protégé, a French astronomer came to the king’s court where the two were working, and claimed to have solved the problem of determining terrestrial longitudes. If true, this would mean much safer navigation. Flamsteed stepped up at this point and replied that neither the positions of the stars nor the movements of the moon were well enough known to make the French astronomer’s method practical. Upon hearing of Flamsteed’s knowledge of the heavens, the king realized all of Moore’s plans, and founded an observatory in which Flamsteed was to be the “astronomical observer” with an annual salary of 100 British pounds.
Although Flamsteed never became a household name, he is still remembered for his incredible observations. Over the course of his lifetime, he observed hundreds of stars, many of which he recorded and cataloged. He wrote many essays, some on the process of measuring craters on the moon by observing the light given off by stars passing behind it, and others on the apparent diameters of the planets. However, just as things in Flamsteed’s life started to look good, they took a turn for the worse.
Just as the observatory was getting off the ground and Flamsteed was beginning to publish his findings, he quickly realized the odds were against him. The king who had initially been so supportive of Flamsteed only paid a little more than enough to BUILD the observatory, let alone STAFF it or fill it with working ASTRONOMICAL INSTRUMENTS. This, added to the facts that Flamsteed had to train approximately 140 pupils over the years, and that his fellow scientists were now impatient for Flamsteed's latest findings, made Flamsteed realize that he was on his way out. By the time Flamsteed died in 1719, his “friendly” relationships with Sir Issac Newton and Edmond Halley had completely ended after the unauthorized printing of Flamsteed’s findings in 1712, and most of his lifetime salary had been spent.
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