Galileo gets the credit for the first use of a telescope, but this record is held by an Englishman, Thomas Harriot, who lived for some time on the banks of the Blackwater in Co Waterford
IT IS 400 years since a scientist first turned a telescope on the heavens, and saw evidence of other worlds there. Ask most people who that scientist was, and they will name Galileo. But they would be wrong. A brilliant astronomer and mathematician who once lived in Ireland beat Galileo by several months.
On July 26th, 1609, Thomas Harriot drew a beautifully detailed map of the moon, complete with mountains, sweeping plains and giant craters. Today it is acknowledged as probably the first recorded telescopic observation of the Moon.
Harriot has sometimes been called “England’s Galileo” and, although he remains little known, his discoveries rivalled those of his Italian contemporary.
Born in 1560, Harriot graduated from Oxford aged 20 and in 1585 joined Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to Virginia and Carolina as a scientific adviser. The friendship with Raleigh would be the making, and later the breaking of Harriot.
During that epic voyage Harriot devised several improvements to navigational techniques; and on arrival, he made a detailed map of the coast, learned the Algonquin language and, like Adam in Eden, named and described everything he saw.
He returned with tobacco, among other things, which would later be the death of him, and a grateful Raleigh presented his friend with part of his Irish estate, the former Augustinian monastery of Molanna Abbey by the banks of the Blackwater in Co Waterford.
There Harriot wrote his Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588). The first English description of the New World, it was soon widely translated and helped to fuel European interest in North America.
Harriot was also a member of Raleigh’s circle of powerful intellectuals, the School of the Night, so-called because of their melancholic black dress, and because they were suspected of magic. They included Sir Francis Drake, the soldier-poet Edmund Spenser, the writer Christopher Marlowe, the publisher Edward Blount, and the “wizard” John Dee.
This notorious group probably met at least once at the Waterford abbey, and a nymph in a Spenser poem is named Molanna. Later, there were accusations of atheism, dark arts and treason, and Raleigh, Blount and Percy were eventually executed, while others were imprisoned. By then Harriot had sold Molanna abbey to Richard Boyle of Lismore Castle, who bought most of Raleigh’s Irish estate, and whose son Robert would go on to fame as the father of modern chemistry.
Like Galileo, Harriot made many contributions to science. With the great European map-maker Gerard Mercator, he found ways to make maps and navigation more accurate. Studying the trajectory of bullets, he came to understand the laws of motion and of falling bodies, and realised correctly that the flight of a projectile describes a parabola. He observed the comet of 1607 (later named after Halley), correctly calculated that its orbit was an ellipse, and predicted its return.
Harriot’s other great work was in mathematics, and he has been described as a founder of modern algebra. He devised the elegant concept of placing everything to one side of an equation and equating that to zero, invented the useful concepts of, and symbols for, “less than” (), discovered the fundamental sine law of refraction 20 years before Snell did, and much more besides.
He died in 1621 of a tumour of the nose brought on by smoking tobacco, probably the first European to die of a smoking-related cancer. Yet even after his death, friends feared to publish his work, condemning this brilliant mathematician and astronomer to relative obscurity.
It is something astronomers in Britain are keen to right in this the International Year of Astronomy, marking the 400th anniversary of the telescope and Harriot’s revolutionary work.
A special Telescope 400 celebration will take place on July 26th at Syon Park, London, former home of Harriot’s patron, the Earl of Northumberland (www.telescope400.org).
Today, Thomas Harriot’s former home at Molanna Abbey is a scenic ruin, part of the larger Ballynatray Estate near Youghal, that was also once owned by Walter Raleigh.
Mary Mulvihill’s new guide to sustainable living, Drive like a Woman, Shop like a Man, has just been published by New Island