Simon Newcomb was born in Wallace, Nova Scotia, Canada on March 12, 1835. His father, John Burton Newcomb, was a schoolteacher, and his mother Emily Prince, was the daughter of a New Brunswick magistrate. As a child, he lived in various villages in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. When Newcomb was 16, he was apprenticed to Dr. Foshay. Newcomb was supposed to learn medical botany and in return he would serve as a general assistant for five year. Unfortunately, Dr. Foshay was a cheat and Newcomb wasted two years serving him. He ran away and eventually journeyed to Salem, Massachusetts where he met his father as they continued on their way to Maryland.
There in Maryland, Newcomb was able to get a teaching post at a country school. In his free time, he taught studied Newton’s Principia and taught himself mathematics. In 1856, he became a private tutor near Washington which allowed him to frequently visit the capital. There, he visited the library of the Smithsonian Institution where he met Joseph Henry, the secretary of the Smithsonian. Henry allowed him to borrow the first volume of Bowditch’s translation of Laplace’s Mécanique céleste and Henry suggested that Newcomb look for a job at the Coast Survey. He was recommended to the Nautical Almanac Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A few weeks after coming to Cambridge, he was given a trial appointment as an astronomical computer. At the same time, he took time to study more mathematics at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University under Benjamin Peirce. He graduated the next year in 1858.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, some of the professors of mathematics attached to the U.S. Navy resigned. This allowed Newcomb to take up the spot at the Naval Observatory. His job was to help in observing the right ascensions of stars with the transit circle. He hated randomly observing stars. When he was put in charge of the mural circle in 1863, he suggested to Superintendent Gilliss to have the right ascension and declination observations done more systematically. In 1865, a new transit circle was obtained and Newcomb took this opportunity to start a four-year program of fundamental observations of stellar positions. He became very interested in the theory behind the orbits of the planets and the moon. He hoped to improve their predicted positions by calculating the disturbances in their orbits caused by the gravitational pull of other objects.
Looking over Hansen’s tables on the moon, he saw that the moon was starting to stray from its predicted position. Hansen had made these tables with observations dating back to 1750. Newcomb went to France to gather even older information about these observations. When Newcomb studied the pre-1750 data, he found that Hansen’s tables had many errors for the period before 1750. He believed that the aberration was due to variations in the rate of rotation of the Earth during that time. However his attempt to verify his theory from observing transits of Mercury was inconclusive. During the last years of his life, he tried again to take up this problem. His discussion of lunar observations from 720 B.C. to A.D. 1908 was completed a month before his death. The discussion he had written was left for others to prove that the fluctuations were caused by Earth’s irregular rotation.
He also devoted two years to observe the satellites of Uranus and Neptune. From his observations and research, which were published in a memoir on The Uranian and Neptunian Systems, it appeared that the orbits of all four of Uranus’s satellites are circular. He also calculated the mass of Uranus and Neptune and verified his earlier predictions of Uranus’s mass.
At an international conference in Paris in 1896 whose purpose was to elaborate a common system of constants and fundamental stars to be used in the various national tables and almanacs, Newcomb was a strong leader. He took up the task of determining a definite value of the constant of precession, and of aggregating a new catalogue of standard stars. The results of these investigations were published in 1899, and have been used since the beginning of 1901.
Simon Newcomb had many accomplishments in his lifetime and published many books and papers on various topics. On July 11, 1909, he died in Washington. Because he was made a rear-admiral by Act of Congress in 1906, he was given a military funeral and was buried in Arlington Cemetery.
Works Cited
- "Newcomb, Simon." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 10. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. 33-36. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 17 Feb. 2011.
- O'Connor, J. J., and E. F. Robertson. "Newcomb Biography." MacTutor History of Mathematics. Oct. 2003. Web. 13 Feb. 2011. <http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Newcomb.html>.
- "Simon Newcomb." NNDB: Tracking the Entire World. Soylent Communications, 2011. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. <http://www.nndb.com/people/473/000103164/>.
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