The astronomical discoveries of Bradley, together with the body of meridian observations that he initiated, mark the true beginning of the modern science of stellar positions.
Born in England, at Sherborne, Gloucestershire, to parents of limited income, Bradley was intended for the Church. An uncle, the Reverend James Pound, rector of Wanstead in Essex, and an able astronomical observer, instructed him in the observational art, and introduced him to Edmond Halley, for whom Bradley carried out a number of astronomical observations. With Halley's support Bradley was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1718, a year after receiving his MA from Oxford. By 1719 he had completed a study of the motions of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, in which he detected the inequalities that would later (1766) be explained by Lagrange; his account of them, however, appeared only in 1749 after that of Pehr Wargentin.
In 1721 Bradley was appointed Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, a post he...
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Bibliography
Alexander, A. F. O'D. (1971) Bradley, J., Dict. Sci. Biogr., Vol. 2, pp. 387–9.
Pannekoek, A. (1961) A History of Astronomy. New York: Inter-science, 521 pp.
Rigaud, S. P. (1833) Miscellaneous Works and Correspondence of the Rev. James Bradley, Oxford.
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Wilson, C. (1997). Bradley, james (1693–1762). In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4520-4_43
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