Word: halley
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, has been selected to deliver the annual Halley Lecture at Oxford University on June 18. This lecture, which is delivered each year by some well-known astronomer, is named for Edmund Halley, who lived during the last half of the seventeenth, and first half of the eighteenth centuries. Halley, particularly famous for his cometary researches, encouraged Isaac Newton to the publication of his "Principia" and to the announcement of the law of gravitation...
...speech of the Senator from Alabama has been taken seriously by a few. It will be remembered that some 15 years ago Halley's comet scorched through the sky. It had a tail a million miles long. It gave off an iridescence; and some persons grew frightened until scientists assured them that while the tail was indeed a million miles long, the whole affair did not have about it or in it an ounce of substance. [Laughter.] Likewise, the speech of the Senator from Alabama gives off an iridescence, but is bereft of even an ounce of substance...
Further on the report states, in referring to the eclipse of 1715, that "Dr. Halley, intimates some appearance of alarm among the fish" during that eclipse, but the committee declares that "we have not heard any similar remark at this time...
...appeal to all school pupils, boy scouts, and girl scouts to assist by making informal observations tomorrow has also been made. This last is interestingly analogous to an appeal sent out in 1715, 210 years ago, by Dr. Halley, the famous British astronomer, as contained in an old account now on exhibition in the Widener Room of the University Library...
...Having found," Dr. Halley is reported as saying, "by comparing what had been formerly observed of solar eclipses, that the whole shadow would fall upon England, I thought it a very proper opportunity to get the dimension of the shade, ascertained by observation. And accordingly, I caused a small map of England describing the track and bounds thereof, to be dispersed all over the kingdom, with a request to the curious to observe what they could about it, but more especially to note the time of continuance of total darkness...