16 Facts About Jeremiah Horrocks

Jeremiah Horrocks, sometimes given as Jeremiah Horrox, was an English astronomer.

Jeremiah Horrocks was the first person to demonstrate that the Moon moved around the Earth in an elliptical orbit; and he was the only person to predict the transit of Venus of 1639, an event which he and his friend William Crabtree were the only two people to observe and record.

Jeremiah Horrocks was born at Lower Lodge Farm in Toxteth Park, a former royal deer park near Liverpool, Lancashire.

Jeremiah Horrocks was introduced early to astronomy; his boyhood chores included measuring the local noon used to set local clocks, and his Puritan upbringing instilled an enduring suspicion of astrology, witchcraft and magic.

In 1632, Jeremiah Horrocks matriculated at Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge as a sizar.

In 1635, for reasons not clear, Jeremiah Horrocks left Cambridge without graduating.

Now committed to the study of astronomy, Jeremiah Horrocks began to collect astronomical books and equipment; by 1638 he owned the best telescope he could find.

Jeremiah Horrocks was well placed to do this; his father and uncles were watchmakers with expertise in creating precise instruments.

Carr House was a substantial property owned by the Stones family who were prosperous farmers and merchants, and Jeremiah Horrocks was probably a tutor for the Stones' children.

Jeremiah Horrocks was the first to demonstrate that the Moon moved in an elliptical path around the Earth, and he posited that comets followed elliptical orbits.

Jeremiah Horrocks supported his theories by analogy to the motions of a conical pendulum, noting that after a plumb bob was drawn back and released it followed an elliptical path, and that its major axis rotated in the direction of revolution as did the apsides of the Moon's orbit.

Jeremiah Horrocks anticipated Isaac Newton in suggesting the influence of the Sun as well as the Earth on the Moon's orbit.

Kepler's tables had predicted a near-miss of a transit of Venus in 1639 but, having made his own observations of Venus for years, Jeremiah Horrocks predicted a transit would indeed occur.

Jeremiah Horrocks made a simple helioscope by focusing the image of the Sun through a telescope onto a plane surface, whereby an image of the Sun could be safely observed.

Jeremiah Horrocks is remembered on a plaque in Westminster Abbey and the lunar crater Jeremiah Horrocks is named after him.

In 1927, the Jeremiah Horrocks Observatory was built at Moor Park, Preston.