33 Facts About John Michell

John Michell was an English natural philosopher and clergyman who provided pioneering insights into a wide range of scientific fields including astronomy, geology, optics, and gravitation.

John Michell invented an apparatus to measure the mass of the Earth, and explained how to manufacture an artificial magnet.

John Michell has been called the father both of seismology and of magnetometry.

The Society stated that while "he was one of the most brilliant and original scientists of his time, John Michell remains virtually unknown today, in part because he did little to develop and promote his own path-breaking ideas".

John Michell was born in 1724 in Eakring, in Nottinghamshire, the son of Gilbert Michell, a priest, and Obedience Gerrard.

John Michell was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, and later became a Fellow of Queens'.

John Michell was Tutor of the college from 1751 to 1763; Praelector in Arithmetic in 1751; Censor in Theology in 1752; Praelector in Geometry in 1753; Praelector in Greek in 1755 and 1759; Senior Bursar in 1756; Praelector in Hebrew in 1759 and 1762; Censor in Philosophy and Examiner in 1760.

John Michell has published some things in that way, on the Magnet and Electricity.

John Michell proceeded to take up clerical positions in Compton and then Havant, both in Hampshire.

In 1750, John Michell published at Cambridge a work of some eighty pages entitled "A Treatise of Artificial Magnets", in which he presented an easy and expeditious method of producing magnets that are superior to the best natural magnets.

At one point, John Michell attempted to measure the radiation pressure of light by focusing sunlight onto one side of a compass needle.

Until the late 20th century John Michell was considered important primarily because of his work on geology.

John Michell recognized that the Earth is composed "of regular and uniform strata", some of which have been interrupted by upheavals.

John Michell devised a torsion balance for measuring the mass of the Earth, but died before he could use it.

John Michell's instrument passed into the hands of his lifelong friend Henry Cavendish, who first performed in 1798 the experiment now known as the Cavendish Experiment.

John Michell was the first person to apply the new mathematics of statistics to the study of the stars, and demonstrated in a 1767 paper that many more stars occur in pairs or groups than a perfectly random distribution could account for.

John Michell focused his investigation on the Pleiades cluster, and calculated that the likelihood of finding such a close grouping of stars was about one in half a million.

John Michell concluded that the stars in these double or multiple star systems might be drawn to one another by gravitational pull, thus providing the first evidence for the existence of binary stars and star clusters.

John Michell calculated that this would be the case with a star more than 500 times the size of the Sun.

John Michell suggested that there might be many such objects in the universe, and today astronomers believe that black holes do indeed exist at the centers of most galaxies.

Similarly, John Michell proposed that astronomers could detect them by looking for star systems which behaved gravitationally like two stars, but where only one star could be seen.

John Michell argued that this would show the presence of a star from which light was not escaping.

John Michell wrote a paper on surveying that his biographer has described as "elegant" in theory.

John Michell was first invited to meetings of the Royal Society in 1751 as a guest of Sir George Savile, who would become his patron.

John Michell later attended meetings "one to four times a year", while at Cambridge.

John Michell followed his work in seismology with work in astronomy, and after publishing his findings in 1767 he served on an astronomical committee of the Royal Society.

John Michell is credited with being the first to study the case of a heavenly object massive enough to prevent light from escaping.

John Michell suggested using a prism to measure what is known as gravitational redshift, the gravitational weakening of starlight due to the surface gravity of the source.

John Michell acknowledged that some of these ideas were not technically practical at the time, but wrote that he hoped they would be useful to future generations.

John Michell was a man of "wide latitude in religious belief".

John Michell wrote to Franklin in 1767 describing his first visit to Thornhill, "the place I told you I was going to remove to".

John Michell helped Smeaton revise his book on the Eddystone Lighthouse.

John Michell's younger brother Gilbert was a merchant in London who later lived with John Michell in Thornhill, where the two brothers were active in local real estate, purchasing many properties in the West Riding of Yorkshire.