1. Joseph-Nicolas Delisle's life changed radically in 1725 when he was called by the Russian czar Peter the Great to Saint Petersburg to create and run the school of astronomy.
10 Facts About Joseph-Nicolas Delisle
1. 2.
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle arrived there only in 1726, after the death of the czar.
3.
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle became quite rich and famous, to such an extent that when he returned to Paris in 1747, he built a new observatory in the palace of Cluny, later made famous by Charles Messier.
4.
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1725 and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1749.
5.
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle developed a map showing where on Earth this transit would be visible and thus where various observing stations should be located.
6.
In 1740, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle undertook an expedition to Siberia with the object of observing from Beryozovo the transit of Mercury across the sun.
7.
Ivan Kirilov, the first director of the imperial Cartographic Office, had Joseph-Nicolas Delisle officially invited to Russia with a view to his collaborating on the proposed map of the empire.
8.
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle worked on the atlas in the 1730s, but his extreme scientific rigour considerably slowed its progress.
9.
Increasingly isolated at court, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle requested permission to leave Russia in 1743, which was granted four years later.
10.
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle is mostly known for the Joseph-Nicolas Delisle scale, a temperature scale he invented in 1732.