18 Facts About Nevil Maskelyne

Nevil Maskelyne was the first person to scientifically measure the mass of the planet Earth.

Nevil Maskelyne's father died when he was 12, leaving the family in reduced circumstances.

Nevil Maskelyne attended Westminster School and was still a pupil there when his mother died in 1748.

Nevil Maskelyne entered St Catharine's College, Cambridge in 1749, graduating as seventh wrangler in 1754.

Nevil Maskelyne became a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1771.

Nevil Maskelyne's proposers were John Playfair, John Robison and Dugald Stewart.

Nevil Maskelyne is buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, the parish church of the village of Purton, Wiltshire, England.

Bad weather prevented observation of the transit, but Nevil Maskelyne used his journey to trial a method of determining longitude using the position of the moon, which became known as the lunar distance method.

Nevil Maskelyne returned to England, resuming his position as curate at Chipping Barnet in 1761, and began work on a book, publishing the lunar-distance method of longitude calculation and providing tables to facilitate its use in 1763 in The British Mariner's Guide, which included the suggestion that to facilitate the finding of longitude at sea, lunar distances should be calculated beforehand for each year and published in a form accessible to navigators.

Nevil Maskelyne was to carry out observations on board ship and to calculate the longitude of the capital, Bridgetown by observation of Jupiter's satellites.

Nevil Maskelyne was to play a significant role in having marine timekeepers, as well as the lunar-distance method, developed, tested and used on board voyages of exploration.

Nevil Maskelyne's observations appeared in four large folio volumes from 1776 to 1811, some of them being reprinted in Samuel Vince's Elements of Astronomy.

In 1772 Nevil Maskelyne proposed to the Royal Society what was to become known as the Schiehallion experiment, for the determination of the Earth's density using a plumb line.

Nevil Maskelyne was not the first to suggest this, Pierre Bouguer and Charles-Marie de la Condamine having attempted the same experiment in 1738 in the Andes.

Nevil Maskelyne performed his experiment in 1774 on Schiehallion in Perthshire, Scotland, the mountain being chosen due to its regular conical shape which permitted a reasonably accurate determination of its volume.

Nevil Maskelyne's first contribution to astronomical literature was A Proposal for Discovering the Annual Parallax of Sirius, published in 1760.

Nevil Maskelyne introduced several practical improvements, such as the measurement of time to tenths of a second and prevailed upon the government to replace Bird's mural quadrant by a repeating circle 6 feet in diameter.

The new instrument was constructed by Edward Troughton but Nevil Maskelyne did not live to see it completed.