Nevil Maskelyne

Nevil Maskelyne FRS FRSE (/ˈmæskəlɪn/; 6 October 1732 – 9 February 1811) was the fifth British Astronomer Royal. He held the office from 1765 to 1811. He was the first person to scientifically measure the mass of the planet Earth. He created The Nautical Almanac, in full the British Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris for the Meridian of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, using Tobias Mayer's corrections for Leonhard Euler's Lunar Theory tables.

Maskelyne was born in London, the third son of Edmund Maskelyne of Purton in Wiltshire, and his wife, Elizabeth Booth. Maskelyne's father died when he was 12, leaving the family in reduced circumstances. Maskelyne attended Westminster School and was still a pupil there when his mother died in 1748. His interest in astronomy had begun while at Westminster School, shortly after the eclipse of 14 July 1748.

Maskelyne entered St Catharine's College, Cambridge, in 1749, graduating as seventh wrangler in 1754. Ordained as a minister in 1755, he became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1756 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1758. Maskelyne became a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1771.

Originally pursuing his career as a Church of England minister, he was Rector of Shrawardine in Shropshire from 1775 to 1782 and then Rector of North Runcton in Norfolk from 1782. In 1784 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were John Playfair, John Robison and Dugald Stewart. On 21 August 1784 Maskelyne married Sophia Rose, then of St Andrew Holborn, Middlesex. Their only child, Margaret (25 June 1785–1858), was the mother of Mervyn Herbert Nevil Story-Maskelyne (1823–1911) professor of mineralogy at Oxford (1856–95). Maskelyne's younger sister, Margaret, married Robert Clive.

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

In 1760 the Royal Society appointed Maskelyne as an astronomer on one of their expeditions to observe the 1761 transit of Venus. He and the mathematician Robert Waddington were sent to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. This was an important observation since accurate measurements would allow the accurate calculation of Earth's distance from the Sun, which would in turn allow the actual rather than the relative scale of the Solar System to be calculated. This would allow, it was argued, the production of more accurate astronomical tables, in particular those predicting the motion of the Moon.

Bad weather prevented observation of the transit, but 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. He 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.

In 1763 the Board of Longitude sent Maskelyne to Barbados in order to carry out an official trial of three contenders for a Longitude reward. He was to carry out observations on board ship and to calculate the longitude of the capital, Bridgetown by observation of Jupiter's satellites. The three methods on trial were John Harrison's sea watch (now known as H4), Tobias Mayer's lunar tables and a marine chair made by Christopher Irwin, intended to help observations of Jupiter's satellites on board ship. Both Harrison's watch and lunar-distance observations based on Mayer's lunar tables produced results within the terms of the Longitude Act, although the former appeared to be more accurate. Harrison's watch had produced Bridgetown's longitude with an error of less than ten miles, while the lunar-distance observations were accurate to within 30 nautical miles.