Halley probably never imagined the world his comet would return to when it reappeared in 1985. Astrophysicists from an American-based national science agency launched spacecraft to analyze it. Earthbound opportunists peddled cheesy T-shirts and other wares commercializing the event as much as commemorating it. Fringe groups and eccentrics circulated pamphlets warning of doom and gloom. Assorted reporters gave live accounts transmitted by satellite-feed or radio waves in every language of the comet’s plodding approach to its perihelion. “Halleymania” imploded worldwide as February 9, 1986, the day when the celestial object would be closest to Earth, drew nearer and nearer.
To get the best glimpse of the spiraling ball of fire, a cottage industry of Halley-watching tours cropped up, offering a goofy gamut of “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities. You could join science fiction writer Isaac Asimov and Czechoslovakian comet hunter Lubos Kohoutek aboard the luxury cruiser the Queen Elizabeth 2 to listen to their lectures as you gawked at the comet from the North Atlantic,
dark skies and stormy seas included. Or fly above the clouds in a posh charter jet to supposedly get an even closer view of the comet’s flight. Or “see the splendor of Halley’s comet from the roof of Australia,” according to one travel brochure. “Before you know it, the skies will come alive with the most dazzling display of celestial bodies in 76 years,” boasted another ad, promoting expeditions to South America and South Africa, among other places.
The comet craze surrounding this luminous mass of ice and dust was nothing new. Modern technologies and ambitions simply amplified the brouhaha. When the entity had revisited Earth’s heavens in 1910, it was met with similar enthusiasm, just on a smaller scale. Instead of glow-in-the-dark T-shirts and doomsday cult memberships, the spectacle was used to promote such items as fountain pens and corsets. And the doomsayers were much less vocal and prolific. Despite the hoopla of the mid-1980s—the Halleywares market with its several thousand product offerings was cautiously pinned at $500 million—the conditions for watching the comet from Earth were the poorest they’d been in two millennia, and it made a disappointingly faint and unspectacular showing.
Today, Halley’s comet—transformed by the first triumph of the Newtonian revolution from a dire supernatural omen to a predictable element of the universe’s clockwork—remains a recurring symbol of this scientific age of the Enlightenment. His comet is hurtling through space at some 20,000 miles per hour and won’t be back until 2061. But it can remind us of past epochs and everlastingly of Halley’s contributions to geophysics and the world of science writ large.
Halley was a man of diverse talents. As Royal Society scientist and administrator, Oxford professor, and eventually England’s Astronomer Royal, his influence, like his perspective, was wide, touching many reaches of society. In his lifetime, Halley published 80 far-ranging contributions in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions. As one of his country’s leading minds of the Enlightenment and its related revolutions, he changed the course of science, industry, and related policy making. In many ways he was an artist of the
transformation that was under way, reflecting, defining, and shaping his age. A generalist in the purest sense, this sage sea captain often mistaken for a pirate was at once an adventurer and a quiet observer, brilliant navigator and pioneering actuary, justice seeker and secret warrior, meticulous historian and forward thinker, avid inventor and methodical referee, skilled cogitator and civic servant, fierce rival to several of the nation’s privileged brainiacs and close confidant to other greats, including Sir Isaac Newton.
As Halley biographer MacPike put it: “The idea of commissioning a landsman to the command of a King’s ship might appear to professional seamen as sheer madness…. However, in Halley’s case the rash outrageous act was justified in the event, but only because Edmond Halley was one man in a thousand, possessed of the most varied gifts and the most extraordinary versatility.”
With Halley’s assistance on ushering the publication of Principia in 1687, Newton altered the way the world perceived the universe. In fact, to many scholars this scientific giant embodied the dawning Enlightenment, broadly identified from the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 that installed William and Mary as monarchs of England to the French Revolution a century later.
By the time Halley embarked on his Atlantic Ocean expedition, Newton’s discoveries about gravity and light had unlocked God’s laws of the universe for those in the know. At the same time, the heated Battle of the Books was already raging in smoke-filled coffeehouses, in cloistered academic chambers, and on rudimentary printing presses. Literary scholarship with its recognized historical underpinnings was pitted against natural philosophy with its modern ideas. Diplomatic, if not debonair, Halley straddled both cultures. Schooled in the classics yet chasing scientific ideals, he was interested in tinkering in all worlds of discourse.
Revering knowledge, education, and opportunity, Enlightenment crusaders of Halley’s ilk instilled new values. Truth, freedom, liberty, and progress were the buzzwords of the day. Disciples of Locke and his greatest patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, spread the word about
civic responsibility. They believed in an innate duty to act publicly for the greater good of humankind and the rising British nation. Like many of the movement’s movers and shakers, Halley had taken this decidedly British notion to heart with exceptional ardor.
England’s growing prosperity and global reach would foster a social climate that would advance the ideals of science and its application to commerce and industry. The restoration of King Charles II served to bring the scientific movement “into the open daylight of fashion and favor.” He supported the founding of the Royal Society, and it was during his reign that Halley matured intellectually and came to be intimately tied to this erudite club.
As time wore on, the increasing openness of the island nation’s religious climate would enable the promotion of observation, experimentation, and reasoning to achieve science-based findings about the natural world. It was out of this environment that Halley secured his mission and in which his career soared.
Clearly, Charles’s successors, Queen Mary and King William, influenced by the elite minds of the Royal Society, believed that a “mission” of science could incite progress. That was an amazing leap of faith for a monarchy. And much was at stake. Any failure of Halley’s international mission of magnetism could have irreparably shaken confidence in public ventures in science, possibly forever dampening Parliament’s willingness to fund bigger and better endeavors in the future.
A spirit of inquiry propelled Enlightenment players to “discover the world.” Halley personified this essence in practice. Though often in Newton’s shadow, Halley never outwardly showed any signs of jealousy. His enthusiasm for his colleagues and the advancement of science went unchecked. Regardless of any wooly politics that were afoot, Halley was morally compelled to seek and share knowledge in order to further humankind and with it the position and prestige of the British nation. With his broad and at times even divergent perspective and willingness to undertake personal risk, he fulfilled a role
that neither the reclusive and erratic Newton nor their other cantankerous contemporaries could play.
If the so-called Scientific Revolution indeed began in 1600 with the publication of William Gilbert’s De Magnete, from which Halley took a magnetic cue, and finished in 1714 with the passing of the Longitude Act, Halley’s interests and career bridged the movement. In England, in particular, the revolution’s impetus was nautical—and based on practical needs. The Royal Observatory, where Halley started as a precocious young investigator and ended his career as the second royal astronomer, was expressly founded “for perfecting the art of navigation.”
The government, with Halley’s prompting, was promoting not faith but reason based on science. Or at least Parliament was sanctioning a new sort of faith, not in religion but in the method of experiment and observation, on which the Royal Society itself was based, when it offered a huge reward for the person who could solve the longitude problem. The challenge would intrigue Halley all his intellectual life. Yet few projects would capture the essence of what the Enlightenment was all about better than his mission aboard the Paramore.
The rise of national trading companies spurred on the revolution in science and the Enlightenment. Just as Halley had fervently pushed for advances in navigation, emerging English trading companies had helped persuade the monarchy that control of the seas was paramount. The Elizabethan mariner Sir Walter Raleigh himself had said it well: “Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.”
THE PROLIFERATION OF BRITISH TRADING companies also enabled the nation to control foreign lands in exchange for its support of such enterprises. As a result, England’s influence on local social, political, and economic matters in its colonies and territories only grew. Naval and
military support usually followed the creation of such diplomatic allegiances. This in effect passed the task to the British Navy of molding the world to the monarchy’s desires. The responsibility for ensuring free trade and access to markets, which are still the key elements of globalization today, fell to these water warriors for whom Halley strove for much of his life to give a competitive edge by advancing navigational knowledge and tools on as many fronts as possible.
The use of Enlightenment ideas to rationalize such intervention on foreign soils—no matter how well intentioned—illustrates the inherent contradictions of thought and action throughout the movement that had cross-cut all strata of British society. For example, the spirit that brought the revolution of 1688 and William and Mary to power was soon compromised by internal political realities and power struggles between the more conservative Tories and the Whigs who sought reform. Whether the changeover of power rescued England from the throngs of tyranny—or quickly enough—remains an open question. For the most part, all citizens remained subjects with effectively few basic rights as such, at least by modern standards.
Halley himself embodied personal and public contradictions. His classist commentary on life expectancy, for one, was telling. Perhaps, British society wasn’t prepared for a scholar who swore or a sailor who wore a periwig, a truth seeker who wagered his life for a few data points, or a man faithful to God but who put faith in scientific methods before the tenets of established religion. In the end, whether through his dogged persistence or at times sycophantic pandering to patrons, all society would embrace him.
Just the same, these new ways of thinking and behaving entailed by the Enlightenment touched all aspects of day-to-day life, inter-leaving history, art, science, philosophy, politics, and religion into the tapestry. In this period the culture of the educated person came to embrace the whole rubric of human knowledge. It was an age of the polymath when science and philosophy were not distinct from theology. And generalists thrived. To be educated was to be an artist, scien-
tist, historian, and philosopher in one. And Halley was among the Enlightenment’s champions.
THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, HALLEY HAD the patronage and even the admiration of a long line of kings and queens and others from the nation’s influential classes—and the respect of much of the leadership of the Western world. The importance of Halley’s personality to the promotion of his career cannot be underestimated. Few others managed to secure the royal patronage of seven monarchies spanning nearly 70 years of swirling political tumult.
Unlike Halley, Samuel Pepys, for one, fell out of royal grace after James II abdicated the throne. As secretary of the Admiralty during many of the British monarchy’s turbulent years leading up to James’s departure, he kept the British navy a league ahead of rival nations by streamlining its bureaucracy and advocating for the necessary resources to keep its ships better maintained and outfitted. But his career and influence suffered when William and Mary came to power since he’d curried only James’s favor. Pepys, though, was already in his mid-60s when the Paramore set sail.
Halley’s ability to charm the powerful of many persuasions furthered his ambitions in other ways. While most astronomers to his time were reputed solitary men, Halley maintained a following of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. A leading scholar dubbed him “a man of prodigious versatility and most attractive personality.” The 1757 Biographia Britannica credits him with “the qualifications necessary to obtain him the love of his equals. In the first place, he loved them; naturally of an ardent and glowing temper, he appeared animated in their presence with a generous warmth which the pleasure alone of seeing them seemed to inspire.” The distinction set him apart from his more unsociable peers like Flamsteed and Newton.
Halley used his diplomacy for the sake of learning. He encouraged the circulation of data and findings and intellectual discourse to stimulate new lines of investigation.
IN HIS AT TIMES SELF-EFFACING ROLE as clerk to the Royal Society during his early career, Halley was the organization’s most prolific administrator in terms of published papers, and his unpublished ones were often more remarkable. He was his age’s most dedicated servant to knowledge and perhaps to the public. He selflessly put the work of other more senior members before his own. He helped perpetuate the society itself by settling disputes among its members and keeping the presses rolling even in hard times. He was a de facto science advisor to the Royal Navy and the monarchy as a hydrographer, meteorologist, mint official, and more. He was also a diplomat and ambassador—and not only of the scientific realm.
More than a mere theoretician, Halley excelled at applying science and mathematics as well. Among his other coups, his practical gifts to navigation, at bare minimum, are worth mention. He designed a new reflecting gadget to measure altitudes to obsolete the Davis quadrant. He invented a glass point to better prop up a ship’s compass card. He also improved the log line by developing an instrument to measure the speed of a ship based on the angle of inclination of a line tossed from a ship’s stern and attached to a brass bell.
He also devised a method to compute meridional parts to make Mercator charts, among other contributions. As astronomer royal, Halley, like his predecessor Flamsteed, can be partially credited for helping spawn the business of scientific instruments and chronometry in England and the resulting improvements in observation and measurement.
MANY OF HALLEY’S MORE ABSTRACT navigational dreams would be fulfilled after his death, but all would bear his fingerprints. Some 70 years after Halley’s voyages, Captain James Cook would bring three key aspirations of Halley’s career full circle. Cook’s first voyage was spawned by Halley’s original prediction of the transit of Venus. Cook would use the lunar method for finding longitude that Halley had chased his entire intellectual life. On his second and third voyages, Cook would also be abetted by a device for determining longitude,
the Kendal watch, which was a direct outgrowth of the Harrison clock that Halley had supported when few others, Newton among them, kept an open mind. (Based on Halley’s advice, top instrument maker George Graham lent Harrison enough money to allow him to make his first prototype to submit to the Board of Longitude.)
When Halley was sailing his Paramore across the North Atlantic and making the first charts of geomagnetism, little did he ever imagine magnetism would underpin today’s stunning advances in information technology and electromagnetic engineering. Magnetism also offers ways to study phase transitions, random disorder, and physics in low dimensions, which looks at particle interactions at ever higher energies in order to essentially study matter at smaller and smaller size scales.
But perhaps just as astonishing was Halley’s lack of progress on other fronts. Could Halley ever fathom that three centuries after his death many mysteries of Earth’s magnetism would remain unsolved? In the decades leading up to the 21st century, study of the solar wind emerged as a leading field of space research. Many fascinating phenomena of magnetic fields remain to be explained in chemistry and biology as well.
Halley might relish the fact that geomagnetism still flummoxes legions of theoreticians and fact finders. While many of Halley’s ideas about magnetism wouldn’t pan out, he remained personally committed to his hypothesis that Earth was comprised of concentric shells. Today geophysicists know that Earth’s magnetic field is generated by electric currents deep within the surface and high above it. They have long known that Earth’s total geomagnetic field is the result of the superposition of all these currents; its model is much more complicated than Halley ever envisioned. The main driving force behind Earth’s magnetic field comes from electric currents sustained by a dynamo in the core. The kinetic energy from the motion within the vast volume of molten iron fluid circulating in the core creates the electric and magnetic fields much like the spinning wire coils in an electric generator. Although scientists know the so-called geodynamo
must be regenerative, they are still unraveling the mysteries of how it works.
While most seafarers take it for granted that their compasses point north, Earth’s magnetic field has actually reversed itself hundreds of times in the past 4.5 billion years. But scientists are yet to understand what makes the field flip from north to south and back again on average every 250,000 years.
It’s no wonder that Earth’s magnetic variation caused many throbbing headaches for the world’s mariners over the centuries. Its complexity accounts for why the amount of declination also varies depending on geographic location and time.
And we should remember how Halley pushed this line of inquiry in new directions. His comprehension of Earth’s magnetic field, which he conveyed through the curved lines of his hard-won map, and interpretation of the meaning of the resulting global patterns of the field pointed research toward unexplored territories. With his “metamap,” he successfully boosted notions of situational awareness while en route and laid the groundwork for today’s constellations of global positioning systems. He realized that Earth’s magnetic field likely originated deep inside the planet and that its magnetic field lines were correlated with auroral phenomena. He also correctly surmised that the westerly drift of the magnetic variation had no impact on Earth’s external dynamics.
All of which remains relevant today.
HALLEY’S VISION WAS RIVALED only by his appreciation for what had gone before him. An adventurer at heart, he was passionate to the end of his life about chronicling and understanding change of all sorts and how it related to humankind. From questions about the cycles of the Moon and tides to variations in Earth’s magnetism to the causes of ancient floods to the timing of Julius Caesar’s landing, he considered them all. And more significantly, he was willing to risk his life, family, personal money, career status, and more to obtain answers. There were his excursions to the enchanting island of St. Helena, the icy
reaches of the Antarctic Circle, the bottom waters off the West Sussex coast, and more.
Perhaps unintentionally, Halley’s pursuits point us toward a reconciliation of sorts of the ongoing conflicts between the study of the empirical natural world and the study of human values. We live, it seems, in a world that at once limits human potential yet at the same time offers boundless opportunities.
In his own lifetime, few in the general populace knew of Halley’s comet work. Today his comet often overshadows his other assorted contributions. “We do not often think of him as a sailor; and yet, previous to Cook, Captain E. Halley was our first scientific voyager,” is how historian S. P. Oliver put it in 1880.
We often forget his scientific values and foresight as well as his intuitive perspectives on everything from auroral phenomena to the source of Earth’s magnetism. Halley’s perseverance in his wide-ranging global sea mission could not be more relevant to an age where cooperative worldly initiatives are hardly optional in research as well as other realms. International surveys and joint observations are increasingly mandated by societal needs and objectives.
Yet Halley’s international legacy endures thanks in large part to that seeming fireball in the sky. Once every 76 years, more or less, the whole world looks up, beyond the horizon and seems unified in its attention to the heavens for a few fleeting moments, focused on something that still startles our imagination. At a minimum, even today we all wonder where the course of science and human progress, which Halley forever changed, will have arrived in 2061 when Halley’s comet next returns.
Maybe by then the Battle of the Books will finally be resolved. And conventional wisdom might hold that Halley was much more than a paid stargazer who had a comet he didn’t even discover named for him.