events.lindahall.org
After Hours with Flamsteed's Burned Star Atlas
This program will be presented virtually via Zoom webinar.In 1716, British astronomer John Flamsteed built a pyre near the Royal Observatory. On it, he burned pages from a book he wrote as a “sacrifice to truth.” The pages were from the 1712 edition of Flamsteed’s Historiae coelestis, which Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley had printed despite Flamsteed’s vehement objections. What happened after the fire? How did copies of Historiae coelestis spread, and who circulated them? Not all the offending pages went up in flames. Flamsteed kept a few copies of the objectionable sections. In one copy, recently acquired by the Linda Hall Library, Flamsteed and his assistant took pen to paper in pursuit of truth: striking through, crossing out, and annotating Newton and Halley’s mistakes. Join scholar Emma Hill and the Library’s Vice President for Special Collections and Public Services Jason W. Dean as they introduce Hill’s census of surviving copies and discuss how the census has uncovered new information about the book’s production and the human story surrounding it.
