Professor John Winthrop's Notes on Sun Spot Observations (1739)

Abstract

JOHN WINTHROP, the second Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard, was born in Boston on December I9, 1714. His forebears had been eminent men in Colonial New England and he was the third JOHN WINTHROP to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His great-granduncle, Governor JOHN WINTHROP, F. R. S. (I606-I676) (I), was a charter member of the Royal Society and it was he who gave Harvard its first telescope in I672. Entering Harvard in 1728, WINTHROP received his A. B. in 173z and his A. M. in 1735. In July 1738, IsAAc GREENWOOD, who had been WINTHROP'S master, was forced to resign from the Hollis Professorship as a result of his Various Acts of gross Intemperance. The next month WINTHROP, at the age of twenty-three, was selected for the chair of the Hollis Professor, and in due time was formally appointed to the position which he held until his death in I779. The first known record of WINTHROP'S scientific observations is his notes on sun spots made in 1739. The next year he observed the transit of Mercury and a lunar eclipse, and his work on these two phenomena resulted in his first communication to the Royal Society (2). Two years later he began a record of his meteorological observations at Cambridge which he maintained until 1763. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 aroused his interest in seismology; an interest which resulted in a lecture on earthquakes presented in Holden Chapel at Harvard (3) and later in a paper