Robert Stawell Ball

Great Astronomers Robert Stawell Ball

John Flamsteed was born at Denby, in Derbyshire, on the 19th of August, 1646. His mother died when he was three years old, and the second wife, whom his father took three years later, only lived until Flamsteed was eight, there being also two younger sisters. In his boyhood the future astronomer tells us that he was very fond of those romances which affect boy's imagination, but as he writes, "At twelve years of age I left all the wild ones and betook myself to read the better sort of them, which, though they were not probable, yet carried no seeming impossibility in the picturing." By the time Flamsteed was fifteen years old he had embarked in still more serious work, for he had read Plutarch's "Lives," Tacitus' "Roman History," and many other books of a similar description. In 1661 he became ill with some serious rheumatic affection, which obliged him to be withdrawn from school. It was then for the first time that he received the rudiments of a scientific education.