Items17The creator’s order
  1. 1Tycho BraheTycho BraheTycho Brahe ran the observatory of Uraniborg on the island of Hven from 1576 for over twenty years, measuring the positions of stars and planets night after night with large instruments and a staff of assistants. Continuity and precision were the point: only a long, consistent record of Mars could…0i
  2. 2Robert MarshamRobert MarshamRobert Marsham, a Norfolk landowner, began recording his "Indications of Spring" in 1736: the first leafing of trees, the first song of birds, frogs croaking. He kept going for over sixty years, and his descendants continued the record until 1958. The Marsham series is now one of the longest…0i
  3. 3Caroline HerschelCaroline HerschelBorn 16 Mar 1750Caroline Herschel swept the night sky for years from the 1780s, finding eight comets and many nebulae, while keeping the records for her brother William's survey of the heavens. After his death she returned to Hanover and, in her seventies, completed a catalogue of the nebulae and star clusters…0i
  4. 4Heinrich SchwabeHeinrich SchwabeBorn 25 Oct 1789Heinrich Schwabe, a pharmacist in Dessau, began watching the Sun daily in 1826 hoping to find a planet inside Mercury's orbit. He never found it, but after seventeen years of counting sunspots he reported in 1843 that their number rises and falls over about ten years. The sunspot cycle was taken up…0i
  5. 5John Bennet LawesJohn Bennet LawesJohn Bennet Lawes founded Rothamsted on his Hertfordshire estate and in 1843 began field experiments with the chemist Joseph Henry Gilbert, who worked beside him for nearly sixty years. The Broadbalk wheat experiment has been sown with the same fertiliser treatments almost every year since, and…0i
  6. 6Wilson BentleyWilson BentleyBorn 9 Feb 1865Wilson Bentley, a farmer in Jericho, Vermont, took the first photograph of a single snowflake in 1885 using a microscope fitted to a bellows camera, and kept photographing them every winter for the rest of his life, over 5,000 in all. He also recorded weather and raindrop sizes. His long series…0i
  7. 7Annie S. D. MaunderAnnie S. D. MaunderAnnie Maunder joined the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as a "lady computer" in 1891 and, with her husband Walter Maunder, spent decades photographing and charting sunspots. Their butterfly diagram of 1904 showed how sunspots drift towards the solar equator through each cycle. Their study of old…0i
  8. 8Charles David KeelingCharles David KeelingBorn 20 Apr 1928Charles David Keeling began measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in Hawaii in 1958 for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, insisting on precise, continuous calibration when funders doubted the value of repeating the same measurement. Within a few years the record showed both the seasonal…0i
  9. 9Jane GoodallJane GoodallBorn 3 Apr 1934Jane Goodall began watching chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania in 1960, sponsored by Louis Leakey, and the study has run ever since, the longest continuous study of wild chimpanzees. Its length revealed things a short study could not: tool use passed down families, a four-year war between communities…0i
  10. 10Gene LikensGene LikensBorn 6 Jan 1935Gene Likens co-founded the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study in New Hampshire's White Mountains in 1963 with F. Herbert Bormann and others, measuring the chemistry of rain and stream water from small forested valleys week after week. The long record revealed acid rain in North America in the early…0i