Born Shelby County, Kentucky, USA, 6 February 1826
Died Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 11 June 1875
Joseph Winlock, a mathematical astronomer, was twice superintendent of the American Ephemeris before becoming the third director of the Harvard College Observatory. There he upgraded the observatory's equipment, expanded its research programs into the New Astronomy of astrophysics, and invented the photoheliograph.
Winlock's grandfather, a surveyor, participated in the convention that framed Kentucky's constitution, and both his grandfather and father had distinguished military careers during the War of 1812. Winlock was educated in his home state. His mathematical prowess was so evident that immediately upon his graduation from Shelby College in 1845, he was offered an appointment there as professor of mathematics and astronomy. Winlock spent his first savings on a set of the Astronomische Nachrichten, then the world's foremost astronomical journal; to gain enough fluency to read...
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Selected References
Annon. (1875). “Joseph Winlock,” American Journal of Science 110: 159–160.
Bailey, Solon I. (1931). The History and Work of Harvard Observatory, 1839 to 1927,New York and London: McGraw–Hill Book Company, Inc.
Bartky, Ian R. (2000). Selling the True Time: Nineteenth‐Century Timekeeping in America. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Jones, Bessie Zaban and Lyle Gifford Boyd (1971). The Harvard College Observatory: The First Four Directorships, 1839–1919. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Lovering, Joseph (1877). “Memoir of Joseph Winlock.” Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences 1: 329–343.
Rothenberg, Marc (1999). “Joseph Winlock.” In American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. Vol. 23, pp. 637–638. New York : Oxford University Press.
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Bell, T.E. (2007). Winlock, Joseph. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1487
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