Sir Harold Spencer Jones KBE FRS[1] FRSE PRAS (29 March 1890 – 3 November 1960)[2] was an English astronomer.
His father, Henry Charles Jones, was an accountant and his mother, Sarah Ryland, had earlier worked as a school teacher.
[7] He was educated at Latymer Upper School, in Hammersmith, West London, from where he obtained a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge.
[3][1] In 1913 he was appointed Chief Assistant at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, filling a vacancy created by the departure of Arthur Eddington to become Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge.
He travelled to Minsk in Eastern Europe in 1914 to observe a total solar eclipse, departing during peacetime but returning after the start of the First World War.
He led efforts by the staff to measure the properties of large numbers of stars from photographic plates exposed on the observatory's telescopes.
They also determined the distances of stars from their parallaxes – the very small apparent annual motions as the Earth orbited the Sun.
He obtained government agreement to move the observatory from its historic site in Greenwich, which was by then significantly affected by the light and pollution of London, to a darker location away from the city.
Spencer Jones moved from Greenwich to Herstmonceux in 1948, but the removal of the whole institution was not completed for another ten years, because of the need to erect new buildings and a lack of funding following the war.
Spencer Jones led major construction projects to accommodate instruments moved from Greenwich.
Spencer Jones's successor as Astronomer Royal was Richard Woolley, who on taking up the position in 1956 responded to a question from the press and was misquoted as saying "Space travel is utter bilge".
Despite recent suggestions that he did not actually make such a statement,[15][16][17] the quote was referenced in 1959 (during his lifetime) in the 17 September issue of New Scientist magazine (page 476).
The sentiment of the quote is consistent with Spencer Jones' own 1957 editorial in the same magazine (10 October 1957), twelve years before the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, in which he stated: I am of the opinion that generations will pass before man ever lands on the moon and that, should he eventually succeed in doing so, there would be little hope of his succeeding in returning to the Earth and telling us of his experiences.
In 1944 Spencer Jones was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Astronomy in our Daily Life.