John Michell
John Michell (/ˈmɪtʃəl/; 25 December 1724 – 21 April 1793) was an English natural philosopher and clergyman who provided pioneering insights into a wide range of scientific fields including astronomy, geology, optics, and gravitation.
Considered "one of the greatest unsung scientists of all time",[1] he is the first person known to have proposed the existence of stellar bodies comparable to black holes,[2] and the first to have suggested that earthquakes travelled in (seismic) waves.
According to one science journalist,[3] "a few specifics of Michell's work really do sound like they are ripped from the pages of a twentieth century astronomy textbook."
The American Physical Society (APS) described Michell as being "so far ahead of his scientific contemporaries that his ideas languished in obscurity, until they were re-invented more than a century later".
The Society stated that while "he was one of the most brilliant and original scientists of his time, Michell remains virtually unknown today, in part because he did little to develop and promote his own path-breaking ideas".
Gilbert was the son of William Michell and Mary Taylor of Kenwyn, Cornwall; Obedience was the daughter of Ralph and Hannah Gerrard of London.
I think he had the care of St. Botolph's Church Cambridge, while he continued Fellow of Queens’ College, where he was esteemed a very ingenious Man, and an excellent Philosopher.
"[8][9] In 1910, Sir Edmund Whittaker observed that during the century after Isaac Newton's death, "the only natural philosopher of distinction who lived and taught at Cambridge was Michell", although his "researches seem to have attracted little or no attention among his collegiate contemporaries and successors, who silently acquiesced when his discoveries were attributed to others, and allowed his name to perish entirely from Cambridge tradition".
[5][page needed][10] In 1767, he was appointed rector of St. Michael's Church of Thornhill, near Leeds, Yorkshire, England, a post he held for the rest of his life.
[12] At one point, Michell attempted to measure the radiation pressure of light by focusing sunlight onto one side of a compass needle.
[12] In this paper he introduced the idea that earthquakes spread out as waves through the Earth, and that they involve the offsets in geological strata now known as faults.
[13] Michell's essay not only provided insights on earthquakes but also, more broadly, represented an advance in the understanding of the geology of the Earth's crust.
Then he placed a massive lead ball beside each of the small ones, causing a gravitational attraction that led the rod to turn clockwise.
[11][13] In 1987, gravity researcher A. H. Cook wrote: The most important advance in experiments on gravitation and other delicate measurements was the introduction of the torsion balance by Michell and its use by Cavendish.
He focused his investigation on the Pleiades cluster, and calculated that the likelihood of finding such a close grouping of stars was about one in half a million.
[16] In a paper for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, read on 27 November 1783, Michell was the first to propose the existence of celestial bodies similar to black holes.
This insight led in turn to the recognition that a star's gravitational pull might be so strong that the escape velocity would exceed the speed of light.
[4] It has been written that Michell was so far ahead of his time in regard to black holes that the idea "made little impression" on his contemporaries.
[4][13] "He died in quiet obscurity", states the American Physical Society, "and his notion of a 'dark star' was forgotten until his writings re-surfaced in the 1970s.
One of them, a reflecting telescope with a 10-foot focal length and a 30-inch aperture, was bought by the distinguished astronomer William Herschel after Michell's death.
During his years at Thornhill, he welcomed visitors including Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, Jan Ingenhousz, and Henry Cavendish (the discoverer of hydrogen).
