Mathematical Worthies

Extract

Edward Wright was probably born about 1560, and he died in 1615. He was a fellow of Caius College, Cambridge. The chief source of information about him, besides his own published works, is an obituary notice in a Latin paper preserved in the college library. He furnishes a notable instance of the conditions under which mathematical science was pursued in his time. The main object kept in view was to supply material needs of life, principally at this period in all matters connected with navigation, and the promoters and supporters of research in this direction were not the universities, but the trading and mercantile communities. Wright was appointed by the East India Company their Lecturer on Mathematics, at a salary of £50 a year. He was mechanical tutor to the eldest son of James I., Prince Henry, who died in 1612 at the age of nineteen. For his pupil’s instruction he designed and made a wonderful piece of mechanism, displaying all the movements of the heavenly bodies then known, and constructed to indicate these correctly for 17,100 years. It lasted, in fact, but a very few years. During the troubles of the civil war it was cast away as old rubbish, and in 1646 was found by Sir Jonas Moore, and deposited in its dilapidated state at his house in the Tower.