George Biddell Airy ran the Royal Observatory at Greenwich for forty-six years, redefined the prime meridian’s instruments, and organised Victorian astronomy into a machine of systematic computation. His Autobiography, assembled from journals and correspondence, follows the sizar’s son from Cambridge triumph through the great projects — and the great controversies, Neptune among them — of a very long reign at the centre of British science.
Airy is candid, methodical and occasionally unbending, exactly as his reputation promises, and the book is a superb inside view of nineteenth-century scientific administration. Download the free EPUB for the Astronomer Royal in his own words.