GOULD, BENJAMIN APTHORP (1824-1896)

This article appears in Volume V12, Page 284 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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GOULD, BENJAMIN APTHORP (1824-1896) , American astronomer, a son of Benjamin Apthorp Gould (1787-1859), principal of the Boston Latin school, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, on the 27th of September 1824. Having graduated at Harvard College in 1844, he studied mathematics and astronomy under C. F. Gauss at Gottingen, and returned to America in 1848. From 1852 to 1867 he was in charge of the longitude department of the United States coast survey; he developed and organized the service, was one of the first to determine longitudes by telegraphic means, and employed the Atlantic cable in ,866 to establish longitude-relations between Europe and America. The Astronomical Journal was founded by Gould in 1849; and its publication, suspended in 1861, was resumed by him in 1885. From 1855 to 1859 he acted as director of the Dudley

observatory

OBSERVATORY

at Albany, New

York

YORK
YORK (
HOUSE
- HOUSE
- HOUSE (O. Eng. hiss, a word common to Teutonic languages, cf. Dut. huis, Ger. Haus; in
  Gothic
  - GOTHIC
  it is only found in gudhiss, a temple; it may be ultimately connected with the root of " hide," conceal)
OF)
YORK, EDMUND OF
LANGLEY
- LANGLEY, SAMUEL PIERPONT (1834-1906)
, DUKE OF (1341-1402)
YORK, EDWARD
YORK, FREDERICK
AUGUSTUS
- AUGUSTUS (a name 1 derived from Lat. augeo, increase, i.e. venerable, majestic, Gr. Ee0avr6s)
, DUKE OF (1763-1827)
YORK, RICHARD, DUKE

; and published in 1859 a discussion of the places and proper motions of circumpolar stars to be used as standards by the United States coast survey. Appointed in 1862 actuary to the United States sanitary commission, he issued in 1869 an important volume of Military and Anthropological Statistics. He fitted up in 1864 a private

observatory

OBSERVATORY

Cambridge

, Mass.; but undertook in 1868, on behalf of the Argentine republic, to organize a national observatory at Cordoba; began to observe' there with four assistants in 1870, and completed in 1874 his Uranometria Argentina (published 1879) for which he received in 1883 the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. This was followed by a zone-catalogue of 73,160 stars (1884), and a general catalogue (1885) compiled from meridian observations of 32,448 stars. Gould's measurements of L. M. Rutherfurd's photographs of the Pleiades in 1866 entitle him to rank as apioneer in the use of the camera as an

instrument

INSTRUMENT (Lat. instrumentum, from insincere, to build up, furnish, arrange, prepare)

of precision; and he secured at Cordoba 1400 negatives of southern

star

STAR

-clusters, the reduction of which occupied the closing years of his life. He returned in 1885 to his

home

Cambridge

, where he died on the 26th of November 1896.
See Astronomical Journal, No. 389; Observatory, xx. 70 (same notice abridged) ; Science (Dec. 18, 1896, S. C. Chandler) ; Astrophysical Journal, v. 5o; Monthly Notices Roy. Astr. Society, lvii. 218.

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