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COMET MAN
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By DR. OLIN J. EGGEN
Remember Halley's Comet, last seen in 1910? It's beaded this way again, to be due in 1985. Herewith some notes on its discoverer.
I'N 1835 a great fire destroyed nearly the entire business section of New York City. Bubonic plague — the Black Death — swept over Egypt killing thousands of people. Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina were scenes of bloody revolutions. Georgia Indians under Chief Osceola were massacring white settlers. And in the sleepy town of Florida, Missouri, Judge Clemens'' wife gave birth to a boy. The superstitious attributed all of these events to the bright comet visible that year.
Seventy-five years later, in 1910, the comet returned to a more peaceful world. A few days before the earth passed through the comet's tail, Mrs. Clemens' son — now better known as Mark Twain — died.
At the present time, 3,000,000,000 miles out in space, this same comet has just rounded an imaginary celestial buoy and is starting on its return journey to the earth. It will arrive in 1985 and the world will have another view of its most famous comet — Halley's.
EDMOND HALLEY, mathematician, astronomer, physicist, statistician, geographer, hydrographer, navigator, diplomat, and man of the world, was born in 1656, the son of a wealthy London soap maker. At the age of 19 he left Oxford University and sailed on a privately-financed expedition to the southern hemisphere to make the first catalogue of southern stars. He revealed his flair for diplomacy when he traced a new constellation in the southern skies and named it in honor of the King of England, Charles II.
King Charles was so impressed with the results of Halley's expedition, and flattered by the new constellation, that he commanded Oxford University to bestow a degree upon the young voyager without requiring him to finish his studies.
At the almost unprecedented age of 22, Halley was admitted to that august body of English science, the Royal Society. The first major problem he set himself to solve was to find the law that gravity must obey in