Dr. Robert Allison
speaker
326 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Jul
Dr. Robert Allison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So this is a big this is something that brings together all of the countries of the world to try to chart this.
In fact, in the 1740s, Franklin publishes something in French about the transit of mercury can be observed here.
sends it up to Canada.
This is at a time when the British and the French are at war.
So he's telling the enemy, look out for this.
And then in 1761, different countries launch expeditions.
And here in Massachusetts, the governor, Governor Francis Bernard,
And the Massachusetts Provincial Assembly authorized money for an expedition, loaning, there's a ship that belonged to the province, the Massachusetts, to take Professor Winthrop up to Newfoundland, where it'll be more visible.
And Harvard allows him to take along the various telescopes.
He has a 24-foot-long telescope he takes up.
He brought that himself.
And he and two guys, and they set this up off of Newfoundland.
They realize the town itself is kind of surrounded by mountains.
So they go off to one, which they call Venus Hill, and set this up so they can focus on the sun.
And they have, you're probably wondering, okay, you're going to look through a telescope at the sun.
No, they have a glass plate.
that is then under it, so on the glass plate, you will see the sun and you will see Venus transiting across it.
You then can measure how fast it goes, as well as the parallax.
Now, I'm a historian, not a scientist.
One good thing about Professor Winthrop is he didn't consider himself a scientist either, so he spoke in words that people like me could understand.
Showing 161–180 of 326 · page 9 of 17
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