Does any SDoper know who successfully predicted the first eclipse? I know the solar eclipses brought fear to ancient leaders, kings, etc., and there was much interest (and snake oil) in being able to predict these things, but who was the first? I assume success came after Newton, but was it Newton?
Extra Credit: Along these lines, did Sir Edmund Halley live during or after Newton? As we know Halley got extremely lucky identifying a comet with a short enough period to prove it was periodic, but (IIRC) he did not live long enough to see its return. I assume Halley applied some of Newton’s ideas to make such a prediction, so might Halley have been one of first to apply Newton’s findings (other than Neqwton himself)???
Isaac Newton January 4, 1643 – March 31, 1727
Edmond Halley October 29, 1656–January 14, 1742
They knew each other. There is a story - possibly apocryphal - that Halley challenged Neton to defend his belief in astrology. Newton replied “Sir, I have studied it. You have not”
As Futile Gesture has posted, Thales is traditionally regarded as the first to have predicted an eclipse. But there is room for doubt - a major source on the matter is Herodotus, after all. Even so, the ancient Greeks did have methods of predicting them. In fact, by the time of Newton the methods in use were quite sophisticated and the issue of merely predicting them was old hat. The classic example from that period has to be the 1715 eclipse of the sun, where the path of totality passed over England. Halley published predictions of the exact path which were accurate to about 20 miles. That’s several magnitudes more sophisticated than merely predicting that the eclipse is going to happen at all.
Indeed Halley didn’t live long enough to see it return after his prediction.
Halley was undoubtedly a pioneer of Newtonian ideas, though it’d be a shame to reduce his contribution to his work on comets. Newton only wrote Principia due to persistent badgering from Halley - and much of the contents were only developed during this writing process. The book was published under the auspices of the Royal Society, which in practice meant Halley; he was the guy taking the manuscript to the printers and overseeing the whole process. If it hadn’t been for him, it’s probable that the book would never have been written or published. The two were then in close contact for the rest of Newton’s life - though I suppose it could be argued that their major joint project was bullying Flamsteed.
It’s rather less than possibly apocryphal, being almost certainly ficticious. There’s a famous paper by I. Bernard Cohen on the anecdote that concludes that the story has no reliable basis - see the references to this page.
There are some claims that one of the things Stonehendge coudl do was be used to predict eclipses accoridn to the 17 (?) year cycle. I don’t know if this is accepted or not.
I’d think lunar eclipses might have been predicted first since they are visible everwhere (well on the side of earth facing the moon and not under clouds) so the recurring pattern would be easier to notice.
Yes, I believe even at the time of Thales, lunar eclipses were reasonably predictable.
Prediction of solar eclipses would have been nothing less than magic, as the ability to view them would have been greatly limited. You can see a lunar eclipse if you’re on the dark half of the earth, but viewing a solar one is quite limited geographically and almost random in occurance.
London didn’t have a full solar eclipse viewable for something like 700 years from 750 forward. A couple of years ago a spot near the coast of Africa had two full ones with about 18 months.
The Chinese probably had Thales beat. I can’t recall the source right now, but I remember two Chinese astronomers from 1200BC or so that got sentenced for incorrectly predicting an eclipse:
“When their reckoning is ahead of the time, let them be put to death without mercy; when their reckoning is behind the time, let them be put to death without mercy.”
The eclipse that Hi and Ho supposedly failed to predict was that of 2137 BC, though so little is known about Chinese astronomy and its context in this period that I think that it’s difficult to infer anything about what they could do from the story.
The average time between solar eclipses visible from a specific point on the Earth is about 375 years (there’s a slight latitude dependence).
This cite mentions the solar eclipse recordkeeping from several different civilizations. It seems to also point out that either eclipse(s) predicted by Thales was either the eclipse of 585BC or 610BC.
I think he’s referring to totality at a given point. I was looking at the catalogue and found a few eclipses between 750-800 that were near the British Isles, but the path of totality missed the Isles or skirted the observers location. Just my WAG.
My understanding was that Thales was, among the Greeks, credied with the first rediction of the eclipse. But yesterday, purely by chance, I stumbled across something I had been unaware of. The brothers Atreus and Thyestes, descendants of Tantalus (and Atreus the ancestor himself of several important and tragic characters) were warring brothers, each of whom wanted the throne. Zeus indicated that he wanted Atreus to be king by sending a message via Hermes that Atreus would be king if the sun set in the East. Thyestes agreed to this, thinking it impossible. But then, of course, Zeus made the sun go backwards. Later Greeks rationalized this story by saying thatg Atreus was really an astronomer who calculated the first eclipe. The claim seems to be stated i a fragment from a lot play by Euripides, but appears also in Hyginus’ Fabulae 158, the comments of Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid Book 1, 568, and in other places. So some ancient Greeks credited treus with being the first to predict eclipses before the Trojan Way. That’s a long time before Thales of Miletus. (Reference: The Loeb Classical Library edition of Apollodorus, Vol. II, pp. 164-167, trans. Sir James George Frazer (1921))
But those are the global figures: the percentages for eclipses visible somewhere on Earth. What the rest of us were talking about are the frequencies of solar eclipses visible from one particular place - which is more relevant to someone in ancient times being able to pick out a pattern.
While about a quarter of all eclipses may be total somewhere on Earth, even those will be partial over a much wider area. Then all the merely partial ones are also visible over much wider areas than the total ones. In one particular location you’re thus far more likely to catch the partial ones than see a total one. Podkayne’s catch of my slip was thus entirely justified: on average, you don’t have to wait anything like three or four centuries to see an eclipse. Even if you stay in the same place, you’ll see a partial one about once a decade or so. But you might have to wait a long time to see a total one.
What is releveant is the once per sidereal month frequency of the moon’s path, and the once per year frequency of the sun’s path, among the stars. A good observer could fix the pattern enough to predict eclipses within a lifetime probably.