Born Wilmington, Massachusetts, USA, 28 March 1805
Died Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, 30 January 1853
Sears Walker, a leading American mathematical astronomer, founded one of the first major research observatories in the United States and calculated a precise orbit for the newly discovered planet Neptune. He also headed the United States Coast Survey's pioneering development of longitude determinations using the telegraph, a technique that dominated geodesy worldwide in the 19th and into the early 20th century.
Walker was born near Boston, of farmers Benjamin Walker and Susanna Cook. As a child, his intellectual precocity and retentive memory were the wonder of the village and a worry to his mother, who tried to discourage his studiousness in favor of outdoor activity – to little avail; Walker was what today would be termed a workaholic, and was plagued by lifelong fragile health and obesity.
In 1825 Walker graduated from Harvard College, remarkably apt at acquiring languages and mastering...
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Selected References
Bartky, Ian R. (2000). Selling the True Time: Nineteenth‐Century Timekeeping in America. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Bell, Trudy E. (2002). “The Victorian Global Positioning System.” The Bent 93(2): 14–21.
Gould, Jr., Benjamin Apthorp (1854). An Address in Commemoration of Sears Cook Walker, Delivered Before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, April 29, 1854. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Joseph Lovering.
H. L. S. [Hamilton Lamphere Smith], ”Obituary [Sears Cook Walker]“ Annals of Science 1 (1853): 110.
Hubbell, John G. and Robert W. Smith (1992). ”Neptune in America: Negotiating a Discovery“ Journal for the History of Astronomy 23: 261–291.
Jones, Bessie Zaban and Lyle Gifford Boyd (1971). The Harvard College Observatory: The First Four Directorships, 1839–1919. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Loomis, Elias (1856).The Recent Progress of Astronomy; Especially in the United States. New York: Harper & Brothers. Includes a detailed write‐up of the Philadelphia High‐School Observatory and an entire chapter chronicling the early development of the American method of determining longitudes.
Rothenberg, Marc (1983). “Observers and Theoreticians: Astronomy at the Naval Observatory, 1845–1861.” In Sky with Ocean Joined: Proceedings of the Sesquicentennial Symposia of the U.S. Naval Observatory, December 5 and 8, 1980, edited by Steven J. Dick and LeRoy E. Doggett, pp. 29–43. Washington, DC: US Naval Observatory.
Williams, Frances Leigh, Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist of the Sea. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1963.
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Bell, T.E. (2007). Walker, Sears Cook. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1439
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