Born Saint Helens, (Mersey), England, 5 May 1811
Died Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, USA, 4 January 1882
John Draper captured the first photographic astronomical image of any type and stated, qualitatively, the relationship between the temperature and the spectrum of a solid body.
After immigrating to Virginia, USA, with his widowed mother in 1832, Draper was trained as a physician at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught chemistry at Hampton-Sydney College for 3 years before moving, in 1839, to New York, where he was a professor of chemistry at the University of the City of New York (later New York University). Draper helped found the New York University School of Medicine and served as its president after 1850. He was a pioneer photographer and applied photography in his medical research.
Besides his support and encouragement for his son, Henry Draper , John Draper’s major contributions to astronomy were twofold. First, his daguerreotype image of the Moon, taken during the winter...
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Draper, John William (1844). A Treatise on the Forces which Produce the Organization of Plants. New York: Harper and Brothers.
— (1874). A History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. New York: D. Appleton and Co.
Fleming, Donald (1950). John William Draper and the Religion of Science. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hoffleit, Dorrit (1950). Some Firsts in Astronomical Photography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard College Observatory.
Lindberg, David C. and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.) (1986). God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. Berkeley: University of California Press. (See the introduction for more on the impact of Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science.)
Martin, Marion (1992). “John William Draper and the Hastings Observatory.” Hastings Historical Society Historian21, no. 1.
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Williams, T.R. (2014). Draper, John William. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_381
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