Sir Frank DysonBorn 8 Jan 1868; died 25 May 1939 at age 71. Frank Watson Dyson was a British astronomer, educated at Cambridge, who spent his entire career (except for 5 years in Edinburgh) at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where he was Astronomer Royal from 1910-33. He directed measurements of terrestrial magnetism, latitude, and time, and he initiated the radio broadcast of time. He determined proper motions of northern stars and completed his portion of the international Carte du Ciel project of photographing the entire sky. Dyson is best known for directing (with Eddington) the 1919 eclipse expedition which confirmed the bending of starlight by the sun's gravitational field. This bending of light, predicted by Einstein, was evidence supporting his general theory of relativity. |
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