Zone d'identification
Cote
Titre
Date(s)
- [1894]-1945 (Production)
Niveau de description
Étendue matérielle et support
13 essays, 2 letters, 1 envelope.
Zone du contexte
Nom du producteur
Notice biographique
Arthur Stanley Eddington was born in 1888 into a Quaker family, and remained of that religion all his life. He was educated at Brynmelyn School, Weston-super-Mare, and Owen’s College, Manchester, before coming up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1902. He graduated in 1905 and spent a short time in Cambridge as a mathematical coach, but in 1906 went to Greenwich as Chief Assistant to the Astronomer Royal. He returned to Cambridge in 1913 as Plumian Professor of Astronomy, and the following year was also appointed Director of the Cambridge Observatory. He held these posts for the rest of his life. Eddington’s most significant scientific contributions were to the study of the structure and movements of stars, the implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the search for a ‘fundamental theory’ to unite the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Histoire archivistique
Source immédiate d'acquisition ou de transfert
Gift of Lieutenant Commander C. A. Lund, Aug. 1945
Zone du contenu et de la structure
Portée et contenu
The essays listed below were written by Eddington while at Brynmelyn School, the Quaker school at Weston-super-Mare he attended between 1893 and 1898. They were presented to the Library in August 1945 by Lieutenant-Commander Cyril Alderson Lund, a former member of Trinity, who had found them in a drawer while headmaster of Brynmelyn. Lund also enclosed a letter written to him by Eddington in 1940, probably not long after the discovery of the papers, which, according to Lund, was a response to his inquiry as to ‘how old [Eddington] was when he wrote them’. The plural pronoun, however, appears to be misleading, for Eddington’s letter indicates that Lund sent him only one paper, written in October or November 1896. This was evidently no. 5, which may have been selected as being the earliest dated item. Corresponding holes in the essay and in Eddington’s letter show that they were formerly pinned together.
Research by Dr Florian Laguens has revealed that all these essays were read as part of the Brynmelyn Literary Society, an internal club at Brynmelyn School in Weston-super-Mare, which brought together around twenty pupils each month. The Society’s minutes, which provide a summary of the essays, enable them to be dated.
Only five of the essays (4, 5, 7, 8, and 13) are explicitly dated. After the papers came into the Library they were simply numbered in the order in which they lay, no attempt being made at a logical arrangement. The essays were then arranged in an approximate chronological order based on internal evidence, with the numbering being altered accordingly. The original numbers were as follows: 1 (11), 2(9), 3(10), 4 (12), 5 (13), 6 (4), 7 (7), 8 (5), 9 (2), 10 (3), 11 (8), 12 (6), 13 (1). The two letters and the envelope were not previously numbered. Subsequence research has shown that this new ordering is substantially correct, though a couple of items are slightly out of place.
Appraisal, destruction and scheduling
Accruals
System of arrangement
Zone des conditions d'accès et d'utilisation
Conditions d’accès
Conditions governing reproduction
Language of material
Script of material
Language and script notes
Caractéristiques matérielle et contraintes techniques
Finding aids
Zone des sources complémentaires
Existence and location of originals
Existence and location of copies
Related units of description
Minutes of Brynmelyn Literary Society, 1890-1904 (handwritten by Eddington on 13 December 1897). Volume 1: June 1890 - June 1895. Volume 2: June 1896 – June 1904. Nothing remains from the year 1895-1896. Weston-super-Mare, Weston Central Library, Frederick Woods Room, L 37.5 BRY.
Zone des notes
Identifiant(s) alternatif(s)
Preferred form of reference
Mots-clés
Mots-clés - Sujets
Mots-clés - Lieux
Mots-clés - Noms
Mots-clés - Genre
Identifiant de la description
Identifiant du service d'archives
Rules and/or conventions used
Statut
Niveau de détail
Dates of creation revision deletion
This description was created by A. C. Green in 2007, and transferred to the on-line catalogue in 2024. It was updated in 2025 after the receipt in Oct. of that year of research by Dr Florian Laguens supplying dates and further details from the minutes of the Brynmelyn Literary Society.