John Bevis

Background

Bevis was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, earning his B.A. in 1715 and M.A. in 1718. In 1757 he published 'The History and Philosophy of Earthquakes', collecting accounts of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake from diverse authentic sources, a survey later used by John Michell.

That same year, tobacconist Thomas Hughes asked Bevis to investigate why no flowers would grow in his garden at Bagnigge House near King's Cross Road, London. Bevis found the well water full of iron; a second well yielded purgative water, leading to the establishment of Bagnigge Wells spa in 1758. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in November 1765.

Electrical research

In electrical research, when the Leyden jar first arrived in the UK in 1746, Bevis worked with William Watson to refine it. They replaced water with lead shot, then lined the glass with lead. They experimented to determine the speed of electricity using nearly four kilometers of wire, observing no time delay and concluding it was almost instantaneous. Watson and Bevis corresponded extensively with Benjamin Franklin and his group, jointly refining the Leyden jar with tin foil, creating a battery by joining jars, distinguishing series from parallel connections, developing a flat glass-plate condenser, and introducing the single-fluid theory of electricity with positive and negative charges.

Astronomer

As an astronomer, besides discovering the Crab Nebula (later catalogued as M1), Bevis observed an occultation of Mercury by Venus on 28 May 1737 NS and found a prediction rule for eclipses of Jupiter's moons. He proposed a modern British star atlas, Uranographia Britannica, first advertised in April 1748. Based on Flamsteed's star positions and Bevis's own observations from 1738–1739, it was the first classical star atlas to include non-stellar objects.

The project was terminated in 1750 when his publisher John Neale was declared bankrupt and the copper plates sequestered. After Bevis's death, three near-complete atlases were sold, and remaining charts were compiled into Atlas Celeste (1786). Three Uranographia copies are known: at the American Philosophical Society, St John's College Cambridge, and Chatsworth House.

Did You Know?

• Bevis died in 1771 from natural causes, not from falling off his telescope.
• He was an acquaintance of Thomas Paine when living at the Temple.