Abstract
ON Saturday, November 27, the authorities of the town and cathedral of St. Albans will commemorate the six hundredth anniversary of the election of a prelate famous in the history of the Abbey—Richard of Wallingford, Abbot 1326–1335. This fact has interest for men of science and archaeologists, for Wallingford was a scientific pioneer, as well as a distinguished abbot. At Oxford, where he was a student and doctor in the ‘Hall’ maintained by the leading Benedictine houses for the reception of promising youths from their local schools, he won fame as a mechanician and astronomer, almost as a magician. In this he shared the lot of ‘Friar Bacon,’ whose follower, though not immediate pupil, he was; it seems that that pioneer genius started what might have been a great school of science at the university. Wallingford was the author of scientific treatises, one of which, “The Rectangulus,” survives in MS. to this day. Many of the scientific instruments he invented are preserved, either actually or as reproductions, in the Ashmolean Museum, and were the basis on which later men could work. His scientific chef d'ceuvre, however, was the astronomical device ‘Albion’ (‘all by one’), which showed “the action of the tides and the revolutions of the planets.”
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
[News and Views]. Nature 118, 741–745 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118741a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118741a0