John Drew

John Drew (1809 – 17 December 1857) was a self-educated English astronomer. Early life and education Drew was born at Bower Chalke, Wiltshire, in 1809. His father died when Drew was only a year old. Drew was self-educated, and was so successful at this that by the age of fifteen he was prepared to teach professionally. He spent two years as an assistant in a school at Melksham, after which he moved to Southampton, where he taught for another sixteen years. He was a corresponding member of the Philosophical Institute of Basel, and had taken a degree of doctor in philosophy at the university of the same place. Career Drew's first celestial observations were made with a three and a half foot refractor. In 1847, he installed a five-foot achromatic telescope by Dollond, mounted equatorially, in a small observatory he built for the purpose in his garden. With the help of a transit circle by Jones and of the Beaufoy clock, lent by the Royal Astronomical Society, he very accurately determined the time, and supplied it during many years to the ships leaving Southampton. He published a number of papers on astronomy, geology, and meteorology. At the Southampton meeting of the British Association in 1846, Drew was appointed one of the secretaries of the mathematical section, and printed for the use of the association a pamphlet ‘On the Objects worthy of Attention in an Excursion round the Isle of Wight, including an Account of the Geological Formations as exhibited in the Sections along the Coast’. On 9 January 1846, he was elected a member of the Royal Astronomical Society.