Letter 1789

Stephen Gray to Hans Sloane – July 31, 1711


Item info

Date: July 31, 1711
Author: Stephen Gray
Recipient: Hans Sloane

Library: British Library, London
Manuscript: Sloane MS 4042
Folio: ff. 336-337



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Transcription

Gray describes the difficulty and hardship of a scholarly life. He is worried that his efforts will lead to nothing and may turn ‘to astronomy and navigation and might hapily find something that might be of use’. He relays his findings on the ‘weight of the Atmosphere’. Gray was an experimental philosopher who established a rapport with the Royal Society and Royal Greenwich Observatory, published articles in the Transactions, and experimented with electricity (Michael Ben-Chaim, Gray, Stephen (bap. 1666, d. 1736), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11354, accessed 26 June 2013]).




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