Letter 4116

Savery writes to Sloane of his glass experiments for a telescope and then of seeing “Jupiter and his satellites”. He explains that his telescope was made according to Sir Isaac Newton’s Direction. He expands on his many surprising observations of planets and stars. Servington Savery (c.1670-c.1744) was a natural philosopher. He authored a paper on magnetism that was published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1730. Savery also designed a telescope, which George Graham used to measure the sun’s diameter. He spent his career in Shilston, near Modbury, Devon (Patricia Fara, ‘Savery, Servington (c.1670–c.1744)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/53780, accessed 18 Aug 2014]).