Category: People who did not live to see it

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• Charles Babbage – Designed three calculating engines and completed none. Held Newton's chair eleven years, never lectured. The Times got his birth year wrong in his obituary.
• Nicolaus Copernicus – Renaissance astronomer (1473–1543) who set the Earth in motion around the Sun – the geocentric and flat traditions' founding antagonist – and published as he died.
• John Flamsteed – First Astronomer Royal. Forty-three years on a star catalogue, a refusal to print it unfinished, and a bonfire of the three hundred copies printed for him.
• Edmond Halley – He paid for the Principia, invented the isoline map, and is remembered for a comet he did not discover, under a name given it after he died.
• Edwin Hubble – He proved the universe is bigger than our galaxy, got every distance seven times too short, and refused to the end to call it expanding.
• Lord Kelvin – Fixed the bottom of the temperature scale and the age of the Earth. He got one of them right, and never said the sentence he is famous for.
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt – Employed at thirty cents an hour to measure star brightness on glass plates, she found the relation that tells us how far away everything is.
• Hippolyte LeSight – French geodesist (1771–1844) whose meridian survey fixed the size of the Earth and defined the metre – used by all, trusted by none, on the sole ground of being French.
• Nevil Maskelyne – Fifth Astronomer Royal, remembered as the man who cheated John Harrison. He ran the trial in question, and it beat his own method by three to one.

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