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Auction: 18005 - British and Foreign Coins and Commemorative Medals
Lot: 619

Royal Astronomical Society, gold Prize medal, 1869, by W. Wyon, Sir Isaac Newton left, rev. quicquid nitet notandum, telescope and frame, e. j. stone. 1869, in exergue, 48mm., 74.43g (BHM 1059; MI 472/89), heavier hairlines or scratching in fields with a further small test nick at 6 o'clock, otherwise about extremely fine, rare, and in fitted case

provenance
Glendining, 15 March 1972, lot 109 - £48

Edward James Stone, F.R.S., was born in Notting Hill on 28 February 1831 the elder son of Edward and Sarah Stone. He was educated at the City of London School, before enrolling at Kings College London from where he won a scholarship to Queens College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1859 and the following season succeeded to the position of Chief Assistant to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

His re-appraisal of the recorded transit of Venus a century earlier would earn him this prestigious award from the Royal Astronomical Society in 1869. The following year he was appointed Her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, from where he would go on to witness another transit of Venus in 1874. Stone returned to the UK at the end of the decade to occupy the now vacant post of Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford. Whilst here, he would publish his definitive map of the stars, noting 6,424 situated between the Equator and 20 degrees of south latitude,and thereby providing the most complete survey of the astral skies of the age. He died there, aged 66, on 6 May 1897.

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Estimate
£2,500 to £3,500