Winthrop, John

John Winthrop, more than any other colonial, transplanted Newtonian physics to the American colonies. His scientific output covered such topics as earthquakes, weather, the Mercury transits of 1740, 1743, and 1769, the return of comet 1P/1758 Y1 (Halley), and the Venus transits of 1761 and 1769. In particular, Winthrop successfully observed the Venus transit of 6 June 1761 from Saint John’s, Newfoundland, the only useful set of observations from North America (Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1970; Turner, Dictionary of scientific biography. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1976; Shipton, John Winthrop. In: New England life in the eighteenth century: Representative biographies from Sibley’s Harvard graduates, 2 pr., 1. Paperback ed. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 349–373, 1995; Yeomans, Biographical encyclopedia of astronomers. Springer, New York, 2007; Jackson, Biographical encyclopedia of astronomers. Springer, New York, 2014; Bickham, Winthrop, John (1714–1779), Scientist. In: Oxford dictionary of national biography, 2018).