The legacy of a Liverpool man who changed the way we look at the night sky was almost lost to history.
Jeremiah Horrocks died when he was just 22, but his discoveries paved the way for Isaac Newton and "changed the way we see the universe", according to the producers of Horrox, a new play about the forgotten hero.
He was born in Toxteth Park, a former royal deer park near Liverpool, in 1618. The Ancient Chapel of Toxteth he attended is still there, surrounded by houses and a derelict cinema where trees once stood. A plaque inside is one of few memorials to him in the city.
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Stars would have glistened in the night sky, and at the age of 15, the chapel's congregation helped him secure a place at Cambridge University to study them. The boy from "humble backgrounds" waited on the dining tables of wealthier students and emptying bedpans for a reduction in fees.
In 1635, he returned to what was then Lancashire without graduating. Jeremiah Horrocks left armed with knowledge of the latest ideas in astronomy and expertise in maths. He collected astronomical books, had a telescope and made his own precision equipment while working in his dad's watchmaking business.
While living in Much Hoole, he became the first person to accurately predict the transit of Venus in 1639 when he was just 20. In doing so, he was able to calculate the distance between Earth and the Sun more accurately than anyone before him.
He was 55 million kilometres off, but it was a closer estimate than any made up to that point, and his discoveries challenged prevailing religious beliefs of the time. Jeremiah Horrocks died suddenly just two years after mapping the transit of Venus.
We don't know what caused his death, which his friend William Crabtree described as an "incalculable loss". His early death, combined with the chaos of the English Civil War and the Great Fire London, almost saw all manuscripts lost and his legacy with it.
Jeremiah Horrocks' work on the transit of Venus, published 20 years after his death, influenced Isaac Newton's theory of gravity and changed the way we see the night sky and our place in the universe.
David Sear, playwright of Horrox, which is playing the University of Cambridge's ADC Theatre, told The Guardian: "Newton wouldn't have been able to complete his work on gravity if Horrocks hadn't done these observations at the time he did."
Leslie Gabriel, whose family has been connected with the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth for generations, credits the congregation's non-conformism for making Jeremiah Horrocks "think outside the box". He told the ECHO: "Newton wouldn't have been able to do anything to do with gravity without him. He acknowledged Horrocks before him."
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