Camille Flammarion

Camille Flammarion was sixteen when the Paris Observatory took him on in 1858 as a computer, one of the clerks who ground through the arithmetic of orbits. He lost the post in 1862 after publishing La pluralité des mondes habités, which argued that other worlds carry life. Some fifty books followed, nearly all of them written for readers with no training at all. Astronomy for Amateurs, put into English by Frances A. Welby in 1904, walks through the sky season by season. Thunder and Lightning, translated by Walter Mostyn in 1905, gathers the stranger recorded effects of a storm. Omega, first published in French as La Fin du Monde in 1894, throws a comet at the twenty-fifth century and then keeps going for millions of years to the planet's slow end; Abel Gance filmed it in 1931. Flammarion founded the Société astronomique de France in 1887, started the magazine L'Astronomie, built a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, spent years on the supposed canals of Mars and tested mediums with the same appetite. His brother Ernest founded the publishing house that still carries the name. He died at Juvisy in 1925, aged 83.