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Life and Death of Kenneth Edgeworth

Kenneth Edgeworth attended both the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and the School of Military Engineering at Chatham. He served with the Royal Engineers in South Africa, Somaliland, Egypt, Sudan, Chatham, and Dublin. During World War 1 he was placed in charge of a signals unit in France, after his service for the royal military, he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and a Military Cross (MC). During 1916, Edgeworth took a leave of absence, it was then he met Isabel Mary, the widow of Arthur F. Eves. The pair then got engaged and married on the 23rd of August 1917. Edgeworth retired from the military in 1926, as a Lieutenant-Colonel. In 1931 he became chief engineer in the Sudanese Department of Posts and Telegraphs before returning home to Ireland. In his retirement, Edgeworth published four books on economics and over a 23-year period published a number of letters and papers which culminated in his book ‘The Earth, the Planets and the Stars: Their Birth and Evolution’ (1961). However, before this publication, in 1943, Edgeworth wrote a piece for the Journal of the British Astronomical Association which suggested the idea of a vast reservoir of cometary material beyond Neptune’s orbit. This was later validated as ‘Kuiper’s Belt,’ and despite suggesting it in the 1940s, Edgeworth’s astronomical findings were not recognised until 1995. Kenneth Edgeworth died in Dublin on October 10th, 1972, at the age of 92.

References

John McFarland. (1996). ‘Kenneth Essex Edgeworth – Victorian Polymath and Founder of the Kuiper Belt?’ Vistas in Astronomy40: 343-354.

K.E. Edgeworth. (1965). ‘Jack of All Trades – The Story of my Life.’

Edgeworth, Kenneth Essex. (2018). Retrieved from http://askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/life-society/science-technology/irish-scientists/edgeworth-kenneth-essex/

The Journal of the British Astronomical Association - 'Kenneth Edgeworth: A Brief Biographical Note'