John Michell's Paper on Black Holes

Background. John Michell (25 December 1724 – 21 April 1793) was an English natural philosopher and clergyman who worked across astronomy, geology, optics, and gravitation. He was a member of the Royal Society and had previously applied statistics to astronomy, demonstrating in a 1767 paper that stars occur in pairs or groups more often than random distribution would allow.

The Paper and Its Argument. In a paper for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, read on 27 November 1783, Michell was the first to propose the existence of celestial bodies similar to black holes. A short part of the letter, published in 1784, calculated that a star with the Sun's density but 500 times its radius would have a surface escape velocity exceeding the speed of light, so no emitted light could escape. The paper appeared in volume 74 of the Transactions under the title "On the Means of Discovering the Distance, Magnitude, &c. of the Fixed Stars..."

Reception and Afterlife. Michell suggested there might be many such objects in the universe. However, the idea made little impression on his contemporaries; the American Physical Society states that he died in quiet obscurity and his notion of a 'dark star' was forgotten until his writings re-surfaced in the 1970s. Today astronomers believe black holes exist at the centers of most galaxies.