- The Comet isn't the only thing named after him. His name was also given to a crater on the Moon and also one on Mars; a research station in Antarctica, a method of solving equations, streets in Oxford, Australia, France and the USA, a mountain peak, a couple of schools, a ward in an East London hospital and two pubs, one in North Carolina and one in London.
- He was born in East London, Haggerston to be exact. His father was a soap maker.
- By the age of 22, he had published papers on the Solar System and sunspots, visited the south Atlantic island of Saint Helena where he set up an observatory and catalogued the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, worked out that the size of the solar system could be determined by watching a transit of Venus, been awarded an MA from Oxford and been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
- Astronomy wasn't his only interest. While in Saint Helena, he also studied monsoons and trade winds, and published a paper on those, too. Some of the symbols he used to represent winds on a map are still used today.
- He also built a diving bell in 1691. He and five others used it to dive 60 feet (18m) in the River Thames for an hour and a half. While it was too cumbersome to be much practical use, Halley made improvements to it which would eventually allow dives of four hours or more.
- He was also a pioneer in the life insurance field and actuarial science. His study of statistics on how old people were when they died allowed the British government to sell life annuities at an appropriate price based on the age of the purchaser. In addition, he learned Arabic and Greek so that he could translate some of the books in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
- Nevertheless, he wasn't immune to having some wacky ideas. It was he who put forward the idea that the Earth was hollow and that the inside was illuminated, had atmosphere and was quite possibly inhabited. He suggested the Aurora Borealis was caused by the gas escaping from the inner Earth. He thought this would explain why compass readings were sometimes anomalous.
- He had his enemies and detractors during his life, too. In 1691 he applied for the position of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. The then Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson, and Bishop Stillingfleet questioned his religious views and gave the post to someone else. Although in 1703, after they both had died, Halley was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry. Even the Royal Society censured him when he suggested in 1694 that the flood described in the Bible hadn't been caused by God but by a comet hitting the Earth.
- In order to further study compass variations, he took command of a ship and set sail for the South Atlantic in 1698. However, he was inexperienced as a captain and was at loggerheads with some of the crew – so he turned the ship around and returned to England in order to take some of his officers to court. He wasn't satisfied with the outcome of the case – he thought the court was too lenient, merely rebuking the crew. However, he joined the navy for a while to get experience as a Captain and tried again the following year. This time he managed to get there and make extensive observations on terrestrial magnetism.
- Halley was also interested in Stonehenge and how old it was. Along with his friend William Stukeley, he set out to work it out, assuming it had been built using a compass, and accounting for deviations in the Earth's magnetism. Their best guess was that Stonehenge was built in 460 BC, which was actually thousands of years out from what we know today. However, the two men laid the groundwork for using science to figure out the age of ancient monuments.
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