There is now no doubt that William Gascoigne, a young gentleman of Yorkshire, was the first 1 Gran, History of Physical Astronomy, p. 449.
William Crabtree, a friend of his, taking a journey to Yorkshire in 1639 to see Gascoigne, writes thus to his friend Jeremiah Horrocks.
Flamsteed, in the first volume of the Historia coelestis, has inserted a series of measurements made by Gascoigne extending from 1638 to 1643.
The micrometer of Auzout and Picard was provided with silk fibres or silver wires instead of the edges of Gascoigne, but one of the silk fibres remained fixed while the other was moved by a screw.
Gascoigne was killed at the battle of Marston Moor on the 2nd of July 1644, in the twenty-fourth year of his age, and his untimely death was doubtless the cause that delayed the publication of a discovery which anticipated, by twenty years, the combined work of Huygens, Malvaison, Auzout and Picard in the same direction.