The forgotten clergyman who predicted the existence of black holes

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Long before modern relativity, an 18th-century English priest theorized that some stars might be so massive that even light cannot escape them. Despite his pioneering work in seismology, magnetism, and astronomy, his most profound discovery remained buried in obscurity for nearly two centuries.

John Michell (1724–1973) was a polymathic natural philosopher whose intellect spanned the foundational pillars of modern earth and space sciences. While he is often celebrated as the father of seismology for his work on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake—where he first calculated earthquake velocity and proposed that seismic energy travels in waves—his most radical insight was purely astronomical. In a paper read to the Royal Society in 1783, Michell used Newton’s corpuscular theory of light to reason that gravity could slow down light particles. He calculated that a star with a diameter more than 500 times that of the Sun would possess an escape velocity exceeding the speed of light, rendering it invisible to the naked eye.

This concept of a 'dark star' was remarkably prescient. Michell even suggested a method for detecting these invisible bodies by observing the gravitational influence they exert on companion stars in binary systems—a technique used by modern astronomers to identify X-ray compact binaries in the Milky Way. He also pioneered the use of statistics in astronomy, providing the first evidence for the physical reality of star clusters like the Pleiades by demonstrating that their groupings were too dense to be random.

Despite his brilliance, Michell’s legacy was nearly erased. After his tenure as the Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge, he moved to a rectory in Thornhill, Yorkshire. His groundbreaking papers were largely ignored by his contemporaries, and his ideas on gravitation and light were only rediscovered in the 1970s. He died in 1793, leaving behind a legacy of scientific 'firsts'—from defining the inverse-square law of magnetism to inventing the torsion balance used by Henry Cavendish to measure the Earth's mass—that the world only fully appreciated centuries later.

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