Sir George Biddell Airy (1801-1892) was born at Alnwick, Northumberland, on 27 July 1801. He attended Colchester grammar school, 1814-1819, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1819 (B.A., 1823), where he became a Fellow in 1824. He was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1826, and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Cambridge Observatory in 1828. He joined the Astronomical Society in 1828, and the Geological Society the following year, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1836.

Airy was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1835. He introduced new instruments of his own design to the Greenwich Observatory, and oversaw the creation of a Magnetic and Meteorological Department in 1838. He controlled the British expeditions to observe the transit of Venus of 1874, and carried out the reduction of the collected data. During his time in office, he also reduced all the planetary and lunar observations made at Greenwich between 1750 to 1830. He retired in 1881, and died at the White House, near Greenwich Park, on 2 January 1892.