 The first actuary thought the earth was hollow. Hi everyone, it's MJ, the fellow actuary, and in our last video we saw that James Dotson was rejected from the first insurance company because he was too old. Now Dotson believed premium should be based on age and went out to create his own insurance company. Now this company would formalize the actuarial role, but one could argue that the theory Dotson based his ideas on was from the person who had the best claim of being the very first actuary. Also in this last video, there was the secret clue at around 849 that no one was able to figure out. Essentially the code can be combined with a YouTube URL to lead to an unlisted video explaining the crypto treasure hunt. Now I did make a public video about it, but basically you can win 10 ETH by deciphering riddles. Now the cards used in the crypto treasure hunt are based on historical actuarial figures. So watch this video closely to try find some more clues. Now our video today is about Edmund Haley and his card is also now available on rareable, so purchase him to unlock the riddle and start your hunt. Now Haley is most well known for predicting the occurrence of a comet, but we are going to see that he started actuarial science, but he also made some very strange statements about the geographical makeup of our planet. So buckle up, this is going to be a wild ride. Now, his dad was a successful soap maker and really cleaned up when it came to business. He asked his son what he wanted for Christmas and Edmund was like, dad, I want a large sextant with telescopic sights plus a smaller quadrant and a number of retracting telescopes. Oh, and I need an island in the Southern Hemisphere to set it all up. So Haley set sail to St. Helena and maps out the Southern Hemisphere. He observes the transit of Mercury and starts figuring out how to determine the size of the solar system. Now he's still only 22 years old when he does this and is rewarded with a Masters of Arts degree from Oxford and is elected as one of the youngest fellows of the Royal Society. Most people today would have used daddy's money to buy a Ferrari and play cyberpunk all day instead of advancing science. Now there was this huge public debate between Europe's top astronomer and the villain of our story, Robert Hook. There was turning nasty and the Royal Society sent Haley to sort it out. Hook was insulting this astronomer for not using a telescope and Haley had to tell him to take a chill pill. After this early success, Haley became friends with John Flamesteed, the first astronomer royal. Together they were observing comets and trying to figure out gravity. Now Flamesteed said that there's only one person who can do this maths but he is really difficult to talk to. But since you sorted out the Hook debate maybe you can try and talk to him. So Haley goes to the shy guy and explains the problem and the dude is like, I've already solved that four years ago. So Haley asks him, why didn't you publish it? And he responds saying that he doesn't have the cash and Haley's like, well, in case you didn't notice I'm super loaded. And this guy was like, well, in that case I've got a lot to publish because in case you didn't notice I'm a freaking genius. So Haley gives his new friends some cash and the world gets mathematical principles of natural philosophy. The most important work in the history of science. Yeah, Isaac Newton and basically science as we know it was funded by the first actuary. Now our villain, Robert Hook, was like, I came up with gravity first. And Newton was like, well then stuff everyone I'm not gonna publish anything again. And once again, Haley had to use his actuarial charm to save science and encourage Newton to keep on publishing his work. In 1691, Edmund Haley builds a diving bowl, spends four hours underwater, gets barotrama and then creates the world's first liquid compass. Now he sends these compass to all his science friends around the world and they start reporting back on the measurements. Haley looks at them and something isn't right. Instead of considering the fact that maybe his liquid compass wasn't that accurate, Haley concludes that the world has multiple magnetic poles and that this is only possible if the earth was hollow. Yes, the first actuary was also the first person to suggest that there was another world inside our planet. Look, you can't have a great idea without having a few crazy ones and they would take the scientific community 50 years to question this conclusion and another 30 years to disprove it. Now, Edmund Haley was also the first to introduce contour lines on maps, establish the relationship between barometric pressure and the height above sea level and to try and scientifically date Stonehenge or any other ancient monument for that fact. Unfortunately, he got the date on Stonehenge horribly wrong. He also wasn't the Bay Sea captain and sometimes spelt his own name wrong. Look, he did translate a lot of important mathematical texts into English and even came up with his own root-finding algorithm used for functions of one real variable with a continuous second derivative. He did apply to be a professor at Oxford but probably got rejected because of his religious beliefs. He even got censored for what he had to say about Noah's flood. Now, Haley was a Christian but tended to ask questions that the priest couldn't answer. So he wasn't very popular at church which back in that day wasn't a very good career move. But let's talk actuarial science. This theologian called Casper Newman starts collecting data about births and deaths in his city. Now, his friend Gottfried Willem Labise, the guy who also discovered calculus independently of Newton and whose name I probably mispronounced was like, you should send that data to my friend who's the secretary of the Royal Society. But that friend dies and the data ends up with Haley. Now, this data is perfect. For one, it contains the age of death, something the earlier life tables didn't have. And because it was based on a small European town, the population was constant. See, the London life tables were messy because of immigration and other demographic movements. And so mortality calculations were horribly inaccurate. Haley didn't just have the perfect data, he had the perfect brain and does a very actuarial thing by smoothing the data and this allows him to calculate when people will die. But he takes it a step further and uses it to accurately price annuities. Before and actually for a couple of years later, life insurance was sold without any regards to a person's age. And as we saw in my last video, James Dotson was rejected from the first life insurance company because of his age. And he used the writings of Edmund Haley to create equitable life which would go on to hire William Morgan who would then establish the actuarial profession. Now, you can purchase William Morgan as a non-fungible token on rareable and I've also now released Edmund Haley and James Dotson. Now these tokens form part of a crypto treasure hunt where each one contains a riddle. Solve the riddle and you get a word, get 12 words and you can unlock a wallet containing 10 ether. You can also resell the cards after you've purchased them and seen the riddle but to learn more about the treasure hunt, check out this video. But the story isn't finished. We've spoken about Edmund Haley and briefly mentioned Isaac Newton but there was a third friend to this party who was not only smarter than both of them but also used his actuarial ability to predict his very own death. Now, the story is coming soon so make sure you hit subscribe and I'll see you guys next time. As always, all the links will be in the description below. Cheers.