Jonathan Homer Lane

Jonathan Homer Lane (August 9, 1819, Geneseo, New York – May 3, 1880, Washington D.C.) was an American astrophysicist and inventor.

His education was at the Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He graduated from Yale University in 1846. He worked for the U.S. Patent Office, and became a principal examiner in 1851. In 1869 he joined the Office of Weights and Measures, a part of the Department of the Treasury that would later become the National Bureau of Standards.

He was particularly interested in astronomy, and was the first to perform a mathematical analysis of the Sun as a gaseous body. His investigations demonstrated the thermodynamic relations between pressure, temperature, and density of the gas within the Sun, and formed the foundation of what would in the future become the theory of stellar evolution.

Lane crater on the Moon is named for him.

Bibliography

• Lane, J. H., "On the Theoretical Temperature of the Sun", 1870, American Journal of Science.