Background
Bleksley was born in the Eastern Cape and attended the Outeniqua High School in George.
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Arthur Bleksley
Edit ProfileEducation
After matriculation he studied at Stellenbosch University and graduated cum laude in 1927 and went on to obtain his Master of Science
Career
In 1929, winning the Van der Horst Prize. In 1930 he joined the Solar Research Station run by the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution at Brukkaros, the caldera of an extinct volcano in South West Africa. To this end detailed observations were made of the Solar Constant.
High-altitude observatories were set up at various locations - Mount Montezuma in Chile, initially at Mount Harqua Hala in Arizona (later moved to Table Mountain in California) and lastly Mount Brukkaros, a site selected by Charles Greeley Abbot, and later moved to Mount Saint Katherine on the Sinai peninsula.
The Brukkaros observatory consisted of a 10m deep tunnel in the flank of the mountain. A solar telescope or coelostat at the mouth of the tunnel passed sunlight to a spectrograph, an Ångström compensation pyrheliometer and a bolometer further in.
In 1932 Bleksley was appointed as Junior Lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Witwatersrand, eventually becoming head of the department. Whilst there he worked on and completed his doctoral thesis A Statistical and Analytical Study of the Phenomenon of Long-period Stellar Variability.
During this period he took sabbatical leave and studied under Sir Arthur Eddington at Cambridge, Professor Hans Ludendorff of the Astrophysical Observatory at Potsdam and Ejnar Hertzsprung at Leiden.
Bleksley showed great interest in parapsychology and in 1969 attended a conference at Saint-Paul de Vence in France. The conference dealt with creativity and its possible links to parapsychology. Other participants included Kenneth Burke, Eugenio Gaddini, the Italian psychoanalyst, Jerre Mangione, the Italian-American author, Emilio Servadio, the Italian-Indian psychoanalyst and parapsychologist and West. Grey Walter, the neurophysiologist and robotician.
He was talented musically and performed as church organist while still a scholar.
His gift of being able to articulate difficult concepts in the fields of astronomy and applied mathematics, made him a popular tutor and inspired thousands of students who sat through his exceptionally lucid lectures.
Membership
His sense of humour, quick mind and broad range of interests, made him a valued member of the team of "Three Wise Men" on the Springbok Radio quiz show, Test the Team, from 1957 into the 1980s, the other two being Grant Loudon and Eric Rosenthal.
