Background
Robinson was born in Dublin on the 23rd of April 1792, the son of the English portrait painter Thomas Robinson.
Robinson was born in Dublin on the 23rd of April 1792, the son of the English portrait painter Thomas Robinson.
He was educated at Belfast Academy and Trinity College, Dublin, where he obtained a fellowship in 1814, at the age of 22. He was for some years a deputy professor of natural philosophy (physics) at Trinity.
Having been also ordained as an Anglican priest while at Trinity, he obtained the church livings of the Anglican Church at Enniskillen and at Carrickmacross in the early 1820s. In 1823, now aged 30, he additionally gained the appointment of astronomer at the Armagh observatory. From then on he always resided at the Armagh observatory, engaged in researches connected with astronomy and physics, until his death in 1882.
During the 1840s and 1850s Robinson was a frequent visitor to the world's most powerful telescope of that era, the so-called Leviathan of Parsonstown telescope, which had been built by Robinson's friend and colleague William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse. Robinson was active with Parsons in interpreting the higher-resolution views of the night sky produced by Parsons' telescope, particularly with regard to the galaxies and nebulae and he published leading-edge research reports on the question. Back at his own observatory in Armagh, Robinson compiled a large catalogue of stars and wrote many related reports. In 1862 he was awarded a Royal Medal "for the Armagh catalogue of 5345 stars, deduced from observations made at the Armagh Observatory, from the years 1820 up to 1854; for his papers on the construction of astronomical instruments in the memoirs of the Astronomical Society, and his paper on electromagnets in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy".
Robinson is also of note as the inventor of a device for measuring the speed of the wind, the Robinson cup-anemometer (1846).
He was president of the Royal Irish Academy from 1851 to 1856, and was a long-time active organiser in the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
He married twice: first wife was Elizabeth Rambaut and second - Lucy Jane Edgeworth, the lifelong disabled daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth.