Person

Nangle, James (1868 - 1941)

OBE; FRAS; FRAIA

Born
28 December 1868
Died
22 February 1941
Occupation
Architect, Astronomer and Educator

Summary

James Nangle was an architect, a renowned educator and accomplished amateur astronomer.

Skip to

Details

He was heavily involved in restructuring architectural education in New South Wales and also published in journals about the structural properties of Australian stones and timbers. He was an early supporter of concrete and steel as building materials.

Nangle's personal interest in astronomy led him to design and build an observatory for his own use at home in Marrickville.

He was appointed to a committee gathered to reorganise the observational work of the Sydney Observatory (1912) and assisted in redesigning the Observatory buildings in the 1920s.

In 1926 Nangle was elected honorary Government Astronomer.

Chronology

1880s
Education - Attended University of Sydney and Sydney Technical College
1890 - 1897
Career position - Instructed in mechanical drawing at the technical education branch of the Department of Public Instruction
1891
Career event - Commenced practicing as an architect
1896
Career event - Associate of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales
1896
Career event - Member of the Royal Society of New South Wales
1898 - c. 1905
Career position - Instructed in mechanical drawing at Sydney Technical College
1900
Career event - Published Australian Building Practice
1905
Career event - Member of the British Astronomical Association
1905 - 1911?
Career position - Lecturer-in-charge of the Department of Architecture, Sydney Technical College
1908
Career event - Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society of London
1913 - 1933
Career position - Served as Superintendent of Technical Education
1913 - 1934
Career event - Member of the Senate of the University of Sydney
1917
Taxonomy event - Eucalyptus nanglei R.T. Bak.was named in his honour
1919
Career position - Served as of director of vocational training under the Commonwealth Department of Repatriation
1920
Award - Member of the Order of the British Empire
1920 - 1921
Career event - President of the Royal Society of New South Wales
1921
Career event - Member of the first Board of Architects of New South Wales
1926
Career event - Appointed honorary government astronomer
1929
Career event - Published Stars of the Southern Heavens
1930
Career event - Published The Sydney Observatory: Its History and Work
1936 - 1937
Career event - President of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects
1937
Career event - Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects

Related Corporate Bodies

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

Books

  • Nangle, James, Stars of the southern heavens (Sydney: Halstead Printing, 1929), 127 pp. Details
  • Nangle, James, The Sydney Observatory: its history and work (Sydney: Sydney Technical College, 1930), 22 pp. Details

Book Sections

Journal Articles

  • Anon, 'Obituary: James Nangle', Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 102:69-70, 102 (1942), 69-70. Details
  • Wood, H., 'Sydney Observatory 1858-1983', Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 5 (2) (1983), 273-281. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1323358000017094. Details

Resources

Theses

  • Stevenson, T., 'Measuring the stars and observing the less visible: Australia's participation in the Astrographic Catalogue and Carte du Ciel', Thesis, University of Sydney, 2015, 381 pp. Details

See also

  • Hall, Norman, A Supplement to Botanists of the Eucalypts (CSIRO, 1978) (Canberra: CSIRO Division of Forest Research, 1979), 19 pp. Details
  • Ludlow, Christa; Bowie, Ian; Neville, Pamela, 'Chapter 15: Engineering education in Sydney' in Sydney: from settlement to city: an engineering history of Sydney, Don Fraser, ed. (Crows Nest, New South Wales: Engineers Australia, 1989), pp. 285-298. Details

Rebecca Rigby

Created: 3 January 2012, Last modified: 8 April 2022

EOAS ID: biogs/P004906b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 February (Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#kooyang
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P004906b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260