Scientific Career
Born in Paris, Bailly was the son of Jacques Bailly, an artist and supervisor of the Louvre, and was the grandson of Nicholas Bailly, also an artist and a court painter. As a child he originally intended to follow in his family tradition and pursue a career in the arts, but he became deeply attracted to science, particularly astronomy, by the influence of Nicolas de Lacaille. An excellent student with a "particularly retentive memory and inexhaustible patience", he calculated an orbit for the next appearance of Halley's Comet (in 1759), and correctly reduced Lacaille's observations of 515 stars. He participated in the construction of an observatory at the Louvre. For such achievements he was elected to the 31st seat of the French Academy of Sciences in 1763.
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