John Henry Lefroy
British Army general
Lieutenant-General Sir John Henry Lefroy (28 January 1817 – 11 April 1890) was a British Army officer and later colonial administrator who also distinguished himself with his scientific studies of the Earth's magnetism.
Biography
Lefroy was a son of the Rev. John Henry George Lefroy, of Ewshot House (subsequently Itchel) in Hampshire, England, and his wife, Sophia Cottrell. His sister Anne married the Irish landowner and politician John McClintock, who was created the 1st Baron Rathdonnell in 1868. Lefroy was also a first cousin to Thomas Lefroy (1776-1869), the future Chief Justice of Ireland. Lefroy entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in London in 1831 and became a 2nd lieutenant of the Royal Artillery in 1834. When the British government launched a project under the direction of Edward Sabine to study terrestrial magnetism, he was chosen to set up and supervise the observatory on Saint Helena. He embarked on 25 September 1839, for Saint Helena, and carried out his task throughout the following year. In 1842, Lefroy was sent to Toronto as the superintendent of the new Toronto Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory built there as part of that project. He immediately began planning a field expedition to the Canadian northwest to measure magnetism there.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Henry Lefroy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.