Leverrier

"Britain is dominating cycling at the moment and that is promoting it better than anything else," said Leverrier, a 35-year-old banker.

Looking in the window of an Evans store in the Canary Wharf financial district, London-based Frenchman Corentin Leverrier says he is tempted to take up cycling again.

Leverrier predicted the existence and the place of the planet Neptune, but it was not until sometime later that Galle actually found the planet at the predicted spot.

The planet Neptune was discovered by Adams and Leverrier by calculation before it was seen in the telescope by Galle; and it was actually seen by Lalande on May 8 and 10, 1795, but he took it for a star and thus missed the discovery.

It is probably not generally known that “some of the greatest astronomers of modern times, such as Kepler, Newton, Hansen, Laplace, and Leverrier, scarcely ever looked through a telescope.”