Born in Scotland in 1817, Jack graduated from the University of St. Andrews and was recruited in 1840 by King’s College (as UNB was then known) as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. He would spend the next 45 years lobbying for, building, then equipping his observatory, all the while recruiting students and bringing the province into the 19th century.

Within seven years of his appointment, Jack convinced college leaders to approve the purchase of a state-of-the-art refracting telescope. His colleague James Robb wrote to lieutenant governor William Colebrooke that, because of the provincial capital’s geographic location, “the great Climate influences… Temperature, Humidity, Pressure, Electricity are free to exhibit themselves in forms more simple and unmodified than at most other places.”

The colonial government also chipped in. Thomas Baillie, surveyor general of New Brunswick, warned the Lieutenant Governor, “Numerous lawsuits are daily springing up out of the looseness of the old surveys upon which the first [land] grants were made.” An observatory was necessary to establish a meridian line as the permanent, unchanging base for drawing boundaries and borders. In other words, the observatory would not just be a tool meant for observing the stars, but would also be used to to settle disputes between neighbouring landowners, claim territory that was ripe for commercial exploitation and assert sovereignty over Indigenous lands.

Jack travelled to Massachusetts to tour Harvard University’s observatory and gather advice on the design and equipment. Upon his return, he designed his observatory with a rotating, copper-roofed dome that could be turned by a single person. Inside was a two-metre refracting telescope of mahogany and brass, made by the best in the business, Merz and Sons of Munich. 

On three evenings in 1855, Jack made history, taking precise measurements of nine telegraph signals sent by colleagues at the Harvard College Observatory and calculating Fredericton’s exact longitude relative to Boston. The two observatories also compared readings as first one, then the other passed beneath a chosen star. Feeding the data into a formula, Jack mapped Fredericton’s exact longitudinal location: 4 hours, 26 minutes, 33.43 seconds west of Greenwich, England, the prime meridian. With Fredericton’s longitude accurately established, Jack then determined the longitudinal locations for almost 40 other towns across New Brunswick.