Airy was born in Alnwick. After some years as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, he was appointed astronomer royal (1835-81). He reorganised the Greenwich Observatory, and determined the mass of the earth from gravity measurements 1260 feet down in Harton pit. There is a plaque in the hospital nearby. He also invented a cylindrical lens for the correction of astigmatism (from which he himself suffered). Greenwich Mean Time, measured using Airy's telescope positioned on the line of zero longitude in his observatory, became Britain's legal time in 1880. Airy also began the practice of sending out time signals by telegraph.
Airy was a member of the four-man commission which in 1846 selected the standard railway track gauge, rejecting the wider Brunel gauge used on the GWR.