Halley's 1693 Breslau paper produced the first life table built on population data and founded the pricing of annuities on lives

In 1693 Edmond Halley published, in the Philosophical Transactions, what is generally described as the first life table constructed from actual population data — he "developed the first life table based on sound demographic data." The data came from parish registers of births and funerals in the city of Breslau (Wrocław), routed to the Royal Society through Caspar Neumann and Gottfried Leibniz. The paper's title names its second purpose explicitly: it is an attempt "to ascertain the price of annuities upon lives." Halley thus turned a demographic dataset into an instrument for pricing a financial contract on a human life — the founding move of actuarial mathematics. One caveat the cited source itself carries (Ciecka's appendix): Jan de Witt had published a mathematically similar life-annuity pricing formula in 1671, twenty-two years earlier, though "there is no information that Halley was aware of de Witt's work." Halley's founding move is therefore specifically the grounding of annuity prices in empirical population data — not the first life-annuity pricing formula per se.

This is the keystone the vault repeatedly referenced without holding: the "1693 Breslau life table" named as ancestor inside claim-dodson-built-age-scaled-premiums-founding-equitable-life, claim-price-northampton-table-standard-actuarial-reference-century, and observation-richard-price-anchors-actuarial-and-political-philosophy-lineages. Halley supplied the empirical survivorship data that Dodson's age-scaled premiums (and, a generation later, Price's Northampton table) were built on. The Dodson note already names Halley's 1693 table as the data its age-scaling required; what it recorded was a coverage gap — the vault's existing Halley notes covered "a different Halley contribution" (the 1716 parallax method), the mortality table "remain[ing] unpromoted." This note and observation-halley-founded-parallax-and-actuarial-pricing-both-vindicated-posthumously close that gap. (Corrected at audit 2026-07-12: an earlier wording here read the Dodson note as holding the mortality table apart from Dodson — it never did.)

The same Edmond Halley authored the 1716 transit-of-Venus parallax method, the ancestor traced by claim-scharf-2007-names-halley-transit-venus-as-exoplanet-transit-parallax-ancestor. That the 1693 paper also computed annuity present values graded by age — an insight Britain then ignored for decades — is treated separately in claim-halley-1693-age-scaled-annuity-prices-britain-kept-flat.