A story has often been told, probably apocryphally, that the solution to the problem eventually occurred to Bradley while he was in a sailing boat on the River Thames. He noticed that when the boat turned about, a small flag at the top of the mast (a telltale) changed its direction, even though the wind had not changed; the only thing that had changed was the direction and speed of the boat. Bradley worked out the consequences of supposing that the direction and speed of the earth in its orbit, combined with a consistent speed of light from the star, might cause the apparent changes of stellar position that he observed. He found that this fitted the observations well, and also gave an estimate for the speed of light, and showed that the stellar parallax, if any, with extremes in June and December, was far too small to measure at the precision available to Bradley. (The smallness of any parallax, compared with expectations, also showed that the stars must be many times more distant from the Earth than anybody had previously believed.)