The article also says that this information is based on contemporary newspapers reports, so...

The article says that the gift was made on the condition that it would remain in the man's family. I don't know if that would hold up in a court of law, but that got to count for something.

Have you read a single word I wrote?

>Absent any prior known history of astronomy, they just might end up deducing that the sun does not travel round the earth, but that it is the other way around.

Knowing that the Earth revolves around the Sun isn't history of astronomy - it's just astronomy.

Knowing who and how demonstrated this, and the reactions to such a discovery as well as its effects, is History of Astronomy. Learning from those events is important because it's much more than simple and pedantic sciolism, it means gaining a deeper understanding of social phenomena surrounding science and why our current perception of science is what it is (and thus also be able to challenge it), which is an incredibly useful tool for a scientist, especially when engaging with the public.

>Having the history available prevents us from having to re-do all the work all the time, and that’s good. But in addressing the title question: no, science does not need history.

If you do not understand the difference between science and history of science, how can you make a call on how the latter affects the former?

The more important point is that what you're talking about is not what's called "History of Science".

The accumulated wealth of knowledge of a certain field is just "science": biology includes all the knowledge we have regarding biology, there's no separate field of study that consists merely of a list of biological discoveries and advancements. History of science instead is the discipline that covers the historical development of the sciences from Antiquity to the present. It doesn't strictly enumerate scientific discoveries (just like how history itself as a discipline isn't the pedantic recounting of past events), but rather how we came upon them and their effects on society and history.

Is your arguement "technically, it's possible to constantly recreate all past knowledge from the ground-up, given enough time"?

Because I would say that not only would that be obviously an undesirable state, it also fundamentally misunderstands what History of Science is as a discipline.