by David Baron
Debate moved to the Senate, where lawmakers discussed adding the funding to a House appropriations bill. Maine Senator James G. Blaine, who a few years later would serve as Secretary of State under President Garfield, favored the amendment on geopolitical grounds. “[W]e should feel in a very awkward condition to have the French Academy and the Royal Observatory at London and other scientific societies sending their agents over here for the eclipse to be observed within our own limits, and our own Government taking no notice of it whatever.” Minnesota Senator William Windom, who would become Garfield’s Secretary of the Treasury, opposed the amendment for fiscal reasons. He argued there were higher priorities for federal funding, most notably the District of Columbia’s impoverished schools.
“[Senator Blaine] proposes to send a commission off skylarking at an expense of $8,000 to watch the eclipse of the sun while he is eclipsing these young intellects right here under the Dome of the Capitol,” Windom declared. “There is too much ‘moonshine’ in this.”
As the winter of 1878 yielded to spring, as the heavenly bodies moved toward their midsummer appointment in the western skies, the country remained unready—not only for the eclipse, it seemed, but to fulfill its responsibility as an enlightened member of the global scientific community.
CHAPTER 6
THE WIZARD IN WASHINGTON
THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 1878—
Washington, D.C.
LEAVES WERE BUDDING, AND SOON ALL WAS GREEN ALONG the National Mall, the patchwork of parks that stretched west from the U.S. Capitol to the Potomac. The Washington Monument, three decades after its cornerstone had been laid, remained a mere stump due to a chronic lack of funds for its construction, but the Smithsonian Institution stood complete and ornate thanks to Old World largesse. The red sandstone castle, clad in ivy and embellished with towers and battlements, had been built from the bequest of an Englishman who aimed to promote “the increase and diffusion of knowledge” in America. Inside, it overflowed with fossils and minerals, live snakes and Peruvian mummies, and innumerable bird carcasses and mammal skins that infested the building with fleas.
In this third week of April, in a first-floor room devoted to geographical reports, a “noon repast” was served. The centerpiece: a thirty-pound boiled salmon garnished with vegetables that had been carved like flowers (turnip japonicas and carrot marigolds). Then the lectures resumed. Simon Newcomb outlined plans for an elaborate experiment to measure the velocity of light. Others spoke of recently discovered fish and reptile fossils, and of new theories to explain the workings of atoms and molecules. The spring meeting of America’s National Academy of Sciences was in session.
MAIN ENTRANCE, NORTH FRONT, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION.
The academy was America’s most elite—and elitist—assemblage of scientists, a congressionally chartered body of experts self-consciously modeled after Britain’s Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences. Created just fifteen years earlier, ostensibly to advise the government but as yet rarely called upon to do so, the academy was still trying to find its bearings. It did little more than hold semiannual meetings and publish memoirs of its deceased members. Simon Newcomb called it “about the sleepiest and slowest institution with which I am acquainted.”
The individual members, however, were among the most influential and accomplished scientists in the nation. They included those dueling asteroid hunters C. H. F. Peters and James Craig Watson; geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden, whose 1871 survey of Yellowstone had prompted the creation of America’s first national park; paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh, a Yale professor whose excavations in the American West were unearthing bizarrely giant fossils (“The name of the animal,” one of his assistants explained to a journalist, “is what is termed the Dinosaur”); and Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian, who, though aged and frail (he would die a month later), served as the academy’s president. Conspicuously absent from the rolls was Maria Mitchell—the academy included no female members and would not elect its first until 1925—yet, in the very room where the distinguished men assembled, her portrait stared down from the wall, presumably put there by Joseph Henry, who had long been an ally and mentor.
THE LATE PROFESSOR JOSEPH HENRY.
Physicist George F. Barker, Thomas Edison’s friend from the University of Pennsylvania, was a member of the academy, and during his visit to Washington for the meeting, Barker lodged at Simon Newcomb’s home, a three-story brick row house decorated in mahogany and furnished with a guest room on the top floor, tucked in the back. Funding for the upcoming eclipse was still in doubt, and it was a topic the men surely discussed. “I shall be only too glad to do anything I can to help on your appropriation for the Eclipse expedition,” Barker had written to Newcomb the previous week. “How can I be of service?” When not engaged in scientific conversation in the parlor or dining room, Barker joined Newcomb’s young daughters in the hall for a game of blind man’s buff. The girls were fond of Barker’s shaggy sideburns. They liked to braid his whiskers beneath his chin.
On this, the third day of the meeting, after the lunch and lectures, the academy suspended its regular session for a special presentation at ten minutes past four in the afternoon. The scientists, then joined by wives, children, and guests, crowded into Joseph Henry’s office, and the audience grew so large that the doors had to be lifted from their hinges to allow spectators to watch from the hallway. At the front of the room, clearly uncomfortable with all the eyes cast upon him, sat Thomas Edison, twisting a rubber band between his fingers. The scientific men, sporting generous beards, appeared wise and scholarly. Edison—clean-shaven and with tousled hair that, as one observer noted, “stood out at all angles in defiance of comb rule”—seemed of another generation. Indeed, of a different era.
The object of all the attention was not the man, but his machine, which consisted of a tinfoil-covered brass cylinder that was set horizontally and rotated on a shaft beneath a small mouthpiece. Edison’s assistant placed the contraption on a desk and turned the crank. The device emitted a faint but clear human voice. “The speaking phonograph has the honor of presenting itself before the Academy of Sciences,” it said in a tone both nasal and seemingly distant. Children pressed nervously against their parents, while adults stared at each other in awe. “I declare,” remarked a member of the audience who had apparently heard a demonstration before, “it sounds more like the devil every time.”
THE PHONOGRAPH—AN INVENTION both astonishingly simple and, simply, astonishing—had propelled Thomas Edison from relative obscurity to international celebrity in the early months of 1878. New York journalists descended on Edison’s country workshop to write gushing profiles. “The Napoleon of Science,” they called him. “The Jersey Columbus.” “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” (And one journalist now referred to Menlo Park as “Edisonia.”) Newspapers nationwide picked up the copy and ran with it. “The Mania has broken out this way,” one of Edison’s business associates penned from Chicago. “School-girls write compositions on Edison: The funny papers publish squibs on Edison: The religious papers write editorials on Edison.”
When Edison first announced his invention of the phonograph, several months earlier, many had insisted it was nothing more than a ventriloquist’s trick. (A stalwart college professor wrote, “The idea of a talking machine is ridiculous.”) The notion that one could capture sound and release it at will seemed magical, like dabbling in the dark arts. After all, the phonograph was mere metal—no lips, no teeth, no tongue—and yet it spoke, enabling a person’s voice to live beyond the grave. “Speech has become, as it were, immortal,” commented Scientific American. Everyone wanted to see the device, to hear it, to talk about it.
THE PHONOGRAPH AND ITS INVENTOR, MR. THOMAS A. EDISON.
Earlier in the day at the Smithsonian, a Washington newsman had approached Edison. “Let me, like all the rest of the world, congratulate you on your discovery of the phonograph,” the reporter said as Edison blushed and bowed his head. “What a pity
you hadn’t invented it before. There is many a mother mourning her dead boy or girl who would give the world could she hear their living voices again, a miracle your phonograph makes possible.”
“No, I don’t think the world was ripe for it before,” Edison said.
“Were you a long time in perfecting the discovery?” the writer inquired.
“Oh, no; I had thought of the idea vaguely many times, long before I undertook to work it out,” he said. “It is a very simple idea when you come to look at it, and the wonder is it wasn’t discovered before.”
“How old are you, Mr. Edison?” the reporter asked.
“Thirty-one.”
“Very young yet.”
“I am good for fifty,” Edison brazenly replied, “and I hope to astonish the world yet with things more wonderful than this.”
DURING HIS EXULTANT VISIT to Washington, Edison demonstrated his phonograph to congressmen, senators, and, during a late night drop-in at the White House, to President Hayes and the cultured, college-educated First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes. Yet Edison’s scientific audience, at the Smithsonian, was arguably the most important.
Yale professor O. C. Marsh, the dinosaur specialist, formally welcomed Edison on behalf of the academy. Edison, who was partially deaf—a surprising infirmity for the man who had just invented the phonograph—held his right hand to his ear, yet he still could not make out what was said. Given his hearing impairment and aversion to crowds, Edison asked his friend George Barker to speak on his behalf. Barker told his colleagues that Edison was “a man of deeds, not words.” Edison’s assistant continued the demonstration—singing, whistling, and crowing into the device, then playing the snippets back as if thawing frozen echoes. Sheets of tinfoil, etched with the dents and pinpricks that recorded the sound, were passed around for inspection. The great men applauded. Edison rose to take a sheepish bow.
Once the phonograph performance had ended, Barker introduced another of Edison’s recent inventions—a new kind of telephone that threatened to upstage Alexander Graham Bell’s device. Barker recalled the stifling day at the Philadelphia Centennial two years earlier, in June 1876, when Bell had amazed the judges with his telephone. In fact, Barker said, it had so excited Britain’s Sir William Thomson that he shouted himself hoarse through it. But this revealed a fundamental flaw with Bell’s telephone; one had to shout through it because the mouthpiece produced a weak signal that was barely audible at the other end. Edison had now devised a solution.
At his workshop in New Jersey, Edison discovered an intriguing property of carbon: the element’s electrical resistance varies dramatically with pressure. Edison then put this discovery to use. He collected the carbon soot produced from burning kerosene and other lamp oils, and he pressed it into small disks that he called carbon “buttons.” These he placed in the mouthpiece of his telephone. When connected to a battery, the carbon turned the vibrations of the human voice into an electrical signal, one strong enough to elicit clear, loud sound from the telephone receiver.
George Barker presented his colleagues with an example of Edison’s carbon telephone. It was connected by wire from Washington to a telegraph office in Philadelphia, and a conversation was initiated between the cities 135 miles apart. A voice down the line called out, “Halloo, halloo.” (The use of this word as the standard telephone greeting, which evolved into today’s “hello,” was Edison’s idea. Alexander Graham Bell had advocated a different word: “ahoy.”) The scientists took turns testing Edison’s telephone and comparing it with others designed by Bell and rival engineers that were also on display. Barker praised the superiority of Edison’s device, and of Edison’s intellect. “You do well, Mr. Edison, to claim you have discovered the principles of science upon which your telephone is based. These other men are only inventors,” Barker said. “You, sir, are a discoverer!” The audience applauded robustly.
EDISON NO DOUBT APPRECIATED the praise from America’s scientific elite, as he still endured ridicule for his experiments on the etheric force. The New York Times had recently seen fit to remind its readers that the man who invented the phonograph “not very long ago . . . became notorious for having discovered a new force, though he has since kept it carefully concealed, either upon his person or elsewhere.” Edison seemed more intent than ever on proving himself a real scientist, worthy of respect.
Earlier that week, a celebrated journalist had spent two hours at Menlo Park interviewing Edison about the telephone, the phonograph, and the progress of science. “I think that science is the greatest interest of the present and future: of more national value than armies or navies,” Edison said. And by “science” he meant more than the engineering of practical gadgets.
The journalist asked Edison, “What position does Morse take in your mind?” referring to Samuel Morse, the American painter-turned-entrepreneur whose electrical device and communications code had changed the world. “I suppose he holds his rank as the inventor of the telegraph.”
Edison’s response was revealing.
“No, he was hardly an inventor. He belongs to the class of ‘promoters,’ ” Edison sniffed. “The scientific man was Professor Joseph Henry, now of the Smithsonian Institute. He made the discoveries which produced the telegraph.” Indeed, Henry’s work with electromagnets had provided key insights that Morse exploited to build, patent, and profit from the telegraph. Edison expressed frustration that Henry, who toiled selflessly to unlock nature’s secrets, had not received more credit or fame. “The newspapers mixed it up,” Edison said, “and got the reputation over to Morse.”
Edison seemed determined to show that he was more Joseph Henry than Samuel Morse—a discoverer, not a crass promoter—in both his public statements and his personal relations with other scientists. He had recently contacted none other than Charles Darwin with an offer to help the Englishman’s studies of natural selection. Edison had noticed a peculiar-smelling bug at his Menlo Park laboratory. “I suppose this odor is used as a means of defence [sic] like that from the skunk,” he wrote. “I could procure some [insects] next summer and send by mail.” Darwin duly replied with his thanks but declined the offer.
Edison found better luck engaging with astronomers. One of them, Samuel Pierpont Langley, directed the Allegheny Observatory in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, just across the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh (and now part of it). Langley specialized in research on the sun, due in part to necessity—the industrial city’s noxious air pollution all but obscured the stars—but also as a result of his boyhood fascination. “I used to hold my hands up to [the sun] and wonder how the rays made them warm, and where the heat came from and how,” he recalled. This query became the focus of his career. Langley studied the sun’s radiant heat. He examined how much energy came from different areas of the solar surface and was carried by different colors of the spectrum, including invisible infrared rays. For his research, Langley used a sensitive electrical thermometer called a thermopile, but as his studies grew more sophisticated, he needed a measuring device that was even more responsive. So he turned to Edison for help. “If you could make something . . . say one hundred times as sensitive,” Langley wrote, “you would not perhaps produce anything commercially paying, but you certainly would confer a precious gift on science.”
PROFESSOR S. P. LANGLEY
Edison took up the challenge, and toward the end of the day at the Smithsonian, after the demonstrations of the phonograph and the carbon telephone, he told a Washington newsman of this new focus of his inventive energy. The remark came in passing, but it signaled a consequential shift in Edison’s life and career, one that would involve the Wizard of Menlo Park in the eclipse of 1878.
“Have you made any recent improvements or discovered any new applications of your instruments?” the journalist asked.
“Well, nothing recently, so far as the phonograph is concerned,” Edison said. “Night before last I found out some additional points about the carbon which I use in my carbon telephone. It may be used as a heat
measurer. It will detect one fifty-thousandth of a degree Fahrenheit.” Edison’s eyes brightened and his face grew animated as he discussed the use for such an instrument in astronomy.
“I don’t know but what I can make an arrangement by which the heat of the stars will close the circuit at the proper time automatically and directly. It is a curious idea that the heat of a star millions of miles away should close a circuit on this miserable little earth, isn’t it?” Edison said. “But I do not think that it is impossible.”
CHAPTER 7
SIC TRANSIT
MONDAY, MAY 6, 1878—
Ann Arbor, Michigan
JAMES CRAIG WATSON DID NOT ATTEND THE SPRING MEETING of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. He was busy in Ann Arbor, where life proved gratifying for the corpulent narcissist. “There has been an unusual interest taken in Astronomy this year, and another whole class are sworn admirers of Prof. Watson and his mode of teaching,” the University of Michigan student newspaper proclaimed. Outside the classroom, at the observatory, Watson enjoyed a rapid string of successes; he had recently discovered three new asteroids and now ranked second in the world in the planet-hunting race, tantalizingly just behind his rival, C. H. F. Peters. And Watson’s skill had been acknowledged by Washington when he received an official request to help observe an important astronomical event in early May. “[T]he Naval Observatory desires, if possible, to secure your cooperation in the work,” it read. That “work” involved research on a pair of planets, one real, the other hypothetical.
The irrefutably real planet was Mercury. As the innermost known world in the solar system, Mercury occasionally passes directly between the earth and sun, a conjunction similar to a solar eclipse. Unlike the moon, however, Mercury appears far too small in the sky to reduce the amount of sunlight by any noticeable degree. What one sees, if one knows to look, is the silhouette of a planet—a perfect black freckle that slowly traverses the bright face of the sun. Astronomers call such an event a transit.