by David Baron
Maria Mitchell wondered if any of these benefits might naturally extend to her. Undeterred, she wrote to Admiral Rodgers, the new head of the Naval Observatory. “Will you please inform me if the reduction in railroad fares for the benefit of foreigners who go out to Denver to observe the Eclipse, will be granted to American scientists?” Rodgers received a similar appeal from an amateur astronomer in Fort Dodge, Iowa—an enthusiastic fellow named Fred Hess, who had been inspired by Simon Newcomb’s Popular Astronomy—and Rodgers obliged him by forwarding an official letter that Hess could show to ticket agents in the hopes of getting free or discounted transportation. Rodgers responded less helpfully, however, to Mitchell, despite her being a professional astronomer at a college. “It is very certain that if any one should have the facility offered, of going to observe the Eclipse, at a reduced cost, you are prominently among the number,” he wrote, yet he suggested there was nothing he could do to assist. “I would advise you to write to the President of some one of the through lines; and I hope he will be as reasonable and as appreciative to you as the Penn. R.R. has been to foreigners.”
Mitchell was increasingly convinced that if women were to succeed in science and in higher education, they could not rely on men but had to join together to help one another. “It is time that women worked in earnest for the education of women,” she had recently written. As a professor at Vassar, she saw it as her role not only to teach female students but to foster a sense of community, to create the kind of supportive environment for intelligent women so lacking in the outside world.
THE SCHOOL YEAR WAS ENDING, and Vassar was preparing for its twelfth commencement. The coming days would be filled with obligatory prayers and processions, concerts and speeches. “The college is handsomely decorated,” a Poughkeepsie newspaper reported, “and every necessary preparation has been made to give visitors a warm welcome and the graduating class of ’78 a grand send-off.”
On this day, however—Saturday, June 22—the weather was less welcoming, the damp skies turning the green campus gray. There was little reason to go outside—most college life took place in a massive, five-story building that housed dormitories, classrooms, a dining hall, chapel, and library—but at seven-thirty in the evening, during a pause in the rain, some of the young women ventured out. They followed a broad path toward the northeast, where the college observatory, graced with a lamppost and cast-iron staircase out front, sat atop a knoll. Professor Mitchell was there, awaiting her guests, who had been specially invited.
Mitchell ushered her students, mostly juniors and seniors, inside and into the dome. The circular room normally appeared spare and workmanlike. The curved ceiling formed an unfinished rotunda, exposed ribs of pine supporting a tin roof. In the center of the room, on a massive stone pier, stood the equatorial telescope with its complex assemblage of gears and pulleys. But on this evening, beneath it all, the space had been transformed. Tea tables surrounded the great astronomical instrument. Place cards and roses marked each seat. Candlelight flickered in the hemispherical void.
The occasion, a highlight of many a Vassar student’s college career, was Professor Mitchell’s annual “dome party.” The evening began with refreshments—usually ice cream, cake, and summer fruit. (“I shall always believe that strawberries have the flavor of a new variety, when eaten with surroundings so unique,” a student later reminisced.) Then came the poems. Mitchell passed around a basket containing rolled slips of paper onto which she had written short, silly, but also unmistakably political rhymes. Each praised one of her students. (An example from a previous year: “Here’s to our Jessie/ So gay and dressy/ So full of capers and pranks,/ Yet a woman of views/ She would not refuse/ To vote, if she had a chance.”) The young women selected verses at random and read them aloud, to the delight of all.
THE OBSERVATORY.
The students then turned to praise their illustrious professor. They sang a tune modeled after Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which in turn borrowed its melody from the Civil War anthem “John Brown’s Body”:
We are singing for the glo-ry of Ma-ri-a Mitchell’s name,
She lives at Vassar College, and you all do know the same.
She once did spy a com-et, and she thus was known to fame,
Good woman that she was.
Glo-ry, glo-ry, hal-le-lu-jah!
Glo-ry, glo-ry, glo-ry, hal-le-lu-jah!
Glory, glo-ry, glo-ry, glo-ry, hal-le-lu-jah!
Good woman that she was.
The song, written by Vassar students a few years earlier, had become a dome party tradition. As the verses continued, they descended into folly. “[T]he English language was ransacked and grammar set at defiance (in the interests of rhyme),” a guest once noted.
She leads us thro’ the maz-es of hard As-tron-o-my,
She teaches us Nu-ta-tion and the laws of Kep-ler three,
Th’ inclination of their or-bits and their ec-cen-tri-ci-ty,
Good woman that she be.
In the cause of woman’s suff(e)rage she shineth as a star,
And as President of Congress she is known from near and far,
For her executive ’bility and for her silver ha’r,
Good woman that she are.
The room echoed with laughter and applause as the rain resumed, slapping against the tin domed roof.
IT WAS EVIDENT THAT Maria Mitchell adored her students, but she did not coddle them. “I cannot expect to make astronomers [of you],” she told them in an introductory lecture, “but I do expect that you will invigorate your minds by the effort at healthy modes of thinking.” This was Vassar, after all, and Mitchell demanded rigorous math and meticulous observation. Each clear day at noon, she assigned students to make glass negatives of the sun to trace the movement of sunspots, a painstaking process in a primitive era when photography generally meant preparing one’s own chemical emulsions. At night, her students forwent social activities to look for comets, track the moons of Saturn, and count shooting stars when a meteor shower was expected. In the classroom, Mitchell taught spherical trigonometry and the computation of planetary orbits, a skill her students used to write a monthly astronomical column for Scientific American. She also taught how to predict eclipses, and in the spring of 1878, the final work for her seniors included a timely challenge: plotting the path of the solar eclipse to occur in July.
Mitchell believed that science was best taught outside the classroom, and with teams of men assembling to go west to observe the solar eclipse, she decided to do something radical—assemble a team of women. She had organized a similar expedition a decade earlier, when she traveled to Iowa for the total solar eclipse of 1869; more than a half dozen current and former students joined her there to assist. But Burlington, Iowa, was not an especially adventuresome destination—indeed, the young ladies from Vassar roomed at the homes of local school friends—and the eclipse predated Dr. Clarke’s vexing book that claimed higher education was endangering women’s health. At the time, in 1869, Maria Mitchell had not yet emerged as a vocal activist, and she did not seek attention for her unusual entourage of female assistants. On the day of the eclipse, when a reporter asked for an interview, Mitchell declined to comment.
The Vassar eclipse expedition of 1878 would pose a far greater challenge and carry larger stakes; it would be more daring, more distant, more resolutely public. Once again, Maria Mitchell sought volunteers, and she approached some of her most talented students. A natural choice was Harriot Stanton, senior class president and a daughter of Mitchell’s friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the leading suffragist who had organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York that helped launch the women’s rights movement. Harriot longed to join the expedition—“What a magnificent opportunity for a young student!” she effused—and one might have expected her mother to support such an overt show of intelligence and independence. But, perhaps because of concerns for her safety, although the stated reason was cost, Harriot’s parents told h
er she could not go. She would always resent the decision. In her memoirs, this daughter of a women’s rights icon, who went on to emulate her mother’s political activism, called missing the 1878 eclipse “the biggest disappointment of my life.”
Mitchell had better luck recruiting recent alumnae. Emma Culbertson had graduated the previous year and clearly viewed Maria Mitchell, in both her career choice and her social activism, as a role model. Culbertson aspired to work in the sciences, not as an astronomer but as a physician (by the 1870s, several female medical colleges had been established, though “lady” doctors remained relatively rare), and at her commencement she had spoken on “Social Prejudices against Woman’s Entering the Profession of Medicine.” During her senior year, Culbertson helped organize the astronomy class to commission a plaster bust of their esteemed professor, which was later cast in bronze. Another of Mitchell’s former students, Cora Harrison, spoke on behalf of the class in offering Mitchell’s bust to the college. Harrison had earned her degree a year earlier but stayed on as resident graduate, assisting at the observatory. She was serious about a career in astronomy and possessed her own telescope. It was no surprise that Culbertson and Harrison agreed to join their mentor’s expedition.
Two other former students, both of whom had left Vassar in 1873, also signed up for the trip. Cornelia Woods Marsh had studied with Mitchell as part of a two-year, non-degree-granting program and then headed home to Quincy, Illinois. (Mitchell’s dome party verse for her began: “Oh C. W. M./ My tears I can’t stem/ At the thought of your going away. . . .”) Elizabeth Owen Abbot had earned her four-year degree in 1873 and then became a schoolteacher, eventually landing a job in Cincinnati. Mitchell provided a glowing letter of recommendation. “[I] can truly say that I know no better woman, nor better scholar,” she had written.
Mitchell invited one more woman to join her all-female eclipse expedition. Phebe Mitchell Kendall, Maria’s younger sister by a decade, was a kindred spirit. Though often quiet and shy, she was active in the Woman’s Congress and advocated the reform of women’s clothing. (“I hope yet to be as simply, comfortably and perfectly dressed as my husband is, and at the same time in a prettier, and less expensive costume,” she once confided.) The sisters had been close as girls and remained so in adulthood. The unmarried Maria had accompanied Phebe and her family on a trip to Europe in 1873, and now Phebe, whose son had since grown, would leave her husband behind and accompany Maria to Colorado. Although no scientist, Phebe was assigned an important role. She would serve as an artist, sketching the corona.
Mitchell had now assembled her team for the Vassar eclipse expedition of 1878. “[W]e were a party of six,” she wrote, “ ‘All good women and true.’ ”
CHAPTER 9
SHOW BUSINESS
JUNE–JULY 1878—
New York City and Menlo Park
“EDISON EXHIBITS AT IRVING HALL HIS NEW INSTRUMENT for measuring heat,” New York’s Daily Graphic announced in early June. “As a wonderful inventor, he is himself red-hot.” The event, held on a Monday night near Manhattan’s Union Square, would offer a public debut of what Edison had first mentioned to the press in April—a hypersensitive thermometer he had created at the request of astronomer Samuel Langley. In advance of the unveiling, Edison’s promoter told reporters that they would witness a device of extraordinary powers. “[I]t would require a Fahrenheit thermometer fifteen miles in height to record the same range of degrees of heat,” he claimed.
The late-spring evening was pleasantly cool, and New Yorkers were out enjoying theatrical entertainment that ranged from classic tragedy (Romeo and Juliet) to modern farce (Our Boarding House, featuring a cowardly, eccentric character named Colonel M. T. Elevator). Edison smartly tied his promotional event to entertainment, too. It began with a musical performance that starred his phonograph in concert with a pipe organ and trumpet. As the general public departed, invited journalists were ushered into a separate room to eat a late supper while being fed information about the latest wonder from Edison’s workshop. One of Edison’s business partners introduced the guest of honor and described the effort required—nearly involving physical force—to drag Edison from his country laboratory. The inventor smiled and obligingly bowed in silence.
Once Edison began exhibiting his heat measurer, however, he had much to say. He described its construction. As in his telephone, the key component was a disk of compressed carbon, set between metal plates and connected to a battery. To this he attached a rod of vulcanized rubber that was set in place so that it pushed against the carbon. “Heat causes the strip of hard rubber to expand and press the plates closer together on the carbon,” he explained. “Cold decreases the pressure.” In other words, an increase in temperature increased the pressure on the carbon, which boosted the carbon’s electrical conductivity and in turn raised the amount of current flowing through the device. The change in current—mirroring the change in temperature—could then be read on a meter, its needle deflected. “By means of this apparatus,” Edison said, “it is possible to measure the millionth part of a degree Fahrenheit.” (The sensitivity Edison claimed for the device had grown twentyfold in just over a month. When interviewed in Washington, he had said the device could detect temperature changes of one fifty-thousandth of a degree.)
Edison gave only a brief demonstration of the device that evening, but he more fully displayed its capabilities a short time later at Menlo Park. When he held his little finger four inches from the instrument, the needle moved in response. When he held a match six inches away, the needle swung twice as far. He then breathed on the device. The needle deflected three times farther still.
During the press event at Irving Hall, Edison explained how the invention could be used in astronomy. By focusing starlight through a telescope and onto the device, a scientist could measure the tiny amount of heat received from that far-off celestial body. A reporter for The New York Herald was impressed. “In this way it is not improbable astronomical researches as to the distance of the stars from the earth may be measured by their degrees of heat,” he wrote in the next day’s paper. “Indeed, if the experiments made by Mr. Edison last night prove anything they show that he has devised an instrument so sensitive as to open an entirely new field in the realm of scientific research.” A reporter for the Tribune echoed this enthusiasm but noted that Edison’s invention lacked something essential. “No name has yet been given to the instrument,” he wrote.
Ensconced back at Menlo Park, Edison scribbled possible names. Micro-thermo-meter. Micro-thermo-scope. Thermo-micro-meter. He had recently purchased an etymological glossary of English words derived from Greek. To describe his sensitive heat measurer, he played with various permutations of Hellenic prefixes and suffixes. Thermo-micro-scope. Carbo-electro-thermopile. Carbon electro thermometer. In the end, he settled on an especially esoteric name: the tasimeter (pronounced ta-sim-i-ter), from the Greek for “extension” and “measure,” since the device worked by detecting the minuscule growth and shrinkage of the rubber strip. To emphasize the instrument’s sensitivity, he sometimes called it a micro-tasimeter.
IN THAT JUNE OF 1878, Edison was working on a raft of inventions with fanciful names, news of which served as a welcome distraction to a nation relitigating the contested presidential election of 1876 with a congressional investigation into voter fraud. Among Edison’s new contraptions was the aerophone, which he described as a herculean loudspeaker, powered by steam, that could broadcast the human voice for miles. (Edison suggested installing it in lighthouses to shout warnings at ships.) The telephonoscope also projected the voice into the distance, but narrowly—for private conversation—using a megaphone for sending and two ear trumpets for receiving. The phonomotor originated as a joke. According to one version of the story, it was during Edison’s trip to Washington that a heckler said, “I wonder if you couldn’t talk a hole through a board.” Never fazed, Edison responded, “Of course, I could,” whereupon he sketched a contrivance that, by means of a vibrat
ing membrane connected to ratchets and cogs, harnessed the human voice to turn a drill bit ever so slowly. The same mechanism, Edison said, could wind clocks using the power of conversation. One of his business partners facetiously suggested another application: “It is expected to become a favorite method of suicide, for by its use a man can bore himself to death with his own talk.” Meanwhile, during this period of frenzied creativity, Edison was inventing not only gadgets, but a persona, crafting for himself an irresistible public image.
EDISON’S PHONOMOTOR.
The 1870s was a time of snake oil and flimflam, an era in which the American populace often had difficulty distinguishing scientific fact from pseudoscientific fraud. Séances, at which ghosts purportedly played guitar and rang bells, drew large audiences, and the occultist Madame Blavatsky—derided in her own time as “one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history”—convinced followers of the existence of magic and invisible spirits. (Blavatsky was, unsurprisingly, one of the few believers in Edison’s mysterious etheric force.) In the medical realm, an 1876 book claimed that exposure to blue light could cure rheumatism, deafness, and baldness, sparking 1877’s “blue glass craze,” during which merchants peddled cobalt windowpanes to great profit. That same year, an enormous petrified man was unearthed in Colorado and went on display in New York. Nicknamed the Solid Muldoon and touted as a missing evolutionary link, the fossilized creature—which sported simian feet and a four-inch tail—was soon revealed as an elaborate hoax, molded out of meat, bone, eggs, and blood mixed with plaster and baked in a kiln. The underwriter of the enterprise was that shrewd huckster of the age, P. T. Barnum.