by David Baron
Edison took it in stride. He enjoyed a good practical joke—“Well, that’s one on me” was one of his favorite expressions. As a scientist, however, he still aimed to be taken seriously. That evening, back in Rawlins, a man whose praise or disfavor carried enormous weight in the scientific world arrived on the midnight train.
NORMAN LOCKYER, THE BRITISH astronomer who had discovered helium in the sun, had not expected to visit America for the eclipse of 1878. Although he had led eclipse expeditions twice before (Sicily in 1870, India in 1871) and was eager to do so again, his son was gravely ill in the early part of 1878. “I have a sick boy at home otherwise I should certainly have come out,” Lockyer wrote to Simon Newcomb in June, apologizing for having to miss the great event. Then Lockyer’s fortunes changed, tragically. “Since my last note to you I have lost a dear child,” he wrote again at the beginning of July. “[M]y doctor’s orders are presently to go away: so I have made up my mind to come and add my mite of work.” With just four weeks until the eclipse—and an ocean and continent to cross beforehand—Lockyer had no time to organize a government expedition. He would come alone, as a private citizen.
JOSEPH NORMAN LOCKYER.
Newcomb replied with condolences and an invitation for Lockyer to join him in Wyoming. “The military furnish my party with an encampment, so I have no doubt I could supply you with a tent to sleep in, if you prefer it to an open sky,” he wrote. “Be sure to bring heavy blankets or rugs, or both, as the nights are extremely cold, though the days are warm. With a flask of brandy in case the water is unwholesome, I think health and comfort will then be assured.”
Although Lockyer was a gregarious man who enjoyed good relations with a number of American astronomers, he did not shy away from rebuking people or ideas that he found wanting, especially when it came to his area of expertise, the sun. He had recently chided Henry Draper in the press when Draper claimed to find evidence of oxygen in the sun—evidence that would later prove faulty. Lockyer even scolded painters who, he contended, portrayed sunlight and its effects inaccurately. His comments on a new work by the English landscape artist John Wright Oakes read as follows: “Sky colours impossible with so high a sun.”
Lockyer’s reputation was perhaps best summarized in verse, in a poem attributed to the physicist James Clerk Maxwell:
And Lockyer, and Lockyer,
Gets cockier, and cockier;
For he thinks he’s the owner
Of the solar corona.
Further amplifying Lockyer’s brash personality was his professional position. He was more than an astronomer; he was the founding editor of the British journal Nature, one of the most influential scientific publications on both sides of the Atlantic. Through the journal, he spoke from on high, his pronouncements godlike. “Lockyer sometimes forgets that he is only the editor, not the author, of Nature,” quipped a colleague.
On Thursday, July 18, Lockyer steamed into New York Harbor on the Baltic, his arrival heralded by the Tribune. It was his first trip to the United States, and he had come, the newspaper reported, not only to see the eclipse, but to observe the observers—that is, the American astronomers, “for whose scientific attainments and methods he had the highest respect.” Lockyer sent a dispatch to Newcomb saying to expect him soon.
The following Wednesday—the day of the jackrabbit incident—Lockyer crossed into Wyoming in a Pullman car on the No. 3. He received a telegram from Newcomb: “[S]ome of us will meet you at Rawlins.” When the train arrived, Newcomb was there. The two men had met eight years earlier, when Newcomb passed through London, with his wife, on the way to Gibraltar for the eclipse of 1870. The Lockyers had been gracious to their American guests. “There was quite a party assembled to meet me,” Mrs. Newcomb wrote after an evening at the Lockyer home. “Refreshments were constantly passed around.” Now, in the United States, Newcomb was the host. He escorted Lockyer to Separation. Apparently there was no tent for the Englishman, however, as he spent the night in the tiny depot. The next day, Lockyer returned to Rawlins and checked in at the Railroad Hotel.
MEANWHILE, ANOTHER SELF-IMPORTANT astronomer secured a room at the hotel. Planet hunter James Craig Watson had left Ann Arbor Monday evening and arrived in Rawlins late Thursday, carrying with him two items of note. One was a telescope—a new refractor that he had borrowed from Michigan State Normal School (later Eastern Michigan University) because his own university did not possess an instrument that could be conveniently transported. The loaned telescope was a handsome piece of craftsmanship. Its gleaming brass tube stretched more than five feet from eyepiece to objective lens, the latter four inches in diameter. The equatorial mount allowed the telescope to pivot easily atop a mahogany tripod, which stood at shoulder height. Etched into the faceplate, in elegant cursive, was the name of the manufacturer: Alvan Clark & Sons.
Watson also brought his wife. Despite being well educated and slightly older than her husband, Annette Watson seemed resigned to the role of subordinate spouse. “[She] is in every thought devoted to her liege lord,” wrote one who encountered the pair during their time in the West, although another astronomer, the affable Princeton professor Charles Young—who had accompanied the Watsons to China for the 1874 transit of Venus—was far from good-humored in describing the couple’s relationship: “[H]is treatment of his wife was simply abominable. She was rather weak & querulous, but gave no reason for his abuse, which sometimes almost went to physical violence.” The two had no children, yet there was some evidence of love between them. Watson honored his wife in the heavens by christening one of his asteroids Helena—Annette’s middle name. On earth, he invited her not only to accompany him to Peking for the transit of Venus, but afterwards to travel together on a long, arduous, and sometimes romantic trip home, visiting the Taj Mahal by moonlight, crawling inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, climbing Mt. Vesuvius, and riding gondolas on Venice’s Grand Canal. “I do enjoy traveling & sightseeing—am never weary of it,” Annette wrote her parents from Egypt. She did occasionally weary of her husband, however, as she noted from Hong Kong: “J. C. is so nervous & almost sick from a cold taken in Shanghai that I can scarcely endure his impatience.” More than impatient, he was also loath to reveal his own frailty. “He has just told me not to write that he is sick, but it is already done,” Annette added with evident exasperation. “I never heard such a cough in all my life. He will never hear to me, but thinks he knows better how to take care of himself.”
By Saturday—two days before the eclipse—the tiny Railroad Hotel was overflowing with guests. Daniel Hector Talbot, a prosperous land broker from Sioux City, Iowa, stopped over in Rawlins while on his way to the Pacific Northwest for business. Talbot was passionate about science and would later spend his fortune collecting natural history specimens, then donate thousands of bird skins to the University of Iowa before dying destitute. W. Fraser Rae, a British journalist and author, had come over from London to accompany Norman Lockyer. Meanwhile, two much younger Englishmen—recent graduates of Cambridge University—had also sailed on Lockyer’s ship across the Atlantic and arranged to meet up with him for the eclipse. “At a little after midnight arrived Rawlins. No beds,” wrote one of the pair, R. C. Lehmann, a handsome fellow with a square jaw and dimpled chin who would later become a well-known magazine writer and parodist. “Roused up Rae & Lockyer. I slept on floor at foot of Lockyer’s bed.”
Rawlins had by now become a veritable Athens of the West. Such a collection of great minds, in such an unlikely setting, was an event worth preserving for posterity, and it so happened that a professional was on hand to do just that. J. B. Silvis was a former saloonkeeper and failed gold miner who found success as a roving photographer on the rails of the Union Pacific. “[He] meanders up and down the U. P. in his palatial photograph car, seeking the shadows of us poor terrestrial mortals,” a Nebraska newspaper explained. The “palatial” car was a converted caboose, outfitted on the inside with a darkroom and portrait studio, and ornamented on the outside with adve
rtisements for his business and an American flag that flew above a severed, antlered elk’s head.
THE ECLIPSE STATION AT RAWLINS, WYOMING TERRITORY.
Left to right: George Barker, Robert Galbraith, Henry Morton, unknown, Fred Hess, D. H. Talbot, W. Fraser Rae, Edwin Marshall Fox, James Craig Watson, Annette Watson, Anna Palmer Draper, Henry Draper, Thomas A. Edison, J. Norman Lockyer. From a photograph by J. B. Silvis.
The Draper eclipse party, along with Norman Lockyer, James Craig Watson, and other visitors and locals, posed for a photograph outside the crude Rawlins observatory on Saturday, July 27. The twelve men and two women stood along the wall of the structure and against the picket fence that surrounded the Galbraiths’ yard. Telescopes could be seen behind them, emerging through the top of the Draper observatory and the side of the chicken coop, and two more telescopes stood in the dirt before them. Most everyone was adorned appropriately for a portrait, the women in subdued Victorian finery, the men in dark suits and bow ties. Watson looked especially dapper, his ample belly filling out his vest. Barker held his head erect, his neatly combed hair in contrast to his signature shaggy beard. Then there was Edison. He crossed his arms before his boyish frame. His bangs hung unevenly, not yet grown out after the recent encounter with wet plaster. His clothes, to put it generously, were casual. “He was the worst dressed man in the room,” a reporter noted when Edison wore much the same outfit two weeks later. “An old black hat, a cheap shirt with the stud-holes in the bosom unoccupied, a two-bit necktie several months old, coarse pants and vests and a mouse-colored linen duster, completed his attire.”
At night, this eminent assemblage invited the people of Raw-lins to look through their telescopes for tours of the night sky. The townsfolk gazed at double stars, distant nebulae, and Saturn’s rings, which at the time were angled directly toward Earth and gave the appearance of a knife edge slicing through the planet. The heavens shone so clearly that the sharp-eyed Watson claimed he could spot the moons of Jupiter without a telescope. “[The scientists] never tired of showing and explaining to the citizens the use of the instruments, and showing them the wonders of the heavens through their glasses,” wrote the Laramie Daily Sentinel. “Such an array of distinguished scholars, so provided with the most improved fixtures, furnished a rare opportunity to us frontier residents to enjoy some of the wonders of science.”
It was also a rare opportunity for the astronomers themselves—to reconnect with old colleagues, who were also competitors. The tension could make things a bit awkward, as Lehmann, the young Cambridge man, sensed. “[Draper’s] great reputation rests on the discovery of oxygen in the sun; Lockyer has written strongly in refutation of this. They dine at the same table here & preserve a sort of armed neutrality.” Later, as the scientists sat in the Draper party’s rustic observatory, they all reminisced, boasting of past expeditions. Norman Lockyer recalled his last eclipse, in India, where he slept in a hammock, in a jungle with scorpions and snakes, while doped up on opium to treat a fever. His party made its base an abandoned fort on the coast, and when it erected its instruments, the locals mistook the telescopes for guns and braced for war. The astronomers successfully calmed those fears, but the eclipse provoked new ones. Lockyer recalled the wails and lamentations of thousands who surrounded the fort and—as he described it—begged the scientists to rid the world of the dreadful dragon that had swallowed the sun.
James Craig Watson shared his own tale of peril and superstition, from his time in Peking for the transit of Venus. In Chinese astrology, the sun represented the emperor, and therefore a planet’s black silhouette crossing the sun portended ill. Just as the celestial event came to pass, the omen appeared validated when the young Emperor Tongzhi fell sick, diagnosed with smallpox (although some suspected the sexually adventurous teen had really contracted syphilis), and he soon expired. The Chinese public blamed the visiting astronomers, and it was only by good luck and strategy, Watson said, that he escaped China alive.
Watson likely told another story from China, a favorite of his, about his discovery of an asteroid by accident. It was the night of October 10, 1874—two months before the transit of Venus—when, while setting up his post in Peking, he turned his telescope toward Pisces. There, among a sea of stars, he noticed one shining dimly that seemed out of place, based not on a star map but simply on his memory of that patch of the heavens. Subsequent observations showed that it was a new minor planet. “This being the first planet discovered in China, I requested Prince Kung, regent of the Empire, to give to it a suitable name,” Watson would write. The asteroid became known as Juewa—“China’s Fortune”—but it was really Watson’s good fortune. He had shown his talents to be almost superhuman. The man could glance at the sky and pluck out a planet. What chance, then, did Vulcan have to hide during the eclipse?
THE WEEKEND BEFORE NATURE’S big show was devoted to final preparations. For Watson, that meant jury-rigging his telescope. Although it was a fine instrument, it lacked setting circles—graduated disks that indicate where the telescope is pointed, measured in declination and right ascension (the celestial counterparts to latitude and longitude). Without these coordinates, Watson would have difficulty specifying the location of any planet he might find, undermining his ability to substantiate the discovery. So he improvised a solution, akin to making his own setting circles. He hired a Rawlins carpenter to fashion two wooden disks, onto which he pasted white cardboard. These he attached to the telescope along with brass pointers that moved just above the cardboard to indicate the instrument’s alignment. The plan for the eclipse, then, was to mark in pencil, on the white circles, the position of the brass pointers when the telescope was aimed at a reference object—say, the sun—and then again when it was aimed at an unknown object of interest. Later, after the hurried work of totality, he would dismount the wooden circles and, at leisure, measure the angles between the marks to come up with the celestial coordinates. It was, he was convinced, a foolproof technique. It would permit no error—and no doubt—as to where he observed an object in the sky.
Edison, too, needed to prepare his equipment. The tasimeter was not yet ready for the eclipse. Just hooking up the device to its external battery and galvanometer (for measuring electric current that indicated heat) proved enormously complicated; he had to conceive a whole new way of wiring the contraption to get it to work. Next, there were continuing problems caused by the device’s sensitivity to extraneous temperature changes. “The approach of any person within five feet threw the instrument out of adjustment,” Edwin Marshall Fox reported in the Herald. “The heat from his little finger at that distance deflected it several degrees.” So Edison insulated the tasimeter; he placed it in a double tin case that held water in a kind of moat around the device. This ungainly assemblage then had to be attached to a telescope—a four-inch refractor that George Barker had brought for Edison’s use—and placed within the confines of the Galbraiths’ chicken coop.
Still, Edison had yet to demonstrate that his apparatus could do what he said it could do: measure the heat of a star millions of miles away. So, a few nights before the eclipse, he performed a test on Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern half of the sky. He aimed the telescope high overhead and carefully focused the starlight onto the rubber strip inside the tasimeter, which rested on a stable platform above the earthen floor of the hennery. Edison was on his hands and knees. The other scientists gathered around and watched.
Edison carefully eyed the galvanometer’s needle, which pointed to zero—no indication of heat. Minutes passed. Still, the needle did not budge. “It’s strange,” Edison mumbled. “It ought to work, and I’m sure it will.” He examined the connections and discovered the problem; a wire was out of place. He reconnected it.
Starting over, he again aimed the starlight into the tasimeter. This time the needle reacted immediately, deflecting toward the side of heat. The instrument was so delicate, however, that it sometimes gave spurious results. He needed to be sure that this one
was real. So he placed a dark screen in front of the telescope to block the starlight. The indicator returned to zero. Then he removed the screen, allowing the light through again. The needle jumped, registering heat. He repeated the experiment several more times until he was convinced that the findings were valid. His tasimeter really could detect heat from Arcturus. Edison then turned his telescope to another star and repeated the exercise. He continued his labors until 4:00 A.M.
“One of the many points of interest here, to me, has been the observatory in which Mr. Edison has been experimenting on his tasimeter,” Norman Lockyer wrote to London, in a dispatch for Nature, the weekend before the eclipse. “It is truly a very wonderful instrument, and from the observations made last night on the heat of Arcturus, it is quite possible that he may succeed in his expectations. For its extreme delicacy I can personally vouch. The instrument, however, is so young, that doubtless there are many pitfalls to be discovered. Mr. Edison, however, is no unwary experimenter.”
Lockyer, the grandiloquent European, cast his praise wider still. Having watched a number of U.S. astronomers prepare for the eclipse, and having heard of the work of others, he lavishly commended the scientific preparations of the neophyte nation. “The energy displayed by the American astronomers is, if possible, greater than I anticipated,” Lockyer wrote. “There is scarcely a man of note among them who is not now along the totality line which runs from the Yellowstone Park to the Gulf of Mexico.”
Although the astronomers appeared ready, Lockyer mentioned one concern: the weather. The skies in recent days had clouded up each afternoon, a worrisome pattern that, if it continued on Monday, could negate all the hard work in preparing for the eclipse. And it was not just a problem in Wyoming. “[A]t Denver,” he added, “matters have been much worse.”