by David Baron
CHAPTER 13
OLD PROBABILITIES
JULY 28, 1878—
Colorado
“RAIN?—OH, NO, IT DOESN’T ‘RAIN’ IN COLORADO THIS YEAR—it just lets go all bolts and comes down in sheets, in torrents,” a newspaper from a mountain town near Denver griped the weekend before the eclipse. “During the past eight years, Colorado has not witnessed a season marked by so many heavy rainfalls—they call ’em ‘cloud bursts,’ and the effects justify such nomenclature.” Day after day, it was the same. Even if morning dawned to clear skies, afternoon brought downpours at the very hour when the eclipse was set to occur.
On Friday, July 26, Maria Mitchell, after much duress, finally retrieved her lost luggage from the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, but the weekend storms made it impossible to set up her telescopes and rehearse. (The tempests likely frayed her nerves, too, for she suffered from a lifelong fear of lightning—ironic for a cousin of Benjamin Franklin.) At the Princeton camp on Cherry Creek, the water rose so high one night that it almost swamped the tents. On Sunday morning, at area churches, there was just one thing to do—pray—“which is precisely what every one who has faith in the efficacy of prayer and a proper regard for science should do,” wrote the Denver Daily Times. Still, Sunday afternoon brought even more rain, and then hail. The cumulus clouds “hovered over our fair city like birds of ill omen,” as one scientist put it, “reducing to zero the hopes of astronomers, rousing the ire of many of our citizens and exciting the anxieties of all.” But of all the scientists bemoaning the inclement weather on that day before the great eclipse, the one who agonized the most—whose life was actually endangered by the atmosphere—was the man who had predicted clear skies.
METEOROLOGY REMAINED AN IMMATURE and imperfect science in 1878. During a recent speech in New York, Mark Twain had lampooned those who tried to prognosticate the weather. “Probable northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward and points between,” began his parody of a forecast, which continued with “probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning.” Twain’s hapless weatherman then concluded: “But it is possible that the programme may be wholly changed in the meantime.”
The critique was not quite fair. Scientists had made great strides in understanding how weather systems formed and moved. Indeed, a key insight had come more than a century earlier, thanks to an eclipse that was not successfully observed. In the fall of 1743, Benjamin Franklin planned to view a lunar eclipse one evening in Philadelphia, but as the appointed hour approached, a violent storm did as well, “so that neither Moon nor Stars could be seen.” It was a northeaster—so named because the winds blew from that direction. “The Storm did a great deal of Damage all along the Coast,” Franklin wrote, “for we had Accounts of it in the News Papers from Boston, Newport, New York, Maryland and Virginia. But what surpriz’d me, was to find in the Boston Newspapers an Account of an Observation of that Eclipse made there: For I thought, as the Storm came from the N E. it must have begun sooner at Boston than with us, and consequently have prevented such Observation.”
At the time, it was believed that storms moved in the direction of their winds, but this northeaster had moved against its winds, toward the northeast. Further study convinced Franklin that such storms along the East Coast generally traveled in that same direction—from Georgia to Nova Scotia. This finding carried practical implications. If a storm set in and you knew its direction of movement, you could give downstream cities an early warning of its impending arrival. At least, you could do so if you had a way to relay the message fast enough.
The telegraph made such real-time storm warnings possible. The Smithsonian’s Joseph Henry, whose electrical research had paved the way for Morse’s invention, took an initial step toward that goal in the 1850s. He arranged for an assemblage of telegraph stations each morning to wire local weather conditions to Washington, where the information was posted at the Smithsonian (using colored cards on a large map) and published in the newspaper. The continually updated chart gave a general sense of storm systems moving across the country, but Henry’s institution did not issue formal forecasts. The federal government did not take on that responsibility until a decade later, when a nascent weather service rose from the ashes of the Civil War.
During the war, Union commanders had relied heavily on military intelligence. They gathered information on Confederate troop movements from spies and scouts, and from a specially trained team—the Army Signal Corps—whose men climbed high hills and church steeples to scan the terrain and send back coded messages using flags, torches, and telegraphs. When the war ended, such skills were no longer in demand, but the Signal Corps’ leader, General Albert J. Myer, was an astute political operator. With his team’s budget slashed and its very existence threatened, he sought a new peacetime role. He found it in the late 1860s, when a spate of shipping disasters on the Great Lakes prompted a Wisconsin congressman to call for the establishment of a federal storm-warning system. Myer argued that his corps possessed just the skills required: it could gather meteorological data at military posts across the country and then telegraph those statistics back to a central clearinghouse, “giving the presence, the course, and the extent of storms . . . as it would, in time of war, those of an enemy.” His lobbying succeeded. On February 9, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation creating America’s first national weather service. It would be operated by the Army Signal Corps.
GEN. ALBERT J. MYER.
General Myer had secured a fresh mandate and a vastly increased budget. What he lacked was a meteorologist.
CLEVELAND ABBE HAD NOT started his career in meteorology. His first love was astronomy, an odd passion for a severely nearsighted boy. (“[W]hen mother had taken me on her lap singing ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star,’ I had looked up at the sky and wondered but saw nothing,” he recalled.) Fitted with strong spectacles and using a borrowed telescope, he studied the night sky from the roof of his family’s New York City home. After college, he did advanced work in astronomy at the University of Michigan—where he came to know James Craig Watson—then served as a kind of postgraduate fellow in Russia, at the well-appointed imperial observatory near the tsar’s summer palace south of St. Petersburg. But what Abbe really wanted was a permanent, paying job in astronomy, a search that proved an exasperating struggle for more than a decade. He applied for the new professorship in astronomy at Vassar, but he lost out to Maria Mitchell. Like Mitchell, he worked for a time as a government computer, but he nearly collapsed under the stress of numerical calculations. (“It was physical-, mental- and almost moral-suicide,” he confessed to Simon Newcomb.) Abbe even tried to marry into the profession, it seems, offering his hand to a younger sister of the man who oversaw Russia’s imperial observatory. She declined.
CLEVELAND ABBE,
“PROBABILITIES.”
Finally, in 1868, Abbe landed what appeared to be—on paper, at least—the ideal job: director of the storied Cincinnati Observatory. The institution had emerged a quarter century earlier out of a grassroots fundraising campaign, pitched as democratic America’s challenge to the tsar’s royal observatory. “I am determined to show the autocrat of all the Russias,” said the Cincinnati Observatory’s founding director, “that an obscure individual in this wilderness city in a republican country can raise here more money by voluntary gift in behalf of science than his majesty can raise in the same way throughout his whole dominions.” The good citizens of Cincinnati answered the call, donating enough money to buy one of the world’s most powerful telescopes, and in 1843 the cornerstone was laid by an elderly John Quincy Adams, who had marveled at the 1806 total solar eclipse while a U.S. senator and, later, during and after his presidency, had advocated the construction of astronomical observatories. (He called them “lighthouses of the skies.”) But success for the Cincinnati Observatory proved short-lived. By 1859, its director left, and its funds dwindled.
When Cleveland Abbe arrived a decade later, the building was all but abandoned, its windows broken and its roof leaking. Out on the portico, one of the Greek columns was tipping over.
Abbe began repairs to the edifice, but he could not fix a bigger problem: the area’s worsening air pollution. Cincinnati—dubbed Porkopolis—was a booming city of meatpackers and brewers, and thick smoke often blanketed the sky. Since atmospheric conditions dictated how much one might see through a telescope, Abbe grew interested in meteorology, and he devised a plan to track the weather in Southwest Ohio. With the help of observers who telegraphed data from a broad geographic region, Abbe drew up daily forecasts—he called them probabilities—and, beginning in September 1869, he offered the service to area newspapers and private subscribers. For his efforts, this fledgling weatherman, though thirty years old, earned a fondly geriatric nickname: “Old Probabilities,” or “Old Probs.”
Cleveland Abbe had created something historic—the first regular weather forecasting service in the United States—but within a year the chronically cash-strapped Cincinnati Observatory was forced to abandon the venture, and Abbe too was soon dispatched, placed on unpaid leave. General Myer, just then seeking to create a weather service on a national level, called on Abbe for advice and quickly offered him a job as his chief meteorologist.
At last finding stable employment, Abbe moved to Washington. Recently married, he soon fathered a son, then two more. From his respectable salary he bought a sizable townhouse on I Street, with a lunette-topped doorway in front, a garden in the rear, and, inside, plaster cornices adorning twelve-foot ceilings. It had once been home to James Monroe and, at the beginning of Monroe’s presidency, had served as the executive mansion while the White House, burned by the British in the War of 1812, underwent final repairs.
Abbe’s office was a short walk away, on G Street, where the Army Signal Service (as the Signal Corps had now come to be known) occupied a three-story brick building topped by weather vanes, rain gauges, wind meters, and other “toys which excite the envy of all the neighboring boys,” as one observer put it. A tangle of telegraph wires led inside, funneling in weather reports taken simultaneously at meteorological stations across the United States. The messages were condensed using a cipher, to speed transmission and reduce cost. Ransack meant that 0.49 inches of rain had fallen since the last report. Dagger was a barometric reading of 29.63. The word cake indicated fair skies, about half covered by clouds, with winds from the south. The reports arrived thrice daily, setting off a frenzy of work among a half dozen clerks. Standing at desks, they mapped precipitation, clouds, and wind velocity; drew isobars and isotherms to reveal patterns of air pressure and temperature; and then Abbe or one of the forecasters he trained would deduce how the weather was likely to change over the next day or two. Within an average of one hour and forty minutes, the latest forecast was ready—telegraphed to the press for publication nationwide.
THE SIGNAL OFFICE AT WASHINGTON.
Cleveland Abbe’s new job earned him a comfortable life and the respect of the scientific community, but he bristled under the office rules. He was a civilian of academic bent stuck in a military hierarchy. When George Barker invited him to address a scientific gathering in Philadelphia in 1876, Abbe drafted a reply explaining that he was forbidden to say or publish “anything relating in the remotest degree to our work without first submitting it to General Myer (and whatever I submit to him is tabled).” He wrote further, “Lectures or any work by means of which the individuals of the corps may build up for themselves an independent reputation are especially obnoxious.” Before sending the final letter, Abbe diplomatically removed any direct mention of his boss, but it was obvious that he had interpersonal differences with General Myer. They were very different men.
Whereas Cleveland Abbe was gentle and bookish (his favorite pastimes were long walks and croquet), General Myer was rigid and domineering. While Abbe argued that the Signal Service must do more than just churn out forecasts—it should conduct basic research to advance the field of meteorology—Myer evinced little interest in theoretical studies. And there was another matter that, for Abbe, must have chafed. His superior had usurped his nickname. The newspapers had taken to calling General Myer “Old Probabilities.”
One summer evening in 1874, while Cleveland Abbe was at home reliving the bachelor’s life (his wife and young sons were away on a seaside vacation), General Myer stopped by. When a servant informed the visitor that the man of the house had already gone to bed, the general laughed—“What, so early?”—and left. The next day, Abbe recounted the incident in a letter to his wife. “Somehow I always feel better when I thus miss seeing him,” Abbe admitted. “I suppose I am foolish & wicked but I can’t help pining for freedom & a telescope.”
IN EARLY 1878, as astronomers began planning for the coming eclipse, they called on the Signal Service for an obvious reason. “I shall be greatly obliged if you will have the goodness to furnish the Observatory, if possible, any data from your records that will guide us in selecting [viewing posts] such as may be thought to give greatest promise of good weather,” Admiral John Rodgers, the head of the Naval Observatory, wrote to General Myer. Myer handed the request to Cleveland Abbe.
What was required was not, strictly speaking, weather forecasting; there was no way to predict the movement of high- and low-pressure systems several months in advance. The task was simply one of compiling and analyzing historical data. Abbe identified thirty-six weather stations that fell within the computed path of the moon’s shadow, and another thirty-one that sat just outside. He gathered statistics for the months of July and August over the previous years, and he then calculated the odds of clear skies on the afternoon of July 29. According to Abbe’s math, the region around Rawlins, Wyoming, should enjoy a 79 percent chance of favorable conditions at the time of the eclipse. At Denver, the numbers were less optimistic, but he still calculated better than even odds of a clear view, at 60 percent. The Signal Service issued these figures, and many others, in a circular that it distributed to the government and the press.
But Abbe, the frustrated astronomer, aspired to do more than provide advice; he hoped to observe the eclipse himself. He had experienced totality once before. On August 7, 1869—when Maria Mitchell, James Craig Watson, and Simon Newcomb stood within the moon’s shadow in Iowa—he was in Dakota Territory, where he had led a wagon expedition across the prairie toward the northwestern end of the shadow’s path in the United States. For three precious minutes, he studied the corona and stood hypnotized, dazzled by twisting cones of light that rose like pearly mountains from the sun’s hidden disk. The spectacle ended too soon. “The totality had passed away like a dream,” he wrote, “and no earthly power could recall that shaded sun to allow us only a moment’s longer study of its surface.”
On that same day in 1869, General Myer had been near the other end of the path of totality, in southern Virginia. In an effort to view the eclipse above the smoke and haze of the lower atmosphere, he had climbed a five-thousand-foot peak. “[O]ur party was one of the very few, possibly the only one, that observed successfully from a mountain top so elevated,” he wrote. What he saw melted the heart of this hardened military man. It was, he recalled, “a vision magnificent beyond description.”
Therefore, when Myer learned where the 1878 eclipse would cross Colorado, he immediately focused on a prominent geographic feature that sat in the middle of the path. This was Pikes Peak, which rose more than fourteen thousand feet above sea level, dominated the horizon south of Denver, and held on its top a Signal Service meteorological post, the highest-altitude weather station on the planet. Manned year-round and connected to the outside world by a seventeen-mile telegraph line, the post imposed harsh duty on its small staff of resident soldiers, who endured electrical storms, hurricane-force winds, frostbite, and the nausea, headaches, and dizziness brought on by the thin atmosphere. Myer was intrigued. Having witnessed the 1869 eclipse from a mountaintop in Virginia, he was cu
rious to know how this eclipse would appear from an even loftier height in Colorado. He hoped to go to Pikes Peak himself, but even if he could not, he wanted another qualified observer on the summit. After all, it was only appropriate for the nation’s meteorological bureau to take advantage of the eclipse to study the sun, since the sun drives the weather on earth.
On this rare occasion, General Myer and his chief scientist saw eye to eye. They agreed: Cleveland Abbe should go to Colorado. He should climb the mountain to observe the hidden sun.
ON FRIDAY, JULY 20, Cleveland Abbe arrived in Colorado Springs, near the base of Pikes Peak, and checked into the Crawford House. The hotel, at two dollars a night, did not especially impress him (another guest around this time complained of large holes in the bedspreads and carpeting), but he was pleasantly surprised by the city—its irrigated yards, its energetic spirit. As for the weather, it could hardly have been better. “This morning the sky is everywhere as clear as a bell and the blue is such a deep fine solid blue that it’s inspiring to an astronomer to look at it,” he wrote to his wife on Saturday. Less fine were his preparations to ascend the mountain. “There’s a good deal of confusion,” he acknowledged.
Abbe was not to be the sole astronomer on the summit. Samuel Pierpont Langley, who had encouraged Edison to invent the tasimeter (but who never did receive one before leaving Pittsburgh), knew Abbe from the days when they both toiled as novice directors at poorly funded observatories along the Ohio River. “I am very glad to hear from you, and to exchange experiences with any one interested in Astronomy,” Langley, in Allegheny, had written to Abbe, in Cincinnati, in 1868. “[H]ere, there is no one to talk to.” Now, in 1878, the two men arranged to join forces on Pikes Peak. “It’s first-rate;—your going;—we’ll have a time—hurroo!” Langley wrote to Abbe the month before the eclipse, then received a kind offer of logistical help from the Signal Service. “[General Myer] takes pleasure in offering you the hospitalities of the Signal Station at the summit for such time as you may need,” read the letter from Washington dated June 13.