by David Baron
The rest of the nation was less favored—those outside the shadow path would not witness a total eclipse—but everyone would see at least a partial eclipse, weather permitting. Sidewalk vendors in Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, and elsewhere did a brisk business in eclipse glasses. “Here ye are now,” a hawker cried in Manhattan, “blue glass only three cents apiece; all ready to look at th’ eclipse—three cents apiece.”
In the late afternoon, when the partial eclipse was set to begin in New York, the city’s focus shifted upward, as the Herald described:
Portly bankers about to start for home paused on their office steps and turned their eyes above the money making world; merchants stood in the doorways of their busy stores, alternately consulting the face of their watches and the face of the sky; clerks and messengers, hurrying along the crowded streets, ceased to knock and jostle one another and with upturned faces and a blissful forgetfulness of business stood gazing all in one direction, while shop girls, escaping from the toilsome factory, caught a [momentary] glimpse of the heavens above and stalwart policemen stood boldly by frightened French nurses and their infant charges. Even the stage drivers forgot for a single moment to crane their necks and beckon enticingly to passing pedestrians, in the hope of securing another passenger and another fare.
Across the land, as America’s attention was drawn to the higher spheres, an otherwise typical workday assumed a new and exotic countenance.
CHAPTER 15
FIRST CONTACT
MONDAY, JULY 29, 1878
2:03:16.4 TO 3:13:34.2 P.M. SEPARATION MEAN TIME
2:19:30.5 TO 3:29:03.5 P.M. DENVER MEAN TIME
“THERE SHE GOES,” HENRY DRAPER CALLED OUT THE MOMENT he saw the moon kiss the sun. He was in his pine-shed observatory, in Robert Galbraith’s yard beside the Union Pacific in Rawlins. By now a crowd had gathered in the vicinity. The spectators immediately turned toward the southwest, smoked glass in hand, and gazed past the railroad tracks and over the treeless hills toward the blazing sun. It requires a practiced eye to identify the moment when a solar eclipse begins, and the locals probably noticed nothing, but first contact had indeed arrived. Another seventy minutes would have to elapse before second contact, the start of totality.
Across the fence, in the Galbraiths’ chicken coop, Edison was still wrestling the whims of a persistent wind. Despite his earlier efforts to shore up the henhouse, his telescope—which projected beyond the confines of the structure—remained subject to the gusts, and they continued to throw his apparatus out of alignment. He now crafted a rigging of ropes and wires to hold the telescope in place. It offered only partial benefit.
The gale was also blowing at Separation, where James Craig Watson had joined the Newcomb party and erected his telescope in the shelter of a sand ledge that broke most—but not all—of the force of the wind. Soldiers from Fort Steele placed sections of the railway’s snow fence on top of the bank to provide added protection, but the fencing tended to blow down.
IN DENVER, WHERE THE ECLIPSE was to start a few minutes later than in Wyoming, the Vassar women spent the moments before first contact watching the sun’s edge for the impinging moon. Maria Mitchell, Cora Harrison, and Elizabeth Abbot silently peered through telescopes while Emma Culbertson, holding a timepiece, counted the seconds. Culbertson’s nerves got the better of her, and she lost her breath. Professor Mitchell took up the counting until her former student regained composure. When the moon at last made its appearance, the three observers recorded the time. Their estimates varied by more than a second—“a large difference,” Mitchell noted.
The beginning of a solar eclipse brings momentary excitement, but what comes next is a lull. Over the following minutes, as the moon nibbles at the sun, one feels the urge constantly to gaze upwards, but with each glance the scene appears virtually unchanged. Given the frustratingly slow pace, one looks for distractions, as did the Vassar party. “Between first contact and totality there was more than an hour, and we had little to do but look at the beautiful scenery,” Mitchell remarked.
A photographer was on hand, and the women took time out to pose. They sat in wooden chairs on the grassy plain, bonnets on their heads and hands in their laps, beside the telescopes that aimed up and to the right in precisely the same direction, toward the sun. The image was captured as a stereograph and would be printed on a souvenir card labeled “Colorado Scenery,” as if this assemblage of scientists was yet one more marvel of the American West, a wonder to behold like the geysers of Yellowstone or the Rockies themselves.
CLEVELAND ABBE ENJOYED NO team of trained assistants as he lay supine on the slope of Pikes Peak, but he enlisted what help he could as he prepared for totality. The proprietress of the Lake House, one Mrs. Copley, offered him the aid of two young men, who constructed a kind of easel that Abbe could reach without getting up. The men drove stakes into the ground to his left and right. Then they placed on these supports a crossbar onto which they nailed a wooden board that pivoted up and down. It held a sheet of paper. The contraption, which straddled Abbe’s recumbent body, would allow him to sketch the corona and to compare his drawing to the real thing in real time, by tilting the board forward and back—toward the sun and away from it. He hoped this would enable him to make an especially accurate and detailed rendering of the sun’s mysterious halo.
Four thousand feet higher on the mountain, dozens of tourists had arrived on the Pikes Peak summit. The day-trippers tethered their horses and burros to the rocks, then picnicked beside a snowbank that they used to chill their wine. The Signal Service had previously cautioned the public, in the press, that the peak was a government reserve and “no one not of the service or connected with its observations, will, without special authority be permitted within one hundred yards (100) of the station or any observing party on the day of the eclipse.” In reality, the head of the Signal Service, General Myer, proved more liberal than this warning suggested. “General, may a woman come within your charmed circle on the peak?” asked Mary Rose Smith, a visitor from Philadelphia. “I invite you, madam, on condition of perfect silence when nearing the totality,” he replied.
The stipulation agreed to, Mrs. Smith and her small party took a seat on the northern edge of the summit, at General Myer’s suggestion, and faced in the direction of Rawlins. That part of Wyoming was far off in the distance, hidden behind several ranges of snow-flanked peaks, but the vista would be ideal for seeing something else: the approach of the moon’s shadow in the moments before totality. In the meantime, the tourists watched the eclipse progress through colored glass. As the moon carved an ever-larger bite out of the solar disk, the sun grew moonlike: a shrinking crescent.
A marmot—a large rodent with a bushy tail and an inquisitive face—emerged from the rocks below. It squatted and grinned.
FOR MUCH OF THE SPAN of the partial eclipse, spectators may well have wondered if the hype had been justified. The sun was one-quarter covered, then half covered, then three-quarters covered, and still there was no noticeable reduction in daylight. If astronomers had not alerted the public to what was happening overhead, many people would have gone about their lives unaware. But about fifteen minutes before the moon completely blocked the sun, strange things began to happen.
In the parlor of Denver’s American House hotel, a woman marveled at a narrow sunbeam that shone on the floor, painting the shape of a sickle. It was an image of the eclipsed sun projected through a puncture in a window shade, the tiny gap serving as an inadvertent pinhole camera. The same phenomenon could be seen in nature. Beneath trees, where the sunlight filtered through a thick layer of leaves, what dappled the ground were not points of light, but crescents. The display under the cottonwoods that lined the streets of Boulder presented, as one local put it, “a gorgeous appearance which would have delighted the heart of a Turk.”
CRESCENTS VISIBLE UNDER FOLIAGE DURING PARTIAL ECLIPSE
Another effect, less obvious to identify, gave the landscape an otherworldly appearance. On a nor
mal cloudless day, the shadows of people and buildings wear ragged edges. This blurry outline, the penumbra—a zone between full shade and full light—results from the sun’s considerable width in the sky, which causes its rays to arrive on earth at a range of angles. Now, as the moon covered the sun, the solar surface effectively shrank. The sun’s rays became more parallel, shadows grew sharper, and objects seemed more clearly defined, as if displayed at high contrast. As the solar radiation decreased, so did the temperature. In Denver, one visiting astronomer, already wearing a light coat on what had been a warm summer’s day, called for a second jacket. To the west, on a high mountain pass, men and women who had ascended for the spectacle wrapped themselves in cloaks and blankets.
Meanwhile, the sky’s hue began to shift. Francis Cranmer Penrose, an English architect and astronomer who had observed the 1870 eclipse in Spain, was struck by the changing light around Longs Peak, a sheer promontory to the northwest of his observing post near Denver. He watched the mountain and the sky behind it turn lilac, while the upper sky deepened to “a very dark warm blue.” In Rawlins, one observer noted a “strange, weird, grey light, resembling that which precedes the dawn.” Mary Rose Smith, the tourist from Philadelphia, perceived a similar change in the landscape’s complexion as she gazed north from the summit of Pikes Peak. “The light of the sun grew pale and grey,” she wrote. “All the yellow rays seemed to fade out of it, and the face of nature and of man took on a weird and ghastly palor [sic].”
About eight minutes before totality, a volunteer working with British astronomer A. C. Ranyard at the Princeton camp pointed to an object in the sky. It was Venus, “which was shining brightly, and might no doubt have been seen some time previously if we had been looking for it,” wrote Ranyard. “The heavens had assumed a violet tint which each minute was growing deeper.”
Animals perceived the ebbing of the light, and they responded as they normally would at the close of day. In Rawlins, owls emerged. Farther north, in a Montana gold mining town, “all the cocks in the city began to crow lustily and in a regular succession.” Across the region, cows turned homeward and pigeons went to roost. Grasshoppers folded their wings and fell to the ground.
WITH TOTALITY RAPIDLY APPROACHING, tension escalated in the scientific camps. Astronomers demanded that spectators remain silent, and not just on Pikes Peak. In Denver, the mayor stationed a police officer at the Chicago Astronomical Society’s observation post to maintain public order. In Rawlins, as one newspaper reported with presumed exaggeration, the Draper party ordered “that if, during the totality, anybody came near or spoke to them, ‘shoot him on the spot.’ ”
Inside the Draper observatory, all was accordingly quiet. Henry Morton was not there; he had left to make his observations from atop a nearby hill. The three who remained—Henry and Anna Draper, and George Barker—prepared candles in case they needed the light to take notes after the loss of the sun. They appeared ready for totality. “The only place of disorder was in that frail structure of Edison’s,” wrote The New York Herald’s Edwin Marshall Fox. “Notwithstanding his efforts the wind continued to give him trouble. In vain he adjusted and readjusted [the tasimeter]. . . . Edison’s difficulty seemed to increase as the precious moment of total eclipse drew near.”
Up the tracks at Separation, James Craig Watson prepared to make his quick search for Vulcan. Even before the sun disappeared, he began sweeping the heavens for any bright objects that had become visible in the darkening sky. Simon Newcomb, meanwhile, was hiding in the camp’s photographic darkroom to sensitize his vision. (Other astronomers, for the same effect, bandaged their eyes.) Newcomb emerged just three minutes before totality. By now, the sun was a mere sliver. As he made his way to his telescope, he noted the “lurid” color of the landscape. “The light seemed no longer to be that of the sun, but rather to partake of the character of an artificial illumination.”
With just a minute to go before totality, another bizarre phenomenon became visible to some. As if the sun were being projected through shallow water at the beach, narrow bands of light and shade rippled across the ground, or—from the viewpoint of astronomer Edward Holden, who was stationed atop the Teller House Hotel in Central City, Colorado—across the roof. “They coursed after each other very rapidly,” he wrote, “seeming about 3 feet from center to center, the dark band being, say, 6 inches wide, the interval being bright.” These wavy lines, termed shadow bands, are not always seen but can be dramatic, as at the total eclipse of 1842 in Southern France, where the undulation was reported to be so striking that “children ran after it and tried to catch it with their hands.” The cause of these ripples is the same that makes stars twinkle—currents of warm and cold air that bend light as it passes through the atmosphere. Indeed, shadow bands have been called, poetically, “visible wind.”
SHADOW BANDS OF 1870 ON AN ITALIAN DWELLING
The sun’s crescent had now grown exceedingly slender, a mere filament. It continued to shrink, like an ember burning itself out at the ends. Before vanishing, however, this glowing thread produced a final brilliant display. It shattered into a string of shimmering jewels. These dancing points of light, called Baily’s beads (described and explained by British astronomer Francis Baily in 1836), are the last of the sun’s rays filtering through valleys on the edge of the moon.
In the closing seconds before the onset of a total solar eclipse, darkness falls with disorienting rapidity. It can feel as if you are losing your eyesight, or perhaps your sanity. The dimming light does not just surround you; it swallows you. The very ground seems to give way.
In the midafternoon on July 29, 1878, as the people of southern Wyoming plunged into shadow, they withdrew the smoked glass from their eyes and beheld a sky like none they had seen before.
CHAPTER 16
TOTALITY
MONDAY, JULY 29, 1878
3:13:34.2 TO 3:16:24.2 P.M. SEPARATION MEAN TIME
3:29:03.5 TO 3:31:44.0 P.M. DENVER MEAN TIME
A TOTAL ECLIPSE IS A PRIMAL, TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCE. The shutting off of the sun does not bring utter darkness; it is more like falling through a trapdoor into a dimly lit, unrecognizable reality. The sky is not the sky of the earth—neither the star-filled dome of night nor the immersive blue of daylight, but an ashen ceiling of slate. A few bright stars and planets shine familiarly, like memories from a distant childhood, but the most prominent object is thoroughly foreign. You may know, intellectually, that it is both the sun and moon, yet it looks like neither. It is an ebony pupil surrounded by a pearly iris. It is the eye of the cosmos.
The sight, for many, is humbling and mystical. A Princeton student who witnessed totality in Iowa in 1869 compared the rush of emotion to an earlier near encounter with death, when “I was once held in a drowning condition at the bottom of a stream and the review of my life passed before me.” The hypnotic effect appears to extend beyond humans. On the eve of the eclipse of 1842, in Southern France, a local man—for an experiment—withheld food from his dog. “The next morning, at the instant when the total eclipse was going to take place, he threw a piece of bread to the poor animal, which had begun to devour it, when the sun’s last rays disappeared,” the astronomer François Arago recounted. “Instantly the dog let the bread fall; nor did he take it up again for two minutes, that is, until the total obscuration had ceased; and then he ate it with great avidity.”
Scientists, too, are apt to be spellbound. Firm hands tremble, eloquent tongues freeze, sharp minds grow addled. “In fact, the general scene of a total eclipse, is a potent Siren’s song, which no human mind can withstand,” warned Piazzi Smyth, the Scottish Astronomer Royal. “For its effects on the minds of men are so overpowering, that if they have never had the opportunity of seeing it before, they forget their appointed tasks of observation.”
Now, in Wyoming, the “darkness was like that of deep twilight, and the beauty of the corona was enchanting, but there was no time to pay attention to such things,” wrote William Harkness, head of t
he government party at Creston. “[E]verybody worked as if for their lives.”
TOTALITY WAS PREDICTED TO last 176 seconds at Creston. At Separation, the duration would be five seconds shorter, and at Rawlins another nine seconds shorter still. Every moment in the moon’s shadow was precious. Keeping track of time was essential.
The scientists—occupied at their telescopes, spectroscopes, and cameras—had many tasks to complete before the sun’s reemergence; they could not spare the distraction of watching a timepiece, so each camp assigned an assistant to count the seconds aloud. For the Draper party in Rawlins, that job fell to Anna Draper, who had filled a similar role for her husband during his observations of the transit of Mercury. Norman Lockyer, beside the Union Pacific station at Separation, gave the duty to R. C. Lehmann, the young man from Cambridge. A short distance away, at Newcomb’s settlement, the timekeeper was a soldier from Fort Steele, Captain William H. Bisbee. The wind howled across the arid plain, drowning out voices, so Bisbee hammered against the round cover from a camp stove. On every tenth beat, he called the time.
TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE, JULY 29TH 1878. Simon Newcomb; Separation, Wyoming.
While the seconds rang out, as if from a resonant metronome, Newcomb began his work by examining the faint outer corona with the naked eye. To view these delicate tendrils clearly, he hid the brighter, inner corona behind a circular screen he had set atop a telegraph pole. (In essence, he eclipsed the eclipsed sun.) He was astonished to see how far the corona extended, stretching many times the sun’s diameter to the upper left and lower right. Nearby, an assistant from the Naval Observatory used a spectroscope to analyze the corona, while a colleague observed through a telescope. Several lay volunteers were also there: James Craig Watson’s wife, Annette; D. H. Talbot, the Sioux City land agent; and Wyoming’s newly appointed territorial governor, John W. Hoyt, a former chemistry professor and a staunch advocate of scientific research, who, like Watson, had served as a judge at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. These three acted as artists, sketching the corona in pencil on sheets of white cardboard.