by David Baron
Watson, meanwhile, stood at the edge of the group, beside the sand ridge that offered shelter from the gusts. He set to work quickly and systematically, necessarily so if he had any hope of finding Vulcan in less than three minutes. Spotting a world close to the sun might seem a simple proposition, but skilled astronomers had looked during previous eclipses, without luck. (Simon Newcomb confessed to his diary after the 1869 eclipse in Iowa, “Was disappointed in not finding intra-mercurial planets.”) Presumably Vulcan was not very bright; it must blend in as just another star. Watson kept a star chart on hand for reference, in case he spotted something that seemed out of place, but he hardly needed it. He had memorized the pattern of known stars he should see near the eclipsed sun.
Captain Bisbee announced the elapsed time. Ten seconds.
Watson pointed his telescope at the sun and then gently turned his instrument toward the east. He used a low-powered eyepiece that enabled him to scan a large area in a short time. His field of view moved through Cancer. He recognized several stars, including one that fell in the middle of the constellation and was called Delta Cancri by its Bayer designation. (German astronomer Johann Bayer’s celestial atlas of 1603 introduced a simple nomenclature of the heavens, labeling the most prominent stars in each constellation with Greek letters, usually in order of brightness. Delta Cancri means simply the “D” star in Cancer.) Watson saw nothing unexpected. He reset his telescope, back toward the sun, then adjusted it downward to take in a new strip of the sky. He scanned east again, and again he saw nothing unusual.
The metallic beats on the camp stove continued to resound. Twenty seconds.
Watson pointed the telescope at the sun once more, then began scanning to the west.
EDISON, MEANWHILE, KEPT STRUGGLING with his tasimeter. After months spent publicizing the invention and weeks perfecting it, he now had less than three minutes to prove its value to science—and The New York Herald was watching. Finally, at the moment he most needed it, Edison received a lucky break.
A total eclipse obstructs not only the sun’s direct light, but its heat, which can cause an abrupt change in atmospheric conditions—sometimes turning a calm day unsettled; at other times, the opposite. The eclipse of July 28, 1851, for instance, fell on a blustery afternoon in Norway. “The most singular thing,” one observer noted, “was, that the wind, which . . . blew hard in the early part of the eclipse, totally ceased, leaving the lake below me smooth and calm as glass.” This was now the fortunate effect in Rawlins. As Edwin Marshall Fox of the Herald wrote, “Totality had brought with it a marked cessation in the force of the wind.”
The sudden stillness was good news for the entire Draper party. In the main observatory, Anna Draper counted the seconds while her husband split the coronal light into its spectrum and photographed the result with a contrivance he called a phototelespectroscope. George Barker took a few seconds to examine the corona with the naked eye, looking for prominences and gauging its brightness. “The amount of light seemed to be nearly or quite equal to that given by the moon when ten days old,” he estimated. He then turned to his own spectroscope.
The instruments of Draper and Barker “were in excellent working order,” The New York Herald’s Fox reported. “Still Edison’s tasimeter was out of adjustment.” The contraption, sitting in its double tin case of water for insulation and connected by wires to a battery and a meter for measuring electric current, had to be aligned precisely with the telescope. Edison needed to project light from the corona through the tasimeter’s tiny slit and onto the hard rubber inside. In essence, he had to take a beam of energy that stretched 93 million miles from the sun to the earth and thread it through a gap finer than the breadth of a hair, and he had to do so while merciless time continued its swift progression.
ONE MINUTE THIRTY SECONDS.
Back at Separation, totality was more than half over, and Watson was making his fifth sweep with the telescope when, near the star Theta Cancri, his eye hit something unusual. It was a reddish object, located where no star should be. Perhaps it was a comet, he thought. He looked for elongation, because a comet that close to the sun should have a tail, yet he saw none. His mysterious object did not look like a star, either, for it did not appear as a mere point of light but rather displayed—as Watson perceived it—a noticeable diameter. It was a planet, he was sure. His heart must have leapt. He had found Vulcan.
One minute forty.
Watson, however, could indulge no momentary celebration. His discovery would mean nothing if he could not specify where in the sky the planet resided. In the dim light of the eclipsed sun, he took up his pencil. Using the contraption he had attached to the telescope, he marked where the brass pointers fell on the wooden circles. He would later read these marks to specify Vulcan’s coordinates.
One minute fifty.
AT ALMOST THE SAME MOMENT that Watson nabbed his elusive planet, Edison succeeded in aiming the coronal light through the slit in his device. He watched intently.
The electrical setup of his tasimeter had not been working quite right. In its null condition—with no heat applied—the needle should have sat still. Instead, it had been moving slowly leftward, toward “cold.” As soon as the coronal light landed on the rubber strip inside the device, however, the needle stopped moving. Then it started moving right—toward “heat.” It accelerated. Within five seconds, it shot off the scale entirely.
Edison was “in ecstasies,” according to one who saw him a short time later. The tasimeter had found heat in the corona—indeed, more than Edison had expected. Had he anticipated so much heat, he would have adjusted his device to be less sensitive so as to get a precise reading. With less than a minute of totality left, however, there was no time to rerun his experiment. Besides, the wind picked up again. The henhouse began to totter.
DURING THE FINAL MINUTE of the total eclipse at Separation, Watson continued his search for planets west and south of the sun. With just about twenty seconds to spare, he stumbled on another object he could not definitively identify. He assumed it was a star—actually, a tight cluster of stars—called Zeta Cancri, but with totality almost over, he had no time to check its placement against other stars in the vicinity. Instead, he quickly marked its location with the brass pointers on the wooden circles. He would later compare its position to known stars on his chart.
Two minutes forty seconds.
With the sun about to reappear, there was one thing Watson still hoped to do: gain independent confirmation of his discovery of Vulcan. He ran a few yards to Simon Newcomb, who by now was at his own telescope sweeping for unknown planets, and urged him to turn his glass toward the ruddy point of light southwest of the sun. Newcomb, however, could not comply; he had found his own strange object and was busy reading its position in the sky. (Newcomb would later determine that his object was nothing more than a known star, and he would lament, “It is of course now a matter of great regret that I did not let my own object go and point on Professor WATSON’S.”)
Then, with jarring suddenness, the show came to a close as a blinding point of sun emerged from the trailing edge of the moon. Daylight returned, seemingly faster than it had gone. The stars and known planets, the corona, and Watson’s mysterious object speedily vanished behind the brightening scrim that is the earth’s blue sky.
EVEN AS TOTALITY ENDED in Wyoming, it had not yet begun farther south, in Colorado. The moon’s shadow raced toward Denver at a bullet’s clip, some two thousand miles an hour. “Those who have seen a locomotive approach . . . can judge of the stupefaction caused by the approach of this black column with all but lightning speed,” Scottish glaciologist James D. Forbes wrote after watching the lunar shadow dash across the Alps in 1842. “I confess it was the most terrifying sight I ever saw.” Now, in the Rockies, the tourists who had gathered on the northern lip of the Pikes Peak summit saw what appeared to be a monstrous, silent storm rushing forward. It was “a solid, palpable body of darkness, rising up in a great wall,” as Mary Rose Smit
h described it. A companion called it “an angry black cloud of inky blackness . . . advancing with startling rapidity as though bent on destroying all before it.” The impenetrable curtain engulfed the distant peaks. One by one, those lit by the sun’s last rays popped out of sight.
As darkness fell, “cheer after cheer echoed and re-echoed among the surrounding mountains,” observed The Denver Daily Tribune. Even those spectators who had pledged to remain silent so as not to disturb the astronomers could not help themselves. “[W]hen the total obscuration was reached, one great universal shout which took in all the great heart of Denver, went up from the streets and housetops,” The Chicago Times reported. The public marveled at the corona and the weird, dim light it cast. “It permeated everything; the faces of the observers partook of the ghastly glamor; the habitations of stone, brick, and wood were all tinted with a hue that seemed to come from another world.”
On Denver’s Capitol Hill, the corona-drawing class organized by the Chicago Astronomical Society was laboring with intensity and purpose. Each volunteer drew in pencil his or her pre-assigned portion of the strange halo around the sun. Together, the sketches revealed an asymmetrical, plumed appendage—a mismatched pair of swallowtails shooting out on opposite sides of the sun. But even this composite view could not be considered a definitive picture. Perceptions of the corona are remarkably subjective; two people standing beside each other will often see a different shape and texture, and members of the class could not agree on the corona’s color. Three of the volunteer artists described it as yellow. Two called it white. One said orange. Four others answered that it was the color of straw.
The sky, too, was of a perplexing and ever-changing hue. F. C. Penrose, the British scientist who had noted a lilac backdrop to Longs Peak in the minutes before totality, now marveled at the bright yellow-orange horizon beyond the mountain—the impending dawn that would follow the afternoon’s brief night.
At the Princeton camp along Cherry Creek, not all was going according to plan. Charles Young had long since abandoned the tasimeter he borrowed from Edison—he simply could not get it to work right—and the Englishman A. C. Ranyard, who had been among those shipwrecked on the way to Sicily in 1870, was about to hit some metaphorical rocks. He had traveled five thousand miles to Denver with a bulky, large-format camera intending to photograph the corona in exquisite detail. The instrument required several men to operate, so Ranyard had recruited three local assistants who spent five days conducting practice drills, until their duties had been rehearsed to seeming perfection. On the day of the eclipse, one member of the team—he happened to be Denver’s superintendent of public schools—invited his thirteen-year-old son to help. During totality, Ranyard thought all was functioning well with the camera, but shortly after the eclipse he would discover—to his dismay—that most of the exposures captured no image. He would blame the mishap on the lad, who when handing unexposed glass slides to his father for insertion into the camera had apparently moved some critical hooks. “If I have the good fortune to observe another total eclipse, and should be compelled at the last moment to accept the assistance of an intelligent boy,” Ranyard would later relate in this cautionary tale, “I shall be careful to explain to him the object of any hooks or clamps that may come in contact with his fingers before totality commences.”
Camera in position
ON DENVER’S EASTERN EDGE, the Vassar party did not attempt anything technically complex during totality. The three women at telescopes—Maria Mitchell, Cora Harrison, and Elizabeth Abbot—examined the corona’s shape and color, and searched for unknown planets. The others made naked-eye observations of the landscape and sky. The women saw Mercury, Mars, and Venus. They found no Vulcan.
For this group of observers, however, viewing the eclipse was arguably less important than being viewed. The Vassar women, far from the sexless Amazons that Dr. Clarke had warned would result from female higher education, presented irrefutable, concrete evidence that science and femininity could coexist. These astronomers in pleated dresses provided “an attraction to the gaping, yet respectfully distant, multitude of masculines, almost as absorbing as the eclipse,” a reporter wrote. “PROF. MITCHELL HERSELF, as with iron-gray curls fluttering under a broad-brimmed Leghorn, she swept the heavens with a four-inch telescope, or directed with native majesty and grace the operations of her assistant nymphs, was a figure, and perfectly commanding.” The Vassar astronomers also proved inspirational to members of their own sex. “[W]omen of low and high degree throughout the territory turned during that day their thoughts toward the hill, even as the pilgrims of old prayed with their faces toward Jerusalem,” wrote another correspondent, “for from the mound where the group stood there radiated a light, that sent its rays hopefully into more than one woman’s heart—a heart with longings for study, culture, improvement, that the simple fact of her being a girl had unjustly deprived her of because old prejudices had hedged her path and defined her duties.”
During the eclipse, the Vassar expedition served as a kind of political theater, promoting social change, and it could hardly have found a more consequential audience. Across the way, near the hospital run by the Sisters of Charity, three Jesuit scientists had established an observation post. Just as the eclipse began, they were joined by Denver’s bishop, Joseph P. Machebeuf, the outspoken opponent of women’s suffrage who only a year earlier had preached, “Women are not needed as men; they are needed as women, not to do what men can do, but to do what men cannot. Woman was created to be a wife and a mother.” What Machebeuf made of the Vassar astronomers, who in the dim, unearthly light of the corona must have looked like beings from another world, is not known. His reactions have been lost to the ages.
FOR CLEVELAND ABBE, flat on his back on the shoulder of Pikes Peak, the 161 seconds of totality felt surprisingly leisurely. All he planned to do—indeed, all he could do in his condition—was examine the shape of the corona and trace its contours. At his only previous total eclipse, in Dakota Territory in 1869, he had used a telescope, which allowed him to examine the corona in detail in the immediate vicinity of the sun. His companions who had used no magnification, and whose eyes captured a much larger portion of the sky, told him they had observed immense coronal streamers that stretched millions of miles into space. Abbe always assumed that what his colleagues had seen were optical illusions, perhaps caused by the way the light was transmitted by the earth’s atmosphere, but now he saw the same thing—long, glowing shafts that projected from the sun in various directions. He tried to determine if they were illusory. He turned his head to see if the rays shifted their position. They did not. He looked for any subtle motion or flicker. He saw none. As far as he could tell, what he was looking at were actual, enormous structures in space.
While struggling to focus his eyes through his spectacles, Abbe examined the region around the sun over and over again. As his vision adapted to the darkness, he discerned ever more detail. He estimated the length and width of the rays, and the angles between them, and he drew what he saw. It became increasingly clear to him that this seeming multiplicity of rays was really just two light beams that crossed the sun nearly at right angles, each beam wide at one end and pointed at the other. “I became perfectly convinced that these rays were permanent and real, and more important than I had hitherto believed,” he concluded. He was still faint from the altitude, and his head ached from straining his eyes and taxing his brain. He puzzled over what he was looking at.
UP ON THE SUMMIT of Pikes Peak, General Myer, a man usually disdainful of scientific research, seemed now to fancy himself an astronomer. Taking charge of Cleveland Abbe’s telescope (much as he had previously commandeered Abbe’s nickname), Myer pressed his eye to the glass and noted what he saw: “No red color in corona; absence of prominences.” Meanwhile John W. Langley, the chemistry professor, used an improvised photometer to measure the brightness of the corona. His brother, however, found himself with remarkably little to do. Samuel P. Langley’s original
plans had been to use a tasimeter and a spectroscope, but Edison had failed to send the former, and the latter had to be left at Allegheny when the U.S. Naval Observatory delayed in shipping a telescope to which it was to be attached. And so, the one true astronomer atop Pikes Peak spent most of totality doing what a team of amateurs was doing in Denver, sketching the corona while viewing it with the naked eye. He was not disappointed, however, to perform so little science. Langley had previously confided to Cleveland Abbe a secret wish—“to see the eclipse (I have ‘observed’ two but not seen any as a spectator)”—and a week after the event he would write of its visceral impact: “I once experienced an earthquake, and I think this and a total eclipse of the sun are two things that it is no use trying to describe; you must feel or see for yourself.”
The tourists who had ascended Pikes Peak—those who had witnessed the approach of the moon’s shadow a few minutes earlier—now peered north for the return of daylight. Gazing toward Wyoming, they watched as the distant mountaintops that had been shrouded in darkness reappeared one by one until, suddenly, it was they who were back in the sunlight. Samuel Langley cried “over.” Totality had ended.
Across the region, cheers once again rose from the mountains, the foothills, the streets, the rooftops. On Grays Peak, a high summit west of Denver, two shots rang out as a member of a large party fired his revolver in celebration. “Then every tongue was unloosed. The ladies started ‘My Country ’tis of thee,’ and sang it with a will,” reported one among the crowd.