American Eclipse

by David Baron

  The Vassar women, in contrast, were silent—privately recording their impressions of totality—when someone interrupted with a shout: “The shadow! The shadow!” Maria Mitchell turned her head and caught the great shaft of gloom as it swiftly departed. To a sheepherder south of Denver, the shadow “looked like a black carpet sliding over the plains.” To those viewing from above, on Pikes Peak, it was “a rounded ball of darkness with an orange-yellow border fading into the light pea-green of the landscape.” They watched as it rushed toward the remote horizon, in the direction of Texas, then seemed to lift off the earth and recede into space.

  CHAPTER 17

  AMERICAN GENIUS

  JULY 30 —AUGUST 27, 1878

  IT WOULD TAKE MORE THAN A WEEK FOR PAPERS OUTSIDE OF Texas to relay the disturbing news of what had occurred when the moon’s shadow reached the Lone Star State. “[T]here were thousands of ignorant people, both white and black, who had not heard that anything peculiar was about to happen,” reported the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, which included details of the father-son murder-suicide in a salacious roundup of vice and crime headlined SATAN’S CARNIVAL. “A terrible tragedy in Johnson County may be set down to the eclipse,” the article continued before recounting the dreadful acts of one Ephraim Miller. “When the eclipse commenced and the darkness of totality came on he ran from the field to his house with a hatchet in his hand,” the paper noted. “[W]ishing to take his ten-year-old boy with him to the other side of Jordan, [Miller] raised his hatchet and split his son’s head open. Leaving the latter weltering in his blood and struggling in the last throes of death, the father, on a ladder, ascended to the top of the house. Here, with a new razor, he cut his throat from ear to ear, and fell to the ground a corpse.”

  News outlets in Chicago, Boston, Salt Lake City, and elsewhere soon printed horrifying accounts of the tragedy, irresistible to an American press that often catered to readers’ base interests; but the lurid tale, tucked in the back pages, was a mere postscript. The main story of the American eclipse of 1878, as it was written in the event’s immediate aftermath, proved an uplifting narrative, a tale of a nation’s enlightenment and undeniable progress.

  “PROFESSOR WATSON FINDS VULCAN,” a Wyoming headline proclaimed the day after the eclipse. Word quickly spread by wire and post. “A new planet discovered, and the discoverer an American!” wrote D. H. Talbot, the Sioux City land agent, in a dispatch back home. “Englishmen may come among us, and endeavor to search out the wonders of the firmament, but they cannot get ahead of American genius.” The most influential of those visiting Englishmen, Norman Lockyer, editor of Nature, recognized the American achievement in a letter to London’s Daily News. “[L]ittle doubt remains that a new major planet has been discovered,” he wrote. “Professor Watson’s work has been acknowledged on all hands to be a veritable tour de force.”

  Some astronomers, largely in private conversation, questioned Watson’s discovery—after all, others who had searched for Vulcan during the eclipse failed to find it—yet the prevailing opinion was summed up by the Boston Daily Advertiser, which called Watson “a thoroughly competent and trustworthy observer. Indeed,” the paper continued, “it may be said with confidence that his keen eyes were not likely to be deceived, or that he could have fancied he saw a planet which was not in view.”

  The subsequent hoopla draped Watson in adulation. A man not short on ego before the eclipse, he surely accepted as fact what one newspaper now called him—“the most noted astronomical observer and discoverer in the world.” Another paper soon made an inevitable comparison when it wrote of Watson, “He is the Edison of astronomy.” On his return journey to Ann Arbor, while passing through Chicago, Watson—like Edison a few weeks earlier—found himself cornered by a reporter.

  “What were the circumstances of your discovery of Vulcan?” the journalist wanted to know. Watson offered a technical response. “I found a star of four and a half magnitude [in brightness], which had a decided disk, and was in a position in which there is no known star,” he said.

  The reporter clearly hoped for a more engaging quote, and he devised a way to break through the professor’s decorum. The hunt for asteroids was often likened to a celestial round of billiards, and in the American rules of the game, one player might grant the other a handicap—called a discount—whereby an opponent’s pocketing a ball forced the player to deduct points from his own score. The journalist joked to Watson, “You probably will want some discount for this in the race you and Prof. Peters are having, will you not?”

  Watson laughed. “Well, I suppose so. I wouldn’t take a dozen asteroids for this.”

  FOR MARIA MITCHELL, the eclipse had produced no great scientific discoveries, but her expedition too had achieved a remarkable goal. “The success of this party is one more and pointed arrow in the quiver of woman suffrage argument and logic,” wrote a correspondent for the New York Sun. The Denver press gauged her accomplishment even more generously. “Recently, here in our midst, a conspicuous example of the power and grasp of the feminine intellect has been exhibited,” effused the Rocky Mountain News. “We allude to Miss Mitchell, and the great interest she is exciting as a scientist. . . . In this she has done a service which all the women’s rights pleaders on the continent could never dream of accomplishing.”

  Mitchell wisely harnessed the attention to further her cause. On the day after the eclipse, she offered a public lecture at Denver’s Lawrence Street Methodist Church, the proceeds to support the Colorado Equal Rights League, a new organization to promote equality of the sexes after the recent state suffrage defeat. Mitchell, “the most distinguished lady astronomer of the age,” as one Denver newspaper called her, told her audience of a distinguished lady astronomer from a previous age: Caroline Herschel. The younger sister of the German-born British astronomer Sir William Herschel, who was best known for his discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781, Caroline had long been her brother’s helper—sitting up all night to record his observations of double stars and cloud-like nebulae, and spending days compiling the data, making calculations, and organizing it all into a vast catalogue of the heavens. Caroline’s painstaking work earned her honors from scientific societies and a salary from King George III (although, Mitchell was wont to note, “when [the king] found that she was doing a man’s labor he gave her a woman’s half-pay”). Mitchell contended that Caroline’s innate talents “were as peculiar and as plainly marked as were those of her brother,” and yet, as a female assistant, she subordinated her needs and never reached her full potential. “If what she did is an example, what she did not do is a warning,” Mitchell admonished. The frontier audience seemed to appreciate the lesson. At the end of the speech, admirers presented Mitchell with an elaborate flower arrangement, shaped like an M and bordered in the colors of Vassar College—rose and gray, symbolizing sunrise through the pall of women’s long-suppressed intellectual lives.

  THOMAS EDISON, MEANWHILE, a man who hardly needed additional press attention, reaped the harvest of his adventures in the West and in the erudite realm of pure science. On the day after the eclipse, The New York Herald ran Edwin Marshall Fox’s account of the Draper party’s activities. “The observation of the eclipse has been a grand success and the astronomers here are in a high state of happiness,” Fox had telegraphed from Rawlins, offering dramatic details of the windstorm that nearly derailed the experiments. “Edison’s observatory, which, in its normal condition, is a hen house, was particularly susceptible,” he wrote. “Every vibration threw the tasimeter into a new condition of adjustment.” Fox told a gripping tale of Edison’s wresting victory from the forces of nature. “At last,” Fox wrote, “just as the chronometer indicated that but one minute remained of total eclipse, he succeeded in concentrating the light from the corona upon the small opening of the instrument. Instantly the [needle] on his graduating scale swept along to the right, clearing its boundaries. Edison was overjoyed.”

  As with all stories about Edison, this one spread national
ly, if not globally, although many journalists were at first unsure how to interpret the news. The New York Times, for instance, noted both that “Edison’s experiments with the tasimeter were quite satisfactory” and, two paragraphs later, “Edison’s tasimeter failed to work satisfactorily.” The Washington, D.C., Evening Star sought to clear up the confusion. “Edison’s trip to the west has resulted in the discovery that there is considerable heat in the sun’s corona,” it explained. “His tasimeter was, however, too delicately adjusted, and the unexpected heat could not be accurately measured. So the experiment was both successful and unsuccessful as reported, with seeming contradiction, in the dispatches.”

  Although Edison could not say exactly how much heat came from the corona because his instrument’s needle had flown off the scale, this flaw in the experiment added ironic luster to his invention. The tasimeter had proved acutely delicate, so much so that Edison suggested a new application of his device—to scan the night sky for invisible celestial objects that are detectable only by the minuscule heat they emit. “His plan is to adjust his tasimeter to its extreme degree of sensitiveness and attach it to a large telescope which moves slowly in a semi-circular direction,” Fox explained in a follow-up story in the Herald. “In this way he states it will be possible to discover stars which are too remote to be seen. In other words, when he cannot see them he will feel them.” Scientific American praised the concept, and although the tasimeter never would be used in this manner, the idea was indeed ahead of its time. Edison had, in fact, anticipated the development of infrared telescopes, devices that a century later would allow astronomers to peer through interstellar dust clouds and to uncover hidden galaxies in the deep recesses of the universe.

  Edison did not return directly to Menlo Park from Wyoming. He and George Barker took a long, meandering route home, first journeying west on an extended vacation to San Francisco, Yosemite, and Virginia City, Nevada, then stopping back in Rawlins for their prearranged fishing trip with Major Thornburgh of Fort Fred Steele. Finally, heading east, the pair stopped in St. Louis for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The gathering of academics and scientifically minded laypeople included several individuals who had also observed the eclipse and some of the same scholars Edison had encountered in Washington at the National Academy of Sciences. Simon Newcomb, the association’s outgoing president, opened the assembly—to meager attendance due to a yellow fever epidemic in Louisiana and Mississippi that, given its potential spread to Missouri, had scared visitors away. “The meeting here, will I fear, be the smallest and dullest ever held,” Newcomb brooded in a letter to his wife.

  Edison’s arrival, however, infused the conference with much-needed pizzazz. “Edison is undoubtedly the ‘big gun’ of the meeting,” wrote one in the audience. “It was curious to observe how even the men whose eyes had grown dim, and whose hair had grown gray, in scientific investigations, listened with almost reverential attention to his technical explanation of ‘The use of the Tasimeter for measuring the heat of stars and of the sun’s corona.’ ” The lecture, presented just after noon on the third day of the conference, was an awkward address. Given Edison’s deafness, nervousness before large groups, and lack of preparation (“I haven’t written the paper yet,” he admitted the previous day), the famed inventor spoke quietly and haltingly while gesturing toward a chalkboard and disassembling a tasimeter to show its inner workings, then concluded abruptly, “I believe that is all I have got to say.” The packed audience at Washington University’s chapel was awed nevertheless, applauding heartily and asking many questions. Earlier in the meeting, attendees had formally elected Edison a member of their scientific body, and that morning, the association’s incoming president, Yale dinosaur specialist O. C. Marsh, had publicly praised Edison for his work that “reflected glory upon the progressive genius of America.” The unschooled inventor bowed and blushed. A headline deftly summed up the day’s events: THE GREAT EDISON. THE SCIENTISTS WELCOME HIM TO THEIR RANKS.

  The following Monday, August 26, Edison arrived in Menlo Park, tanned and rested after a month and a half away. As he sat in his workshop, his young daughter danced up to him and tapped his shoulder. “Why, Dot, is that you?” Edison cried, showering her with kisses. Soon, though, he shifted his attention from his family back to the press. Several journalists had come to report on the Wizard’s return, and Edison regaled them with lively anecdotes from the journey—the stuffed jackrabbit, the tottering henhouse, the trout so abundant you could catch them without bait. He even demonstrated his newfound marksmanship, taking out his Winchester and shattering a glass insulator placed on a post at a distance.

  “Did you get any new ideas out there, Mr. Edison?” a reporter asked, inquiring about the lasting impact of the trip to the West.

  “No,” Edison said. “That’s not a place for ideas. It’s perfectly barren; but it’s a splendid country. I’d like to go out there every summer.”

  The next day, in his laboratory, Edison began work on a new project, one that would propel his fame, wondrous as it already was, to unimaginable heights.

  PART FIVE

  1878–1931

  CHAPTER 18

  GHOSTS

  SEPTEMBER 1878–DECEMBER 1880

  HISTORIANS HAVE IDENTIFIED THE PERIOD BETWEEN 1861 and 1877—from the beginning of the Civil War to the end of Reconstruction—as the era that created the America we recognize today, when a continental power finally coalesced north and south, ocean to ocean. At the time of the 1878 total solar eclipse, the country was still adjusting to this new reality. Like an ungainly teenager after a growth spurt, the United States was settling into its larger, more muscular body, and it was beginning to exert its strength. Soon it would project its military might overseas, interpreting Manifest Destiny on an ever-grander scale as it grabbed possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and by 1900 this brawny empire would overshadow its European rivals economically, outperforming Britain, France, and Germany in industrial production. Around that same time, America would start eclipsing the Old World in another realm: the pursuit of science—an eventuality that, a few generations earlier, many in Europe thought would never come to pass.

  “It must be acknowledged that in few of the civilized nations of our time have the higher sciences made less progress than in the United States,” observed Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker, after his visit to America in 1831. “Many Europeans, struck by this fact, have looked upon it as a natural and inevitable result of equality; and they have thought that, if a democratic state of society and democratic institutions were ever to prevail over the whole earth, the human mind would gradually find its beacon-lights grow dim, and men would relapse into a period of darkness.” Simon Newcomb did not subscribe to this view, but the American astronomer agreed that his own country faced a special challenge. “In other intellectual nations, science has a fostering mother,” he maintained, “in Germany the universities, in France the government, in England the scientific societies. . . . The only one it can look to here is the educated public.” In a democratic and egalitarian America, the citizenry was in charge of the nation’s destiny, and therefore advancing science in the United States required convincing the populace of the value of research—that it was worth promotion and investment.

  The eclipse of 1878, then, arrived at a fortuitous moment in this campaign, and its influence was far-reaching and multifaceted. “It is good for our general culture if startling astronomical events awaken an interest in the things above us,” Maria Mitchell wrote, and indeed the eclipse had that effect: instilling awe about the workings of nature, educating a broad public through a flood of science news, and infusing astronomical research with a patriotic fervor as Americans cheered on their home team of observers. For the United States, a nation of strivers, the celestial event suggested a higher calling—a point made, appropriately, by a man of the cloth. “When the time of our late eclipse drew near, what a procession of arts
and of instruments moved far out to where the shadow would fall!” the Reverend David Swing, an influential preacher, sermonized from the stage of the fashionable McVicker’s Theater in Chicago in late 1878. “[I]n the very summer when we are lamenting most that mankind knows no pursuit except that of gold,” he proclaimed, “[this] Rocky Mountain scene only faintly illustrates the intellectual activity of our era. If the passion for money is great in our day, it is also true that the intellectual power of the same period is equally colossal.” Americans radiated pride when speaking of the astronomical event that their nation had hosted. As one Centennial State newspaper exulted, “Colorado has . . . furnished the grandest eclipse of the age.”

  The federal institutions that had sponsored expeditions claimed a share of the glory as well. The U.S. Naval Observatory preened over what its efforts had produced: an abundance of new photographs, drawings, spectroscopic data, and other observations for scientists to ponder in the years ahead. “It is thought that the results reached are important, and in many respects differed from things previously seen,” Admiral John Rodgers, head of the observatory, wrote to the secretary of the Navy. “In many respects this is perhaps inferior in interest to no eclipse ever observed, since the weather was exceptionally fine, and it was attempted to take advantage of the previous experience of the world.” The Naval Observatory prepared a thick volume of reports for wide distribution.

  The U.S. Army Signal Service seemed to be making similar plans. General Myer assigned Cleveland Abbe to compile a report, for presumed publication, on the eclipse observations from Pikes Peak and from weather service observers elsewhere. Abbe avidly took up the task. He was eager to promulgate a theory he had devised just after totality, that those vast rays he had seen emanating from the corona were enormous streams of meteors pouring into the sun. This idea aligned with another theory some nineteenth-century astronomers embraced—that the sun’s energy was generated by a constant rain of material from space—and Abbe further proposed that his meteor streams might account for periodic displays of shooting stars on earth. Abbe surmised that meteor showers occurred when our planet passed through these highways of debris. (In fact, we know now that such showers result from the earth passing through dust trails from comets, and the sun derives its energy from nuclear fusion, a process unknown in Abbe’s time.)