by David Baron
Several months after the eclipse, in October 1878, Abbe gave his boss his lengthy report—a full 461 pages—at which point the general, perhaps still reluctant to share the spotlight with his underling, put a stop to the whole project. Only General Myer’s death, two years later, would finally give Abbe the chance to publish his report, but by then Abbe had long since shared his hypothesis about the coronal streamers—and his ordeal on Pikes Peak—with other scientists and the press, and he must have been cheered by the response, which helped restore not only his reputation as an astronomer but also his nickname. “Was ever [an] astronomer in such a plight?” The Chicago Tribune wrote in a humorously flattering article. “Sick, near-sighted, flat on his back, trying to squint through a pair of old, defective spectacles,” and yet Abbe had made what seemed a potentially important discovery. “Now if Old Probabilities, with only a bad pair of spectacles, a few obliging young men, and good MRS. COPLEY, and flat on his back at that, could do so much, what might he not have done if he had had a telescope, and a tasimeter, and a galvanometer, and an integrating telescope, and could have stood on his feet?” Before long, periodicals in London were also recounting Abbe’s deed. France and England had long boasted stories of eclipse adventure—Jules Janssen’s balloon escape from Paris under siege, Norman Lockyer’s shipwreck on the way to Sicily. Now America could claim its own tale of pluck and tribulation in the race to catch the shadow of the moon.
Scientists in the Old World offered generous praise for what the United States had accomplished. Lockyer declared in the pages of his own Nature, “I regard this eclipse as the most important that has been observed for many years as it throws much needed light on many points hitherto obscured in doubt.” Scotland’s Astronomer Royal Piazzi Smyth, in a letter to Henry Draper, extended his congratulations on the eclipse, “which American men, and American instruments, methods, & ideas, have made more peculiarly & grandly American, than any Solar Eclipse you have had in your country yet.” For those scientists on the receiving end of the praise—the Americans who had gone west seeking fame and respect and societal change in the ethereal glow of the sun’s corona—the event’s influence would endure, both for good and for ill.
IN THE FALL OF 1878, three months after the eclipse, Maria Mitchell once again attended the annual Woman’s Congress, this time in Providence. In addition to the usual crowd of activists and intellectuals, a large contingent of the general public attended. Schools cancelled classes so teachers and older students could hear the lectures. More than a thousand tickets were sold. Two years earlier, in 1876, when Mitchell had presided at the gathering in Philadelphia, she had delivered the opening remarks. Now, as a vice president of the assembly, she was advertised to speak on the final evening.
At 7:30 P.M. on Friday, October 11, the audience pressed into Low’s Opera House, filling the ground floor and boxes. Up on the stage stood a blackboard. Mitchell ascended and drew three circles in chalk to represent bodies in our solar system. “In a total eclipse of the sun, the earth passes through the small dark cone of shadow which the moon throws upon the earth,” she explained, adding lines to her diagram to indicate the area in shade. “The dark shadow is never great in extent, at most but about 200 miles, but as the moon moves along it throws its shadow upon one place after another, circle of black overlying circle of black, until if we map down the footsteps of the shadow a narrow band of black seems to girdle the country.” Mitchell described the path of totality of the recent eclipse, a line that crossed rugged terrain from Montana to Texas. “Looking along this dark strip on the map, each astronomer selected his bit of darkness on which to locate the light of his science,” she said. “My party chose Denver.”
Here she turned from professor to storyteller, relating the adventures of the Vassar College eclipse expedition. She told of adversity—the storms that plagued the region, the railroads that misplaced her luggage. “We haunted the telegraph rooms and sent imploring messages,” she recalled of her desperation. She praised those who had come to her party’s aid—a “friend who lived in Denver” (Alida Avery), and the Sisters of Charity. “[T]he black-robed sweet faced women came out to offer us the refreshing cup of tea and the new-made bread.” And she described the flawless sky that met totality. “As the last ray of sunlight disappeared the corona burst out, all around the sun, so intensely bright near the sun that the eye could scarcely bear it.”
Thomas Edison’s lecture on the eclipse, in St. Louis, had been technical and dry. Maria Mitchell’s approached poetry. “Looking toward the southeast we saw the black band of shadow moving from us—160 miles over the plain and toward the Indian Territory. It was not the flitting of the cloud shadow over hill and dale,” she said, “it was a picture which the sun threw at our feet of the dignified march of the moon in its orbit.” The astronomer finished her performance to great applause, “conclusive proof,” a Chicago newspaper noted, “that Miss Mitchell had popularized science.”
If at previous meetings of the Woman’s Congress the press had sometimes ridiculed the speakers as grotesque harpies, the reviews now seemed unequivocally positive. “Professor Maria Mitchell of Vassar, who came to describe the solar eclipse at Denver with graphic and beautiful language, must have satisfied every man fortunately present that the highest scientific attainment is compatible with true womanliness,” a Boston daily commented. “Possibly they may have felt that she gave a masculine stroke in drawing her diagrams, but would certainly concede that she proved herself perfectly feminine when she lost her trunks.”
Mitchell’s story of robustly feminine Vassar astronomers surely helped her cause—transforming public attitudes toward women in science. However, proponents of the broader effort to expand women’s education were still haunted, as the founding dean of Bryn Mawr College later put it, “by the clanging chains of that gloomy little specter, Dr. Edward H. Clarke’s Sex in Education.” The idea had not yet been banished that education itself could coarsen and sicken American girls. By the early 1880s, though, a group of female college graduates would form an organization, the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (now the American Association of University Women), which would boast among its members a physician, Dr. Emma Culbertson, Vassar ’77, who had received her medical degree after participating in Mitchell’s eclipse expedition to Denver. The association would immediately take up Dr. Clarke’s screed and answer it with logic by surveying more than seven hundred alumnae, inquiring extensively into their health (including menstrual health) before, during, and after college. The completed questionnaires were then delivered for analysis to an impartial outsider, the head of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. His findings, issued in 1885, were clear: “The graduates, as a body, entered college in good health, passed through the course of study prescribed without material change in health, and since graduation . . . do not seem to have become unfitted to meet the responsibilities or bear their proportionate share of the burdens of life.” College did not harm women, the report emphasized, and the evidence was so conclusive “that there is little need, were it within our province, for extended discussion of the subject.” In other words, the case was effectively closed, and while the ghost that Dr. Clarke had conjured would linger for some time, its reign of terror finally began to lift, due—fittingly—to a scientifically minded group of women.
Overall, the 1880s would be a time of energy and optimism for women’s higher education, but Mitchell herself, after a long run of good health, slowed down. Two years after her journey to Colorado, she fell seriously ill and left Vassar to convalesce with family on Nantucket. “If I am to get really well,” she wrote a short time later, weak in body but strong in resolve, “may I be enabled to work for others & not for myself.” She did just that, returning to Vassar to teach and fight for women’s rights until she physically could do so no longer. She died at age seventy in 1889, still thirty-one years before American women were finally granted the vote.
JAMES CRAIG WATSON, less selfless, focused his energie
s after the eclipse of 1878 on his own renown. Famous astronomers in Germany and France sent letters praising his “brilliant discovery,” and even Alexander Graham Bell—who had received a medal from Watson and the Group 25 jury at the Centennial—applauded his former judge. “Permit me to congratulate you upon the fame that has come to you as the discoverer [of Vulcan],” wrote the inventor of the telephone.
Watson leveraged his newfound prestige to further his career. The University of Wisconsin was building a grand new observatory and wooed him as its director, and despite the University of Michigan’s vehement attempts to keep him in Ann Arbor, Watson defected to Madison for more money and a larger telescope. His new home state bragged of landing such a hefty prize. “[H]e will be a most valuable addition to the faculty of the university,” the Wisconsin Journal of Education gloated, adding, in a line that would prove morbidly ironic, “He is in the very prime of life—a man of great physical and mental vigor.”
During this period, however, the story of exactly what Watson had discovered in Wyoming changed. This shift occurred, at first, for a propitious reason. After the eclipse, when scientists were puzzling over why no one but Watson had seen the intra-Mercurial planet, it soon turned out that somebody had. The second charmed observer was Lewis Swift, a Rochester hardware merchant and respected amateur astronomer who had been among the throngs on Denver’s Capitol Hill. Upon returning home, Swift announced that he, like Watson, had spied an unknown object that shone with a reddish light near the star Theta in Cancer. The news was exactly what Watson needed—corroboration—and since totality had occurred in Wyoming prior to Colorado, Watson retained credit for Vulcan’s discovery. He had seen the planet several minutes before Swift.
The situation was not quite so simple, however. During totality, Swift had actually noted two objects; he had assumed one was Vulcan and the other was a star. Watson too had noted a second object, which he also had taken for a star; but when he reexamined the object’s coordinates as marked on the cardboard circles he had attached to his telescope, he began to change his mind. “I have no doubt about being able to substantiate the discovery of one intra-Mercurial planet,” he wrote to the U.S. Naval Observatory in early September, “and I am pretty sure that I shall establish the existence of two.” Before long, Watson was certain. “[T]he records of my circles cannot be impeached by all the negative evidence in the world. There are no known stars in the places which they give, and hence I cannot be mistaken as to the identity of the objects which I observed.” A Chicago newspaper remarked, “This Vulcan business grows interesting and confusing.”
It soon grew more confusing. Lewis Swift discovered that he had miscalculated the coordinates of the objects he had seen. When he corrected the data, it became evident that his objects matched up neither with the ones that Watson had seen nor with known stars. “If the above conclusions are true,” Swift wrote, then “four planets were discovered instead of two.”
The strange saga of the multiplying Vulcans played out in the pages of Nature and other science journals, and it prompted some of Watson’s colleagues to snicker behind his back. Simon Newcomb, in a letter to C. H. F. Peters in 1879, remarked that the situation seemed to mirror, in reverse, a nursery rhyme known today as “Ten Little Indians” but which, in that era, was sung at minstrel shows and went by an even more derogatory title, using an epithet for African Americans. In the rhyme, a group of boys shrinks one by one as a series of accidents befalls them. “But,” Newcomb wrote, “the Vulcans have increased by one with every accident.” Newcomb then supplied the start of his own ditty, penned in Peters’s native German, but here translated, loosely, to retain the rhyme:
One little Vulcan tastes a scalding stew,
He rockets off his little chair and look! Now there’s two.
Two little Vulcans etc.
And look, now there’s three.
Peters, as Watson’s longtime nemesis, read it with delight. “I should have liked to hear the whole of that poem, of which you only give me the beginning,” he replied. “Here with us the poetical fountain runs very badly, but I might continue perhaps in this way,” he wrote, picking up the rhyme at “three”—again mostly in German, and translated here:
Said one to the other, “Let’s have a beer, and more!”
They kept on drinking merrily—and look, now there’s four!
They wanted yet another, a fifth would give them breadth.
Alas, the keg is empty—they drank themselves to death.
To which may be added perhaps the lesson:
That’s what always happens, the frog puffs and puffs galore;
In the end he bursts apart—no one believes him anymore.
Peters was sure that his puffed-up rival would soon be deflated and that no one would believe him anymore. Indeed, Peters intended to do the puncturing. Ever convinced of Vulcan’s nonexistence, Peters attacked Watson in what was then the world’s leading astronomical journal, a German publication called Astronomische Nachrichten. The critique was snide and damning. After deriding Lewis Swift’s observations as so unreliable they were hardly worth mentioning, Peters set his sights on Watson’s assertion that the locations he claimed for his supposed planets “cannot be impeached.” Any measurement, after all, comes with a margin of error, so Peters carefully considered the unusual method Watson had used for noting the coordinates of his objects: the wood-and-wire contraption that a Rawlins carpenter had attached to the telescope the night before the eclipse. Peters concluded that making marks with a pencil pressed against a flexible metal pointer, “in the dim light of the total eclipse” and “with a certain hurry,” would have introduced imprecision, perhaps amounting to one-seventieth of an inch. This tiny error on the cardboard, Peters showed, took in enough of the sky around Watson’s stated coordinates that the position of each “planet” could actually be that of a prominent star in Cancer. “It is therefore quite apparent to every unbiassed [sic] mind, that Watson observed [these stars], nothing else,” Peters asserted. He was accusing Watson of a beginner’s error, mistaking fixed stars for planets.
Watson seethed. “Professor Peters’ whole attack upon the integrity of my observations is not of the slightest consequence, since he has created the errors in his own brain and has then produced [them] to assail them,” Watson huffed. “I do not intend to engage in any controversy about these matters and especially with a person who was, at the time of the observations, more than two thousand miles away from the place where the eclipse was observed.” Rather than offer a full rebuttal of Peters’s charges, Watson resolved to answer his rival in a more spectacular manner. He would prove that his planets existed. He would find them again, this time without the aid of a solar eclipse.
Since the age of Aristotle, a myth has persisted that by looking up from the bottom of a deep well or mineshaft, it is possible to see the stars at midday. This belief has endured, despite evidence to the contrary, because it possesses a whiff of plausibility. After all, the walls of a deep well or mine should block out the sun and allow light to enter only from a narrow portion of the sky. But the method does not work because what hides the stars in the day is not sunlight coming in at an angle, but the bright sky itself, which washes the stars out. Descending into a well does not change the sky’s brightness.
A man of Watson’s intelligence should have realized as much, but he was determined to restore his besmirched honor, and his move to Wisconsin gave him an opportunity for bold action. The university’s observatory sat at the top of a south-facing hill, and he decided to use his own funds to build a small second observatory at the bottom of the hill, specially designed to look for Vulcan. The plan was to dig a cellar twenty feet deep and to install an underground tube, parallel to the earth’s axis, that ran fifty-five feet from the cellar to the top of the hill. An adjustable mirror would direct light from any part of the sky down the shaft and into a telescope in the subterranean observatory.
Watson began construction in the spring of 1880. All throug
h the summer and fall, while continuing his astronomical studies at night, he personally supervised by day the erection of his small observatory, as well as an expansion of the university’s large one. By mid-November, the underground facility was almost ready for the installation of the telescope. “I am happy to say that it is nearly completed,” Watson wrote to a scientist friend who had served with him as a judge at the Centennial.
Just then, the autumn weather turned. “Look out for a ‘freeze up,’ ” a Wisconsin newspaper cautioned, but Watson continued to oversee his construction projects with single-minded determination. A witness to his behavior wrote that the professor went “out among the workmen on the Observatory without bundling up. I thought he was imprudent but did not like to speak to him about it.” Sure enough, Watson caught a chill, yet he continued his dogged work. His cold lingered. Then, suddenly, his condition took a downward turn.
On Monday evening, November 22, 1880, two doctors were summoned to the house, but Watson was rapidly deteriorating, and they could not forestall the inevitable. Death arrived for the astronomer, age forty-two, at six in the morning. The official cause was inflammation of the bowels, perhaps appendicitis, but many discerned a deeper explanation—Watson’s “recklessness of his own health” and “exhausted condition by overwork and exposure,” brought on by his obsession with Vulcan.