by David Baron
Fifty-three years after the eclipse that inspired America, on October 18, 1931—a time when the nation needed inspiration again—Edison died, at age eighty-four, in West Orange, New Jersey, where he had moved from Menlo Park decades earlier. This newer home, a red brick mansion on an estate called Glenmont, was suited to what he had become—a captain of industry and an American icon, a man who through his more than one thousand U.S. patents was credited, more than anyone, with propelling civilization into modernity. “This electrical age is largely of his creation,” The New York Times eulogized. President Herbert Hoover asked Americans to turn off their lamps for a synchronized minute in the dark, a reminder of how the Wizard had brought light from the gloom—something to be thankful for even in the depths of the Great Depression.
Tributes arrived from across the globe, from the likes of Albert Einstein and Pope Pius XI, while locals expressed their gratitude in person. More than forty thousand mourners—workers in overalls and mothers with children—bowed their heads as they filed past the bronze coffin, which had been placed in Edison’s grand library, a high-ceilinged space paneled in dark wood. Edison had used this room as his office, and he had filled its alcoves and balconies not only with tiers of books but also with a trove of mementoes, the souvenirs of a rich life. These were the items that now surrounded his body as it lay in state: portraits of presidents and other men of fame and substance whom he had befriended; a marble statue of a winged boy holding aloft a light bulb; framed diplomas and prizes; and a grainy picture in black and white, a photograph from Wyoming Territory, taken on a July day in 1878 when the young inventor and a team of astronomers awaited the illuminating darkness.
THE ECLIPSE STATION AT RAWLINS, WYOMING TERRITORY.
EPILOGUE
TENDRILS OF HISTORY
IN THE SIERRA MADRE MOUNTAINS OF SOUTHERN WYOMING, two miles west of the Continental Divide, a monument stands today to Thomas Edison. The bronze plaque, embedded in a pedestal of concrete on the shoulder of State Highway 70, overlooks rugged Battle Lake, its turquoise waters set against a slope of granite and spruce. This was the very spot where Edison went trout fishing after the eclipse of 1878 with George Barker, Major Thornburgh, and a group of men from Rawlins, and the historical marker tells a story passed down in local lore—that it was here that the Wizard of Menlo Park, in a flash of inspiration, divined his light bulb.
It is, of course, a fanciful story, one that apparently originated with Robert Galbraith, the Union Pacific railroad mechanic in whose chicken coop Edison had mounted his tasimeter. Galbraith joined Edison on the fishing trip and recalled almost a half century later, “After we had been [at Battle Lake] about three days, one morning at the breakfast table, Edison was asked by Professor Barker, ‘Well, Tom, how did you rest last night?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t thinking about resting. I lay and looked up at the beautiful stars and clear sky light, and I invented an incandescent electric light.’ ” (Later embellishments suggest that Edison had been inspired by the bamboo fibers of his fishing pole, perhaps after the pole had been broken and thrown in the campfire, which caused the wooden filaments to glow.) It is true that Edison’s Wyoming adventure helped foster the creation of his bulb, in subtle ways—the trip, as friends and coworkers noted, was just the vacation he needed, leaving him relaxed and ready to take on new projects—but the claim that Edison was struck by a wilderness epiphany is not credible. It does not square with his actions or statements upon returning home.
The fable written on the roadside marker is admittedly appealing, however, for it conforms with popular notions of science—that discovery is intuitive, that insights come suddenly, that the emergence of ideas is easy to trace. In reality, science is a messy business, a point made eloquently by Samuel Pierpont Langley, the astronomer who inspired Edison to invent the tasimeter and who climbed Pikes Peak with Cleveland Abbe. A decade after the eclipse of 1878, at the end of his term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the same guild that Edison had joined in St. Louis), Langley gave a farewell address in which he reflected on the progress of science and, more provocatively, critiqued how textbooks frequently misrepresent scientific progress:
We often hear it, for instance, likened to the march of an army towards some definite end; but this, it has seemed to me, is not the way science usually does move, but only the way it seems to move in the retrospective view of the compiler, who probably knows almost nothing of the real confusion, diversity, and retrograde motion of the individuals comprising the body, and only shows us such parts of it as he, looking backward from his present standpoint, now sees to have been in the right direction. . . . With rare exceptions, the backward steps—that is, the errors and mistakes, which count in reality for nearly half, and sometimes for more than half, the whole—are left out of scientific history; and the reader, while he knows that mistakes have been made, has no just idea how intimately error and truth are mingled in a sort of chemical union.
The accumulation of scientific knowledge does not occur in a simple, linear fashion. Doctrines embraced in one generation are jettisoned the next. Seemingly productive avenues of research abruptly dead-end. Scientific discoveries and events acclaimed in their day fade into obscurity with the passage of time.
Such is the case with the total solar eclipse of 1878, for reasons that may seem obvious today, looking back from our twenty-first-century perch. Despite James Craig Watson’s vaunted discovery, there is no planet Vulcan. Edison’s celebrated tasimeter has long been forgotten as an obscure flop. Maria Mitchell’s all-female expedition to Denver, despite the favorable attention it received in its time, failed to transform the male-dominated world of science, a realm that still too often pushes women to its margins. And yet the eclipse of 1878 did leave indelible marks on America, just not in a manner that anyone could have predicted, for such is the nature of scientific progress: less an organized march than a series of stumbles.
IF ANYONE WHO OBSERVED the eclipse of 1878 could be said to have achieved what he most wanted out of the celestial event, it was arguably Simon Newcomb. The learned astronomer, who had so lamented America’s scientific standing at the time of the centennial, expressed a much brighter outlook two decades later. “[O]ur traditional reputation has not been that of a people deeply interested in the higher branches of intellectual work,” Newcomb expounded in an 1897 speech. “Men yet living can remember when in the eyes of the universal church of learning all cisatlantic countries, our own included, were partes infidelium”—uncultured lands. As the twentieth century neared, however, Newcomb could see how far American science had progressed, for example in astronomy. “[T]o-day our country stands second only to Germany in the number of researches being prosecuted, and second to none in the number of men who have gained the highest recognition by their labors.” Modern historians generally agree that by 1900 America had matured into a scientific peer of Europe, and then would soon surpass it. Come the latter half of the twentieth century, the United States would unquestionably lead the world in science, whether measured by money spent or Nobel Prizes earned.
It would be folly to claim—and Newcomb never did—that America’s soaring scientific fortunes could be attributed to three minutes of midday darkness in the summer of 1878. Even before the eclipse, the United States was fast on its way to becoming a formidable scientific power. It is fair to say, however, that the celestial event helped push the country toward that destination, and not solely because it inspired and educated a broad American public.
Newcomb, in his 1876 jeremiad critiquing the sad state of the nation’s research establishment, laid out several concrete steps he believed the United States must take to address its deficiencies and become, as he put it, “the leader of the world in science at no very remote day.” For one thing, he argued, the nation needed new scholarly publications to disseminate its discoveries. “Not only is our scientific literature of every kind meagre in the extreme, but the facilities for the publication of any k
ind are extremely restricted,” he wrote. In this regard, Edison’s foray into publishing—inspired, some suggest, by his meeting Norman Lockyer in Wyoming—proved hugely influential. Science, the magazine Edison founded in 1880, became, and remains today, the nation’s premier weekly journal of scientific research, America’s answer to Britain’s Nature. Although Edison withdrew his funding after just eighteen months—“It cost me too much money to maintain,” he said—the quirky inventor, by starting the magazine (which was soon resurrected by Alexander Graham Bell), gave his stodgy scientific counterparts a lasting gift.
Another need of American science circa 1876, according to Newcomb, was a means to inspire and motivate researchers by publicly honoring their accomplishments. “The precise form which such a recognition should take is comparatively unimportant, but the most natural one would seem to be that of medals or testimonials to be awarded from time to time,” he wrote. Here, James Craig Watson’s early death contributed to Newcomb’s grand design. Watson’s bequest to the National Academy of Sciences, establishing the James Craig Watson Medal, was the first donation received by that organization to create a prize, and it set a precedent. Two years later, when Henry Draper also died prematurely, his wealthy wife, Anna—who had counted the seconds during totality in Rawlins—endowed a second professional prize, this one in her husband’s name. Today, the National Academy bestows more than two dozen awards to recognize and encourage scientific achievement.
Of course, journals and prizes are meaningless without an adequate corps of researchers to do the actual work, and here lay another weakness Newcomb identified in centennial America: “We are deficient in the number of men actively devoted to scientific research of the higher types.” Newcomb used the word men, but in fact women made significant scientific contributions in those latter years of the nineteenth century. In his 1897 speech, Newcomb praised a monumental project at Harvard that was cataloguing thousands upon thousands of stars the way an entomologist might study a forest full of ants—sorting them into different types and varieties based on their appearance and behavior. It was painstaking work that required the patient analysis of fragile photographic plates of the heavens, exactly the sort of labor that Maria Mitchell, in her 1876 speech “The Need of Women in Science,” had argued was suited to her sex. Indeed, Harvard gave the work to an all-female team, a key member of which had been a student of Mitchell’s, and funding for the costly project came from Anna Draper, whom Mitchell had urged to employ “a corps of lady assistants” to encourage young female astronomers while honoring Henry Draper’s memory. The project would be known as the Henry Draper Memorial.
The long tendrils of the eclipse of 1878, and of Maria Mitchell’s quiet but pronounced influence, reach well into modern times. Vera Rubin, one of America’s top astrophysicists in the late twentieth century, was born in 1928, almost forty years after Mitchell’s death. Rubin attended Vassar in the 1940s and was asked in 1989 what had inspired her to pursue astronomy despite the societal bias against women in science. “I knew about Maria Mitchell, probably from some children’s book,” she replied. “I knew that she had taught at Vassar. So . . . it never occurred to me that I couldn’t be an astronomer.” In 2004, Rubin received, for her pioneering studies of dark matter, the James Craig Watson Medal.
IN THE NEARLY ONE AND A HALF centuries that have passed since July 29, 1878, revolutions have occurred in the science of astronomy, and much has changed in the role played by eclipses. On that very day when the moon cast darkness on the American frontier, The Times of London suggested that an era was soon to close. “It is, in fact, thought by many that the eclipse vein is nearly worked out.” The paper’s prediction proved hasty and extreme—even today some astronomers head to the ends of the earth to conduct research in the moon’s fleeting shadow—but the age of large and cumbersome eclipse expeditions indeed passed long ago. As the sun gave up its more discoverable secrets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the field became more specialized, and many studies of the solar corona can now be done at any time, without waiting for an eclipse, thanks to new telescopes and sun-gazing spacecraft. Today it is a small proportion of astronomers that seeks out eclipses, and the professionals are joined by a large company of tourists, who routinely travel by jetliner and cruise ship to reach the path of totality.
What has not changed over the centuries, however, is the emotional allure of total eclipses. These rare and unearthly events, when they pass overhead, suspend human affairs and draw people out of their quotidian existence. Beholding the corona still provokes chills and tears. Some look up and find God. Others discover a new passion for science, a desire to understand the workings of the sun and solar system. The impact of eclipses remains life-changing, as I myself can wholly attest.
SINCE MY FIRST EXPERIENCE of totality, in Aruba in that winter of 1998, I have, so far, traveled four more times to meet the moon’s shadow, journeys that have felt like reunions with an old acquaintance who is available only at odd intervals and seemingly random locales. In August 1999, I flew to Munich, where my observing platform—like that of the U.S. Naval Observatory party in Central City, Colorado, in 1878—was the roof of a hotel, in this case a high terrace where guests sipped Champagne and nibbled on canapés while awaiting the show. When the sun at last revealed its delicate corona, a collective cheer lifted from the darkened city, like the cry that the old newspapers say rose from Denver. In November 2012, I again stood in the path of the moon’s shadow, on the Queensland coast of Australia, where a mantle of clouds drew apart to offer a flawless view of totality, and third contact produced a “diamond ring,” a gemlike point of sunlight set in a silver band around the blackened moon.
The weather proved far less promising—predictably so—in the Faroe Islands, in the remote North Atlantic, where in March 2015, due to a lack of hotel accommodations (as Denver and Rawlins experienced in 1878), I slept at a private home, in the bed of a displaced sixth grader, and on eclipse day I stood in the sleet on the edge of a sheep pasture and managed to glimpse the corona for a full two seconds—a half second longer than Norman Lockyer’s view from Sicily in 1870. And then, in March of the following year, when I witnessed totality from a fishing village on Belitung Island, Indonesia—where roosters crowed as darkness approached, and the locals seemed as fascinated by the visitors from afar as they were by the spectacle overhead—I finally caught sight of Baily’s beads, four dazzling pearls that vanished the moment I comprehended them yet still seared themselves into my memory. That eclipse proved memorable in another way, for precisely one saros—the eighteen-year period over which these astronomical conjunctions repeat themselves—had passed since 1998. It was, in a sense, the same eclipse I had seen in Aruba. The cycle had ended and then, like the seasons, it renewed.
Eclipses, I find, connect the present with the past like few other natural events. For me, personally, they are life milestones. Each forces me to reflect on who I was the last time I gazed at the corona. For us, collectively—as a society, a nation, a civilization—they can have the same indelible, life-affirming effect. They afford a chance not only to grasp the majesty and power of nature, but to wonder at ourselves—who we are, and who we were when the same shadow long ago touched this finite orb in the boundless void.
NOTES ON SOURCES
I HAVE BUILT THIS BOOK ON A FOUNDATION LAID BY DOZENS of prior writers—historians, biographers, scientists, journalists—who investigated and interpreted the events and themes so central to the tale of the 1878 eclipse. Their insights proved invaluable as I sought to understand the personalities and actions of people long deceased, and as I aimed to grasp the cultural context in which these individuals lived. Please see my bibliography for a list of the many published works I consulted, but here, before I provide detailed citations largely to primary source material, I would like to highlight a few of those broader works that proved especially influential.
Anyone interested in America’s intellectual maturation in the nineteen
th century and the country’s emergence as a scientific power should consider the following books to be essential reading: Robert V. Bruce’s The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876; Daniel J. Kevles’s The Physicists; and Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. Through my years of writing, as I often struggled to navigate a vast sea of information, these three incisive works served as lodestars. Howard S. Miller’s Dollars for Research: Science and Its Patrons in Nineteenth-Century America also proved a trusty guide, enlightening me about the practical steps America took to establish its scientific infrastructure in that early era. Among the books on astronomy that steered me in the right direction were Steven J. Dick’s Sky and Ocean Joined, a comprehensive history of the U.S. Naval Observatory, and Empire and the Sun, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, an examination of Britain’s elaborate eclipse expeditions during the Victorian age. Richard Baum and William Sheehan’s In Search of Planet Vulcan engagingly introduced me to the colorful tale of the planet that never was. Thomas Levenson’s more recent The Hunt for Vulcan, another valuable work on the subject, approaches the story from a philosophical perspective, using the tale to explore how science progresses—and why it often goes astray.
Many fine books and scholarly articles have been written about Maria Mitchell. Of those, I am partial to Margaret Moore Booker’s Among the Stars, a sweeping and highly readable biography. Although Mitchell never wrote an autobiography, her sister Phebe Mitchell Kendall compiled her writings in the indispensable Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals. To understand the long career and deep influence of Simon Newcomb, I relied on Albert E. Moyer’s A Scientist’s Voice in American Culture. In my exploration of Thomas Edison’s remarkable life, I profited from a large number of excellent books—too many to list here—as well as several journal articles that strongly shaped my writing: Norman R. Speiden’s “Thomas A. Edison: Sketch of Activities, 1874–1881,” David A. Hounshell’s “Edison and the Pure Science Ideal in 19th-Century America,” and John A. Eddy’s “Edison the Scientist.” (See bibliography for citations.) Another article by Eddy, “The Great Eclipse of 1878,” provided the initial spark that set me on this book-writing journey, and Steve Ruskin’s “ ‘Among the Favored Mortals of Earth’: The Press, State Pride, and the Eclipse of 1878” inspired me to explore the cultural aspects of this scientific tale. Without the guidance of these works—and many more—I would never have known where to begin in telling this story.