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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FEW REMARKS HAVE SO PROFOUNDLY CHANGED THE TRAJECTORY of my life. At the time, in 1994, I was working as an NPR science correspondent in Boston, and I had been assigned to report on an annular solar eclipse (for a definition, see page 37) that was to cross nearby New Hampshire. The tenth of May found me in the path of annularity, where, through protective Mylar glasses, I watched the sun metamorphose into a brilliant golden ring. It was an impressive sight, yet Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff, a veteran of such conjunctions of the sun and moon, helped put the event in context. In an interview, he explained that a partial solar eclipse, even an annular one, is nothing compared with nature’s most awesome show, a total solar eclipse. He then offered some advice. “Before you die,” he said, “you owe it to yourself, at least once, to experience totality.” It was Jay’s urging that led me, four years later, to Aruba, where I first encountered the solar corona. My opening acknowledgment, therefore, must go to Jay Pasachoff. If not for his remark all those years ago, my passion for eclipses likely would never have been ignited, and without that passion, I surely would never have written this book.
Todd Shuster, my gifted and tireless agent, offered encouragement, ideas, and profound patience when I told him, after that initial experience in Aruba, that I aimed to write a book about eclipses—but not just yet. I suggested that we hold off for nineteen years, for what better moment to publish than in the summer of 2017, when the moon’s shadow would traverse the United States from the Pacific to the Atlantic for the first time in almost a century. In 2011, Todd and I dusted off my vague book idea, and I began to hunt for a concrete story to tell. I soon discovered the little-known tale of the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878. Its rich amalgamation of lively characters, weighty themes, and adventurous settings seemed to offer fertile raw material, so I shared this embryonic book concept with my editor, Bob Weil. How I got so lucky to work with such a brilliant man, I will never know. Bob—as usual—saw how to elevate the story far beyond my original notion, motivated me to do my best work, and, when I ultimately handed in the manuscript, took what I wrote and invariably made it better. I cannot adequately express my thanks to Bob, who nurtured this book and remained its unwavering champion.
Pulling off a book that involved so much archival research required a tremendous amount of support, financial and otherwise. I am grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, specifically Doron Weber, for generously underwriting this endeavor. My thanks go, as well, to the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, which provided supplemental funding to visit archives in Wyoming and Colorado. Uncountable librarians, archivists, and curators also assisted me in innumerable ways, and while I cannot thank them all by name, some deserve special recognition.
In Washington, Mark Mollan doggedly tracked down items hidden deep inside the National Archives, Richard Stamm led me through the Smithsonian Castle to the site of Joseph Henry’s office (where Edison famously exhibited his phonograph in April 1878), and Yann Henrotte gave me a personal tour of the Arts Club of Washington, formerly the home of Cleveland Abbe. Thanks also to Janice Goldblum at the National Academy of Sciences, Gregory Shelton at the U.S. Naval Observatory Library. Norma Rosado-Blake at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Tad Bennicoff, Ellen Alers, and Courtney Bellizzi at the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
In Pennsylvania, Marianne Kasica at the University of Pittsburgh helped me sift through Samuel Langley’s records from the Allegheny Observatory, and Nancy Miller and Tim Horning at the University of Pennsylvania facilitated m
y exploration of George Barker’s papers. Across the ocean at the University of Exeter, Angela Mandrioli offered similar assistance with the correspondence of Norman Lockyer. Nan Card at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums in Fremont, Ohio, and Jascin N. Leonardo Finger at the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association graciously answered myriad questions about items in their collections. At Vassar College, where many of Maria Mitchell’s writings have been archived, Dean Rogers kindly photocopied and forwarded hundreds of pages of relevant material, and Debra Elmegreen and Colton Johnson responded to my queries about the school’s illustrious history. On my visit to Poughkeepsie, Fred Chromey showed me the observatory where Maria Mitchell hosted her dome parties, and when I ventured farther upstate to Hamilton College, archivist Katherine Collett opened the papers of C. H. F. Peters to me.
At the University of Michigan, which houses the James Craig Watson Papers, my thanks go to Malgosia Myc and her team at the Bentley Historical Library, and to Karen Wight, who gave me a tour of Watson’s old workplace, the Detroit Observatory. At Eastern Michigan University, in nearby Ypsilanti, Norbert Vance permitted me to see—and, thrillingly, to touch—the very telescope that Watson took to Wyoming to find Vulcan, and at The Henry Ford, in Dearborn, Stephanie Lucas gave me a rare behind-the-scenes look at Edison’s reconstructed Menlo Park laboratory and an up-close view of an original tasimeter. In Texas, Jessica Baber and Christy Morton of the Layland Museum of History aided me in reconstructing what life was like in Johnson County at the time of the 1878 eclipse. In Iowa, at the Sioux City Public Library, Kim Walish spent hours on my behalf scrolling through streaked and blurry microfilm to find, and then decipher, D. H. Talbot’s eclipse report from Wyoming Territory.
In modern-day Wyoming, Larry Brown at the State Archives tracked down many items for me, including the 1881 coroner’s inquest into the lynching of “Big Nose George” Parrott. In Rawlins, Palma Jack at the public library shared her deep knowledge of local history, and Corinne Gordon and Carol Reed at the Carbon County Museum allowed me to peruse that institution’s archives. Dan Kinnaman, the museum’s historian emeritus and author of several books on the region’s early settlement, opened his vast personal collection of books and photographs to me. Also connecting me to Wyoming’s past was a North Carolinian, Craig Galbraith, who shared items that his great-great-grandfather Robert M. Galbraith had handed down through the generations, including recollections of 1878 Rawlins and of Thomas Edison’s visit to town.
As an independent writer unaffiliated with a university, I am blessed to live in a community with a first-rate public library system. At the Boulder Public Library, Ann Berry and Laurel Seppala-Etra cheerfully filled my constant requests for interlibrary loan material, and the team at the Carnegie Branch Library for Local History (Wendy Hall, Hope Arculin, Marti Anderson) handled the many reels of microfilm that arrived from near and far. At the Denver Public Library, Lisa Flavin and Coi Drummond-Gehrig helped me find and scan many of the illustrations in this book. Others who assisted my quest for artwork were Iren Snavely at the State Library of Pennsylvania, Ann Passmore at Penn State, Jennifer Claybourne at the University of Minnesota, Jean Lythgoe at the Rockford Public Library, Maria McEachern at the John G. Wolbach Library of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Leonard DeGraaf of the Thomas Edison National Historical Park.
As my manuscript neared completion, several experts magnanimously read what I had written to offer advice, critiques, and corrections. Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers, helped ensure that passages describing the life of the great inventor remained true to the historical record. Daniel Kevles, historian of science at Yale, and Deborah Jean Warner, history of science curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, assessed my characterizations of late nineteenth-century American scientists and scientific institutions. Mark Miller, former Wyoming state archaeologist and author of Hollow Victory: The White River Expedition of 1879 and the Battle of Milk Creek, vetted what I wrote about frontier Rawlins and the Meeker Massacre. Dr. Peter Hackett, director of the Institute for Altitude Medicine in Telluride, Colorado, reviewed my medical assessment of Cleveland Abbe’s ailing condition in the rarefied air atop Pikes Peak. And astronomer Jay Pasachoff, already mentioned for his role in sparking the creation of this book, scrutinized the final product for scientific accuracy. He and his wife, the author Naomi Pasachoff, meticulously read my manuscript and offered many suggestions for improvement. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to this panel of authoritative readers. Any errors that have slipped through despite their advice are fully my own.
I am fortunate to be surrounded by good friends who are also great writers and editors. Early on, when I first conceived this book, conversations with Dan Glick, Tim Weston, Andrea Meyer, and Dana Meyer valuably shaped my thinking. When I then fashioned these ideas into a book proposal, Kathryn Bowers and Andy Bowers offered key insights that helped me frame the story for a broad audience. During the long months of research and writing, Jonny Waldman drew me out of my solitary existence for happy-hour literary discussions that helped sustain my enthusiasm and focus my thoughts. When I finally had a draft manuscript to share, Len Ackland, Alison Richards, Katy Human, and my father (Charles Baron) read it carefully and offered pivotal advice for adjusting the narrative where it veered off course. Rhitu Chatterjee, Carol Stutzman, and Ken Bader read later iterations and helped fine-tune the manuscript. I am also immensely grateful to copyeditor Annie Gottlieb, who, with good humor and scrupulousness, cleaned up my lapses of language and fixed my logical inconsistencies. Thanks, as well, to Marie Pantojan at Liveright, who deftly guided my book through editing and production and held my hand through each step of the complex process.
Friends and family assisted me in many practical ways. Dave Groobert genially hosted me on my research trips to Washington. Gloria Cohen, in New Haven, visited Yale University’s Manuscripts and Archives on my behalf. John Miller generously donated his full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from the 1870s, which assisted my research. I received foreign-language help from Deborah Keyek-Franssen, who creatively translated the poem “One Little Vulcan” from the German, and Alison Perlo, who assisted my reading of the French writings of Auguste Comte. Alan and Mary Frankel accompanied me on an eclipse chase in Munich in 1999. Rachel Nowak was also with me that year and then, in 2012, joined me for totality in Queensland along with her delightful daughters, Ting and Jie Giovannitti-Nowak, whose presence made that eclipse especially joyful.
Others who have sustained me with their encouragement and moral support include Dianne; Jessica; Ira, Sharon, Sophia, and Max; Sam and Aubrey; Jason, Cheryl, Leah, Cassie, and Jason Jr.; Glenn and Sharon; Amy and Philip; Jane; Spider and Louise; Ruthy and Karen; Mary-Alice and Walter; Ailsa and Kate; John and Carole; Richard and Valerie; Bill and Michael; Gilles and Emma; Robin and Grant. Above all, I am grateful to the person who has been by my side on this entire adventure, from the beach in Aruba through this book’s publication: my husband, Paul Myers, who served as my primary reader, confidant, sounding board, and cheerleader. He shared my excitement when things went well, calmed me in the occasional moment of panic, and enriched the journey—and life in general—in so many ways.
Two people who deserve my deep gratitude I unfortunately never had the opportunity to meet. One is the late Jack Eddy, a noted solar astronomer who was himself fascinated by the total solar eclipse of 1878. His published writings (see bibliography) and unpublished lecture notes (held by the archives of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder) guided me as I traveled back in time. I similarly benefited from the scholarship of Patricia “Sandy” Whitesell, a historian at the University of Michigan who had been working on a biography of James Craig Watson when she died, far too young. Her husband, John Wolfe, kindly shared her unpublished manuscript and research notes, which proved invaluable. I so wish I could have met Sandy and Jack. We would have had much to discuss.
I ne
ver more palpably felt the presence of individuals long gone than in late July 2015, when I ventured into the Wyoming desert west of Rawlins in search of Separation, the railroad stop long since abandoned. Local historian Dan Kinnaman and his wife, Angie, were my guides, and we were joined by Jack Eddy’s daughter Amy Gale (and her daughter Cami), who with her family in 1968 had excavated two stone-and-concrete piers built by the scientific team at Simon Newcomb’s eclipse camp. It took us several hours of searching in the heat and thorny brush, but we eventually located the piers, now largely buried by the shifting sand. For Amy, those stone markers brought memories of her father. For me, they were monuments to the remarkable people who had stood at that spot and elsewhere along the path of totality on July 29, 1878. I am grateful to Maria Mitchell, James Craig Watson, Thomas Edison, Simon Newcomb, Norman Lockyer, Cleveland Abbe, and so many others for putting their thoughts to paper. I hope this book does justice to their lives.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878, as seen from Creston, Wyoming Territory. This lithograph, published in 1882 as part of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, was described as follows by artist E. L. Trouvelot: “The eclipse is represented as seen in a refracting telescope, having an aperture of 6⅓ inches, and as it appeared a few seconds before totality was over. . . . The two long wings seen on the east and west side of the Sun, appeared considerably larger in the sky than they are represented in the picture.” [Trouvelot (1882:27)]Courtesy of Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
Composite sketch of the total solar eclipse, as seen from Denver’s Capitol Hill, produced by local volunteer observers organized and trained by the Chicago Astronomical Society. “The ladies and gentlemen . . . seated themselves on the brow of the hill, between our telescopes and the sun,” the society wrote in its eclipse report. “The accompanying diagram represents the average outline of the corona. . . . The position of the protuberances was on the solar limb, nearly opposite the letter A, in the diagram. We have made no attempt to represent them, or the curved form of the rays.” [Chicago Astronomical Society (1878:11–12)] Courtesy of Denver Public Library.