The Long Space Age

by Alexander MacDonald

  The Philadelphia High School Observatory, while pedagogically focused, foreshadowed the civic observatories to come and the role of signaling motivations in their establishment. In 1836, the federal government redistributed to the states some of the surplus from the national budget. The return of Halley’s Comet in 1835 had increased general interest in the study of the heavens. This provided fertile ground for members of the American Philosophical Society and for George M. Justice, a prominent Quaker merchant who was a member of the Board of School Controllers, to cultivate the idea of using the funds for a research observatory to be established at Philadelphia’s Central High School.74 Like most American observatories of the day, the High School Observatory project selected a large equatorial refractor, ideal for exploring and examining the heavens rather than just measuring them. With members of the American Philosophical Society acting as technical advisors for the project, the high school became the first to import a German telescope, a seven-inch refractor from Merz and Mahler costing $2,200. With total funding of $5,000 allocated for the observatory, it was for a time the best equipped in the country.75 Although the equipment was unrivaled in the United States, support for scientists to use that equipment for research was limited. The principal instructor in astronomy at the high school, Professor Ezra Otis Kendall, was unable to convince the controllers to allow him to shed some of his teaching duties to focus on research.76 In contrast, support had been forthcoming when it was proposed that the instruments be mounted on marble pillars. The objective of the project, with the large observatory dome situated directly atop Central High School, was to make a powerful statement. This was not only an educational endeavor but also a monument to the civic spirit of Philadelphia, an organizing motive that would be prominent in later observatories in Cincinnati, Boston, Albany, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago.

  As well as being an interesting early example of civic support for astronomy, the Philadelphia High School Observatory is a little appreciated milestone in the development of the American Observatory Movement. Not only was it the first observatory to have been planned with input from a wide range of members of the American scientific community, it also directly influenced the development of subsequent observatories. Based on his experience as controller for the project, George Justice would be asked to help with the planning of two more observatories. The Central High School project also set the trend for German refractors, which were purchased for most of the major observatories over the next five years, including the U.S. Naval, Cincinnati, and Harvard College Observatories.77 Of perhaps even greater import, however, would be the influence that alumni of the school would have on the development of two of America’s most important astronomical institutions. One alumnus, George Davidson, who taught as an assistant at the school’s observatory, would be intimately involved with James Lick’s decision to build his monumental observatory, while Charles Yerkes, who had learned astronomy from Professor Kendall, would go on to make his fortune and endow his own Yerkes Observatory with the world’s largest refractor.78

  An observatory located on top of a Philadelphia high school may seem an unlikely inflexion point in the history of American space exploration. Yet its establishment was the culmination of an interest in and support for astronomy in Philadelphia that stretched back to pre-Revolutionary days and the 1769 transit of Venus effort, and it was the first significant observatory built in a major American city. The Philadelphia High School Observatory directly influenced the development of subsequent observatories, and it planted, through its alumni, seeds that would contribute to the growth of some of the most important “big science” projects of late-nineteenth-century space exploration.

  The early observatories, from Yale to Philadelphia, were smaller in scale than those that would follow in the decades to come, but they established a number of the trends that would continue to be seen through the course of the later Observatory Movement: the importance of leading individuals in the establishment of observatories, the preeminence of private funding, the role of signaling and signal emulation, the growth of intrinsic interest in the exploration of heavens, the religious undercurrent behind much of the support for astronomy, the sense of civic identity and support that observatories could engender, and even the conflict between funding the scientific research that astronomers favored versus financing the spectacle of the observatory favored by the patrons.

  Though universities would continue to be a focal point of American astronomy, the scale of the largest observatories would increasingly rely on private and civic motives that superseded academic and pedagogic ones. The Harvard College Observatory would be just as much the result of a desire on the part of the citizens of Boston to have a world-class observatory for the purpose of signaling their beneficence and wealth as it would be the result of the efforts of Harvard astronomers. Likewise, while the Lick Observatory was to be managed by the University of California, its impetus came from the desires of an individual who was fulfilling significantly broader ambitions than school patronage. While moderate-size university observatories, similar in motive and scale to the early observatories of the 1820s and 1830s, would continue to be a mainstay of American observatory construction, the largest and most expensive telescopes became increasingly intertwined with broader national, regional, dynastic, and even international forces. Within the first five years of the 1840s, four major observatories would be founded, each at a scale and expense eclipsing the earlier college observatories, and each driven more overtly by signaling motivations.

  The Astronomical Observatory at Georgetown College in Washington provides another interesting transition point from the college observatories, with their principally internal focus, to the civic observatories, where external signaling concerns and the implications for community identity became more overt organizing motivations. In the case of the Georgetown Observatory, however, the community was not one of civic-minded urban citizens, but rather a religious order that had long used astronomy as a signaling device. Although the case of the Georgetown Observatory has unique features, it was part of a larger trend of religious sentiment providing significant support for astronomy. Astronomy was an integral part of the natural theology of the period, with the immensity and order of the universe, as revealed by astronomy, being widely interpreted as a sign of God’s handiwork. The intrinsic motivations of religious belief thus played a significant role in the funding of early American observatories, and the intertwining of religion and astronomy can be seen in the writings of a number of influential early Americans.

  One of the earliest expressions of this linkage comes from Benjamin Franklin, who was a committed Christian with religious views that were shaped by the discoveries of astronomy. In the opening lines of his “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” written in 1728, Franklin reveals his fascination with the cosmos: “When I stretch my Imagination through and beyond our system of planets, beyond the visible fixed stars themselves, into that space that is every way infinite, and conceive it filled with suns like ours, each with a chorus of worlds for ever moving round him, then this little ball on which we move, seems, even in my narrow imagination, to be almost nothing and my self less than nothing, and of no sort of consequence.”79 For many Americans in the nineteenth century, the wonders of the cosmos were seen as obvious proof of the existence of a deity. For support of this worldview, American intellectuals could point to the man then considered the greatest natural philosopher of all time, Sir Isaac Newton: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One. . . . This being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God or Universal Ruler.” 80

  Seeing God in the universe would have seemed as obvious to a nineteenth-century Ameri
can as the changing seasons. Through this perspective, astronomy was often seen as a humbling reminder to humanity of its status within a grand plan. David Rittenhouse described this sentiment eloquently: “All yonder stars innumerable, with their dependencies, may perhaps compose but the leaf of a flower in the creator’s garden, or a single pillar in the immense building of the divine architect.” 81 Such thoughts and writings form a thread in American intellectual life, which can be traced from the Puritans through the time of Franklin to the nineteenth century, creating a strong natural alliance between astronomy and religious sentiment—one that could be leveraged to attract resources to astronomical endeavor.

  As we have already seen, John Quincy Adams was one such American who saw stargazing as an activity directly analogous to worship. He firmly believed that “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1) and that an observatory was therefore a “Temple hallowed to the worship of the Creator, raising the Souls of all who are admitted to its nightly disclosures, to a more intimate communion with the author of the Universe and with the ever multiplying wonders of his creation.” 82 With sentiments like these permeating the thoughts of American intellectual leaders, it should not be surprising that members of one of the most powerful religious orders, the Society of Jesus, would look to build such a temple in America.

  The tradition of Jesuit observatories is an example of the strong linkage between astronomy and religion, as well as the use of observatories as signaling devices. At their height in the nineteenth century, there were fifteen Jesuit observatories across North America, with the most important being in Georgetown, St. Louis, Boston, and Montreal.83 The Jesuit order had long made astronomy a key part of their education system, as well as part of their proselytizing activities. The signaling value of astronomical observatories was explicitly understood and utilized by the Jesuits. As Agustin Udias notes, “the scientific prestige of the observatories was considered to be an important factor in spreading the Christian message.” 84 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jesuits had seventy-four observatories in missions as far afield as Paraguay, Madagascar, China, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Lebanon, Colombia, and Australia.85 Although many of these efforts were relatively modest in scale, a number constituted significant expenditures. For instance, a new building for the Manila Observatory was erected in 1894, complete with the latest imported instruments, at a cost of $40,000.86 Although these observatories were often the results of efforts by dedicated individuals committed to scientific investigation and personal exploration of the heavens, these structures, and the insights into the cosmos that they enabled, were also used by the Jesuits to signal to the world the strength, sophistication, and high-mindedness of the order.

  The Georgetown Observatory was the first, largest, and most important example of this Jesuit tradition in the United States. Like with earlier university observatories, the faculty initiated its establishment, but, as with later observatories, it would quickly acquire a significance extending beyond its campus—in this case, all the way to the Vatican.

  In 1841, an Irish Jesuit, Father James Curley, made his case for an observatory at Georgetown and solicited donations from other American Jesuits, eventually persuading the young Thomas Jenkins to offer $8,000 from his inheritance. Reverend Charles Stonestreet offered another $2,000 the following year, and the Jenkins family would make additional contributions. Curran and O’Donovan estimate the building cost at $9,000 and the instruments at perhaps twice that amount, for a total of $27,000, making it one of the most expensive observatories of the era.87 Yet, despite the funds coming almost exclusively from American Jesuits and their families, there was opposition to the project from Rome. The procurator of Georgetown thought it “a true folly” but felt it “worse than useless” to preach fiscal prudence amid such enthusiasm.88 In Rome, the superior general of the Jesuits, Jan Roothaan, was similarly concerned and wrote to Curley denying approval for the project. Curley, however, through some curious misinterpretation of Roothaan’s response, continued with the project. When he was ordered to defend the project again to Roothaan, he explained that it was “building public esteem for the college’s commitment to science” and thus attracting additional contributions to other causes supported by the order.89 The superior general, however, remained concerned that such a monument might be seen as an extravagance and again instructed Curley to halt the project. The letters going back and forth to Rome would take weeks to travel each way, however, and the observatory was virtually completed by the time Roothaan’s final words on the matter reached Georgetown in 1844.

  Although the Jesuits in Georgetown and the Jesuits in Rome had opposite views of the matter, they were both concerned with the signaling value of the observatory. Reverend Curley thought that the observatory would signal the strength of Georgetown and of the Jesuit order in America, while Superior General Roothaan was specifically concerned with what message such an expensive signal sent. Once established, however, Rome supported the observatory, sending its top astronomers, Father Francesco de Vico, director of the Vatican Observatory, and Father Angelo Secchi, a pioneer of spectroscopy, to the observatory during the revolutions in the Italian states in 1848. The arrival of two notable European astronomers was itself interpreted as a signal of growing American intellectual prestige and was heralded by the American press as a coup for the nation. Not since the transit of Venus observations in 1769 had American science garnered such international attention, and never before had the signaling ambitions of an international organization been interwoven with the founding of an American observatory. Although it may have been religious devotion and a personal desire to explore the heavens that had initiated the Georgetown Observatory project, the cost and visibility of the observatory turned it into a project of prestige for the order.

  The Georgetown Observatory project demonstrates how the motivations of signaling, science, and religious devotion could combine to spur forward the construction of astronomical observatories. Similarly, the observatory attached to the Friends’ Central School in Philadelphia became a point of pride for the Philadelphia Quaker community and was appreciated as a visible signal of their high-mindedness.90 Built in 1846 with a fifteen-foot revolving dome and a five-inch equatorial refractor, it was a nontrivial expenditure for its patron and director, Miers Fisher Longstreth. While it did serve as a signal for the Quaker community, Longstreth’s motivation was a personal desire to study the work of God in the heavens. This personal desire to study the natural theology of the heavens was the original motivating force for many of the projects that marked the American Observatory Movement, not only for religious societies but in the founding of personal, university, and civic observatories as well. The story of the Georgetown and the Friends’ Central School Observatories also elucidates a more general trend: the process by which projects are initiated out of the personal interests of individuals and transformed into signaling devices for broader communities. This process would be repeated many times throughout the history of American space exploration, including in the founding of the nation’s first national observatory.

  The founding of the U.S. Naval Observatory in the early 1840s presents another example of continuum in the history of U.S. space exploration and a pattern that will be seen even more emphatically in later chapters—that of individuals leveraging and shaping military demands in order to secure funding for facilities and projects that are their personal objectives. A. Hunter Dupree famously called the Naval Observatory “the classic example of the surreptitious creation of a scientific institution.” There is much to support this statement in the way in which a few individuals engendered the growth of the Naval Observatory, rather unexpectedly, from a simple, privately funded storage and rating depot for marine chronometers to an institution hailed as the nation’s first “National Observatory.” However, as Steven J. Dick rightly cautions in his authoritative history of the institution, the transformation from depot to national o
bservatory was also the result of broader forces running through the politics, culture, and military bureaucracy of the time, including John Quincy Adams’s observatory proposal and the seemingly irresistible pull of a national observatory as a mark of prestige.91

  In the nineteenth century, astronomy was a crucial skill for surveying and navigation, and thus it received modest federal patronage from a variety of sources, one of the most prominent being the U.S. military. Early support came from the necessity of training young officers in these requisite skills at West Point Academy. Three towers for astronomical observation were part of the academy’s large library building, which initially housed a 6-inch refractor until it was replaced in 1842 by a $5,000 American Henry Fitz refractor of 9.75 inches.92 The military institution that would become America’s “national observatory,” however, started out even less auspiciously as a small personal initiative.