The U.S. Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments was established and expanded through the personal ambitions of three young officers. In 1830, Lieutenant Louis M. Goldborough proposed a depot to store marine chronometers and provide the critical service of rating their accuracy. This involved calculating the error in timekeeping for each chronometer in comparison to the time as measured by the movement of the sidereal heavens, so that the error of each chronometer could be factored into navigators’ calculations to determine their longitude at sea. The business of rating chronometers thus involved astronomical instruments, principally a high-quality transit instrument for timing sidereal movement. With the help of his father, then the secretary of the Board of Navy Commissioners, Lieutenant Goldborough managed to secure an initial annual budget of $330 for a small depot facility of which he was to be the sole employee.93 Goldborough’s successor, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, moved the depot to a new location on his personal property in 1833 and constructed a small observatory there for observations.
It was the personal ambition of the depot’s third head, Lieutenant James Melville Gilliss, that would increase the scope of the depot to include astronomical observation beyond that which was required by the navy’s operational needs. Gilliss saw expanding the depot’s activities to include astronomical research in general as a way to improve the technical reputation of the Navy: “I should have regarded it as time misspent to labor so earnestly only to establish a depot. My aim was higher. It was to place an institution under the management of naval officers, where, in the practical pursuit of the highest known branch of science, they would compel an acknowledgement of abilities hitherto withheld from the service.”94 Motivated to improve the reputation of the navy, Gilliss initiated a major proposal for a new depot that would include a permanent astronomical observatory.
Although Gilliss himself was interested in developing astronomy within the navy to signal the capabilities of its officers, his proposal was couched in explicitly utilitarian terms. His appeal to the board in 1841 rested on a number of factors: the experience and utility of the depot’s chronometer rating, the unsuitability of the existing building for the task, the uncomfortable fact that the property now occupied by the depot was privately owned, and the defects of the current transit instrument. No stress was laid on the facilities for general astronomical observation that had been included in the request. The board approved the proposal and forwarded it to Congress, and there it languished. Congressional inaction may have been due to lingering opposition to the Adams proposal, which had been recently reborn in the debate on the Smithson bequest. Interestingly, it was the opposition to Adams’s proposal, however, that became an unlikely source of support for an observatory-equipped depot, specifically because the chair of the Senate Naval Committee, Senator W. C. Preston, recognized and disapproved of the signal that a genuine national observatory would send.
Senator Preston had originally opposed even accepting the Smithson bequest, believing that it would increase federal power at the expense of the states, and, not surprisingly, he adamantly opposed Adams’s idea of using the funds for an observatory, which would be seen to signal federal power. Preston’s position took a tactical shift, however, after Gilliss made a presentation to the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, which Senator Preston favored as a potential destination for the Smithson bequest. When Gilliss advocated the idea of expanding the Naval Depot of Charts and Instruments by adding a small observatory, Preston calculated that an observatory within the navy would undermine Adams’s case for using the Smithson bequest to fund a larger national observatory and thereby strengthen the case for his proposed use of the funds.95 With Preston’s support, the Senate passed a bill endorsing the depot proposal in 1842, and the House soon followed suit, authorizing an impressive $25,000 and appropriating $10,000, leaving the remainder of the funds and the details to be provided by the navy.96 With the depot’s observatory signed into law, Gilliss and the navy were free to use the ample authorization to outfit an observatory with the finest astronomical instruments and an imposing edifice. Even after a shuffle in naval leadership left the hydrographer Matthew Fontaine Maury in charge of the newly completed depot in 1844, the value of the observatory as a route to naval prestige was obvious. Maury, with the assistance of the secretary of the navy, George Bancroft, seized the title of “National Observatory” for the new facility simply by declaring it so on the title page of the depot’s first published volume of astronomical observations.97
Although it was never officially designated the “National Observatory,” it became widely recognized as a de facto one, perhaps most significantly by Adams. In the final debate on the Smithson bequest in 1846, Adams stated, “I am delighted that an astronomical observatory—not perhaps so great as it should have been—has been smuggled into the number of institutions of the country, under the mask of a small depot for charts,” and thus concluded, “I no longer wish any portion of this fund to be applied to an astronomical observatory.”98 Through the efforts of Maury and Alexander Dallas Bache, the observatory would soon attract some of the best American astronomers and remained a leading American center for the exploration of the heavens until the early twentieth century. Throughout that time, the observatory’s reputation as a national symbol would continue to be a dominant theme. The observatory’s superintendent, Rear Admiral Benjamin F. Sands, supported the purchase of the world’s largest refractor for the observatory in 1870, at a cost of $50,000, and lobbied hard for the even more expensive transit of Venus expeditions in 1874 and 1882, largely on the basis of national prestige and navy pride.99
And prestige and pride did flow. Elias Loomis would note that the astronomical work “placed our National Observatory in the first rank with the oldest and best institutions of the same kind in Europe.”100 James Ferguson’s discovery of the asteroid 31 Euphrosyne at the observatory in 1854 became a point of particular pride, as would Asaph Hall’s discovery of the two moons of Mars in 1877. The original motivation for Preston and Congress supporting the Naval Observatory may have been to put an end to Adams’s campaign for a national observatory as a symbol of federal prestige and power. Cultural and institutional forces nonetheless ultimately shaped the Naval Observatory into the type of national symbol that Adams had desired. It has even remained a national symbol into the twenty-first century, as located on the observatory grounds—in the house built in 1893 for the observatory’s superintendent—is the current official residence of the vice president of the United States.
That the U.S. Naval Observatory evolved toward its signaling role from its initially utilitarian one is an important indication of the signaling value ascribed to astronomical observatories in nineteenth-century America and of the financial support that could be mobilized on that basis. This equation—which we have already seen at play in the establishment of the early university and college observatories, in a religious-order manifestation with the Jesuits and Quakers, and in the development of the Naval/“National” Observatory—would yield even more impressive results when combined with the civic pride and boosterism of an emerging American power seeking to project itself on the world stage. What I refer to as the “civic observatory movement” would mark the apogee of popular nineteenth-century American enthusiasm for astronomical space exploration. It would also move the endeavor from the level of intellectual pursuit to that of mass culture, drawing on the inherent potential for doing so, which we have already seen in the Moon Hoax episode. The following chapter traces both this flow of funds into civic observatories and the parallel stream of what I refer to as “founder” observatories—those that were funded largely through the benefaction of a single patron. In time, it would be founder observatories that would come to dominate American astronomy. This would be due in part to the increasing wealth inequality in the Gilded Age, but also because their wealthy patrons, while also motivated by signaling interests, were interested in legacy—reputational signaling to future generations—a long-term fo
cus that aligned well with the long-term research interests of professional astronomers. These two funding sources—community patronage and individual wealthy patrons—both generated largely in the private sector, and both driven primarily by signaling motives, combined to produce an impressive nineteenth-century U.S. space exploration effort. Quantifying its magnitude is our next task.
2
PUBLIC SPIRIT AND PATRONAGE: AMERICAN OBSERVATORIES
It is also a place where men of business may acquire new ideas of the wonders of the material universe; where men, whose days are spent in toiling for the acquisition of wealth, may learn that there are miens of intellectual riches more inexhaustible than the mines of California.
—Elias Loomis, “Astronomical Observatories in the United States,” 1856
The prominence of American civic observatories—beginning with the Cincinnati and Harvard College Observatories in the 1840s, and continuing with the similarly motivated observatories in Albany, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago—is evidence of a broad-based, popular interest in astronomy and in the use of large telescopes as vehicles for the personal exploration of space. While sometimes associated with colleges or universities, they are differentiated by the fact that they were motivated and funded by a civic enthusiasm going far beyond the academic sphere. Although often an outgrowth of genuine interest in the exploration of the heavens, they were also used to signal the coming-of-age of a city, as well as to boost the prestige of the nation as a whole. As the Boston correspondent of The Athenaeum put it in 1840, “One of the prominent subjects of discussion among our savants is the establishment of Observatories of a character suitable to our standing as a civilized nation.”1 As Miller’s general study of scientific patronage in the period observes, “astronomy was the queen of science, and its cultivation a sure sign of cultural accomplishment.”2 The civic observatories reflected the degree to which this sentiment had permeated both across America and through the layers of the social strata.
The Cincinnati Observatory is a particularly fascinating example of broad-based support for space exploration in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1840s, Cincinnati was America’s sixth largest city and was undergoing an economic and demographic boom, with the population increasing from 46,000 in 1840 to 115,000 by the end of the decade.3 It was in the midst of this boom that, in the spring of 1842, Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel—a charismatic professor of mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy at Cincinnati College and a former assistant professor of mathematics at West Point—gave a public lecture series entitled The Planetary and Stellar Worlds. Through his lecture series Mitchel described these worlds to the citizens of Cincinnati. He was aided by visually stunning lantern slides of galaxies and nebulae, produced from drawings made at the Dorpat Observatory, which then housed the largest refractor in the world in what is now modern-day Estonia and was then the Russian Empire. His lectures were wildly popular, and after he had finished them he was asked to repeat his last lecture at the city’s largest meeting hall, the Methodist Episcopal Wesley Chapel. There, at the end of his lecture, in front of an audience of two thousand, he made an appeal to the people of Cincinnati for a telescope to surpass that of the Dorpat Observatory. He lamented that “while Russia with its hordes of barbarians boasted the finest observatory in the world, our own country with all its freedom and intelligence . . . had literally done nothing.” 4 He declared that if government patronage was not to be found and if the wealthy were “too indolent and too indifferent,” then ordinary people would have to take up the cause of science in America.
Mitchel came up with a funding model that presented the proposed observatory as a shareholder corporation and community asset in which all those who helped fund its construction could personally share in the exploration of space that it enabled. He divided the $7,500 he felt was required to purchase the necessary refractor into three hundred equal shares of $25 each to be payable when the entire amount was subscribed.5 With the $25 came membership in the Cincinnati Astronomical Society, which planned to grant members the privilege of looking at the heavens through the best telescope in the world. Mitchel evidently expected this model to appeal most directly to the burgeoning middle class of the city: “I will go to the people, and by the anvil of the blacksmith, by the work bench of the carpenter, and thus onward to the rich parlor of the wealthy, I will plead the cause of science.” 6 This approach was remarkably successful, with initial subscriptions obtained from sixty-seven different professions including: thirty-nine grocers; thirty-four landlords; thirty-three lawyers; six judges; seven paperhangers; five steamboat owners; three stable keepers; three stonemasons; three butchers; two lamp dealers; two plumbers; and one brick maker, among others.7
In addition to selling direct exploration of the heavens to the general public, Mitchel was also calling on prestige and civic patriotism to produce the funds. In the preamble to the constitution of the Cincinnati Astronomical Society, a direct connection was made between the private support of astronomy and the republican government of America: “Realizing the truth, that in our own country, and under a republican form of government, the people must hold, with respect, to all great scientific enterprises, that position of patrons, which in monarchial governments is held by Kings and Emperors.” 8 Mitchel also combined this patriotic sentiment with a sense of civic pride in the context of international competition: “I am determined to show the autocrat of all the Russias that an obscure individual in this wilderness city in a republican country can raise here more money by voluntary gift in behalf of science than his majesty can raise in the same way throughout his whole domains.”9 As we have seen earlier with John Quincy Adams, the anti-Russian rhetoric that pervaded the space race had interesting parallels in nineteenth-century America and was also at that time placed in the context of competition between two political systems.
Against rather long odds, Mitchel succeeded in his aim of obtaining general public funding for the project. Walking up and down the streets of Cincinnati with his subscription book, he secured $9,437 for the telescope and approximately $6,500 for the observatory building.10 A local philanthropist donated a tract of hilltop land on which the observatory could be built. With the resources in place, as would be the case in Albany and Pittsburgh, an independent company was incorporated that would be solely responsible for the completion of the project and its subsequent management. That the required resources were raised wholly through public subscription is indicative of the appeal held by an observatory and by the prospect of direct access to best-in-class space exploration technology.
Although the popular appeal of astronomy and the exploration of the heavens is clear, it is less clear that the exchange the subscribers entered into had much to do with science from their point of view. The broad interest in the personal exploration of the heavens was so significant that it effectively precluded Mitchel’s attempts to do research with the observatory. When Mitchel tried to limit visiting hours to the observatory in order to conduct his research, this was strongly opposed by the subscribers who had underwritten the project and who demanded that the observatory remain open so that they could use it as intended.11 Tellingly, the subscribers had chosen not to provide funds for research materials other than the telescopes or for the salary of astronomer.
In the now aging John Quincy Adams’s mind, the project had little to do with science in the first place. Although he did agree to be the keynote speaker at the observatory’s opening, he was annoyed at Mitchel’s “braggart vanity which he passes off for scientific enthusiasm” and accused him of expending more effort on a sumptuous edifice, pageantry, and “gloss of showy representation” than on scientific research.12 This attack on Mitchel was somewhat misplaced, as it was in fact the patrons of the observatory who had most clearly demonstrated these priorities. For Adams the Cincinnati Observatory’s principal value was signaling, lauding the citizen subscribers in his oration for connecting the honor of America “with the constant and untiring exploration of the firmament o
f heaven.”13 Miller has claimed that “the Cincinnati Observatory was an important symbol of the place of science in American life.”14 In light of the backlash against Mitchel’s attempt to do dedicated scientific research, however, it would be more accurate to say that the Cincinnati Observatory was an important symbol of the desire by Americans for personal involvement in the exploration of the heavens and the social status that accompanied it.
As a symbol of prestige and a signal of the new growth and wealth of a frontier town, the Cincinnati Observatory also acted as a spur to the men of affluence in old Boston. At a lecture in the Boston Odeon on the recently observed Great Comet of 1843, one of the leading American scientists and mathematicians, Benjamin Pierce, addressed a crowd of a thousand on the topic of astronomy and the need for a modern observatory in Boston. He made an appeal similar to that which Mitchel had made to the citizens of Cincinnati: to fund by public subscription a new large telescope for the observatory at Harvard College. Numerous previous attempts had been made, including by John Quincy Adams, to raise funds for an observatory at Harvard, all unsuccessful. Eventually the college itself provided $1,000 in 1839 for a basic observatory for teaching at Dana House.15 This time, however, a large telescope for research was the goal, and heavier emphasis was placed on civic pride and prestige, noting that Yale, and even a Philadelphia high school, possessed better instruments than Harvard did and that an upstart Ohio river town had now managed to raise over $10,000 for a large telescope.
Stirred by the spirit of civic competition, the citizens of Boston determined to procure for their city and university the largest telescope in America. With local textile tycoon Abbott Lawrence as chairman of the subscription committee and an initial pledge of $5,000 from prominent landowner David Sears for the erection of the observatory tower, a total of $25,000 was raised.16 Although the base of support was not as wide and varied as it had been in Cincinnati, the funds nonetheless came from over ninety-five sources, including $4,000 from businesses and societies.17 The analysis done by Marc Rothenberg on the Harvard College Observatory’s funding shows that the main donors were members of the elite, learned societies, and corporations—including insurance companies, which hoped better celestial navigation methods might reduce shipping losses.18 The new observatory project experienced significant cost overruns, with an expenditure of around $50,000 from 1843 to 1846, and there were additional fund-raising campaigns over the next eight years, contributing an additional $14,000 on top of the original $25,000.19 Out of the forty wealthiest Bostonians at the time, almost half of them (nineteen) were donors to the Harvard College Observatory during the decade. The most impressive donation was that following the suicide of young Edward Bromfield Phillips, son of one of Boston’s wealthiest and oldest families. He bequeathed to the observatory a massive $100,000 endowment in 1848 in consequence of his friendship with George P. Bond, the son of the observatory astronomer.20 The scale of the philanthropy and the extended period over which the observatory remained a focus for the elite of Boston are testaments to the prominent role that astronomy held within Boston’s civic society.
The Long Space Age Page 7