The new Harvard College Observatory presented an unprecedented opportunity for American astronomers to take the lead in the exploration of the heavens. However, as at Cincinnati, the motivations that had led to the telescope’s funding had consequences that, at least temporarily, impeded research. The generous funding of the new observatory allowed for the purchase of a fifteen-inch equatorial refractor from Mertz and Mahler, equal to that of the Pulkovo Observatory, allowing it to share the title of largest refractor in the world. As the first astronomical instrument of such distinction in the Americas, there was enormous potential for discovery, some of which was certainly realized, one example being the pioneering work of William Cranch Bond and John Adams Whipple in producing early daguerreotypes of the Moon and the stars. However, a number of factors limited the ability of Harvard astronomers to capitalize on the telescope’s potential. For one, as in Cincinnati, no provisions had been made for salaried positions at the observatory, with the astronomers relying on, and having to seek, ad hoc university funding until the Phillips bequest in 1849. Secondly, the civic nature of the observatory’s funding also led to expectations by the general public that the observatory would be available for public use. Efforts were made to accommodate this expectation, with the rather astonishing result that the citizens of Boston, for a time, had relatively open access to use the largest refracting telescope in the world for their personal explorations of space. However, as the provision of this service significantly reduced the availability of the telescope for scientific investigation, the astronomers protested, asserting their priority within the university environment, and access was ultimately curtailed.21 These conflicts highlight the important role that both signaling and the desire for personal access to the exploration of space had in securing funding for observatories, along with the rather secondary interest of supporting scientific research.
The third most significant example of the civic observatory, and the most infamous case of conflict between the desires of an observatory’s patrons and its astronomers, is the Dudley Observatory established in Albany. By the mid-nineteenth century, land speculation and the Erie Canal had made Albany a center of wealth and culture. City patricians had high hopes that the city might become the intellectual center of America and planned for the establishment of the University of Albany with a world-leading, hilltop observatory figuring prominently in the plan as a visible sign of the New York State capitol’s emergence onto the world stage. Due to his fame as the founder of the Cincinnati Observatory and his subsequent popular lecture tours, the university organizers contacted Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel to help establish the new observatory. While Mitchel laid out a general plan and made the initial cost estimate of $25,000, it was the local elite who organized the funds. The principal organizers were James Armsby, a prominent fund-raiser for philanthropic causes in Albany, and Thomas Worth Olcott, a powerful banker whose Albany Mechanics and Farmers Bank had funded the political machinery of President Martin Van Buren, New York Governor Charles Marcy, and Senator Charles Dudley. With their connections, $25,000 was raised from about twenty of Albany’s most influential citizens within two months of the campaign’s commencement, kicked off by a founding donation of $13,000 from Mrs. Blandina Dudley to memorialize her husband.22 With a grant of land for the observatory from General Henry Van Rensselaer, and a promise of $1,500 annual salary for Mitchel, the project had as generous a foundation as any of the era.
Although it had a strong foundation, it was one based on civic sentiment and prestige, not on science, and in many ways it would be the very strength of this foundation that would lead to its troubles. When obligations required Mitchel to return to Ohio, the trustees of the observatory, few of whom had even an amateur’s interest in astronomy, confidently proceeded with what they considered the matter of highest priority—the construction of a suitably impressive observatory building. Only when this had been completed in 1854 did the trustees turn their full attention to the secondary consideration of acquiring astronomical instruments and astronomers. That the project, meant to become a leading institute of astronomy, could proceed comfortably for years almost wholly without scientific input highlights the secondary nature of science and the prominence of the signaling motive in the founding of the observatory. When a scientific council was finally convened in 1855, it was appropriately replete with some of the most prestigious names in American science: Alexander Bache, director of the U.S. Coast Survey; Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution; Benjamin Gould, who had studied under Carl Friedrich Gauss and was the first American to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy; and Benjamin Pierce, a prominent Harvard scientist. These influential men of science, however, were less than enthusiastic about the way that signaling had trumped science in the development of the observatory.
Although chroniclers of the dispute between the trustees and the science council have placed emphasis on personal relations and differing notions of what constituted gentlemanly conduct, there were real differences of opinion on the shape and purpose of the observatory.23 The science council failed to appreciate the importance of an elegant edifice to the donors and the increased base of support that would come with a large equatorial telescope that enabled the citizens of Albany to make their own use of the observatory. Instead, the scientists demanded architectural design changes that were aesthetically disappointing and they chose as their principal instrument a fixed heliometer for scientific measurements of the Sun. While a heliometer would enable them to conduct work in their preferred field of solar observations, it prohibited satisfying public stargazing. The stage for conflict had been set.
The trustees wanted their observatory to be a leading institute of astronomy and so were initially deferential to the scientists’ requests. To do so, however, required significant increases in funding and the provision of an endowment for the salaries of the astronomers. The widow-benefactor Mrs. Dudley was able to come up with the additional $14,000 for the heliometer in 1856 as well as $50,000 of an $80,000 endowment raised for salaries and operations, for a total of $119,000. The remainder of the funds were raised from William Astor, the trustees, and sixty other prominent men and women of New York.24 Despite this generosity, scientific council members Pierce and Gould were uncompromising in their pursuit of what they considered “pure science.” They further antagonized the donors with the firing of an assistant who had named a small, newly discovered comet after one of the most important benefactors, Thomas Olcott. The personal conflict between the two sides eventually escalated to the point at which Gould and Pierce barricaded themselves in the observatory and declared squatter sovereignty and rights as legal guardians. The trustees responded by terminating all agreements, threatening legal action, and distributing fifteen thousand copies of a 173-page polemic against Gould’s character and behavior.25 The trustees ultimately battered down the door of the observatory and threw Gould out into the January snow.
At the heart of this debate was the same conflict that had been seen on a smaller scale in Cincinnati and Boston, that between scientific research and the aesthetic and exploratory desires of those who had provided the funds. The type of instrument was at the crux in Albany, with Gould demanding a purely scientific institution with an instrument for cutting-edge research and with Olcott desiring a general-purpose telescope and at least some public access to the observatory. The trustees raised this point explicitly in their statement on the conduct of Gould: “Citizens, when visiting the Observatory and grounds were, in repeated instances, treated with incivility. Sometimes admission was refused altogether; and, at other times, when they succeeded in obtaining admission, visitors were received with so little respect or courtesy that they felt themselves at liberty to complain of their treatment.”26 For his part, Gould, in his lengthy response to the statement of the trustees, attacked them for the priority that they gave to superficial matters: “The empty dazzle of temporary show was, in the wishes of the managing Trustees, paramount to any ideas of scientific usefulness or dignity
.”27 Gould also lamented the openness that Olcott and the trustees prized: The Dudley Observatory “ought not to be a place where every observation is interrupted by curious visiters [sic], who suppose the establishment to be a sort of exhibition, or where the instruments are continually liable to serious disturbance by idle and meddlesome fingers.”28 This disagreement between the trustees and scientists on the objectives and requirements of the observatory led to a 300 percent cost overrun and a fundamentally crippled institution. The principal legacy of the Dudley Observatory is unfortunately that of being the first major American space exploration boondoggle. Nonetheless, the extensive debate between the trustees and the scientific council makes clear the motives that had driven such an expensive project in the first place: a desire for a prestigious signal and a general interest in the personal exploration of the heavens.
There were a number of other examples of astronomical observatories that were funded through public subscription by civic pride and popular interest in astronomy. In 1848, in Shelbyville, Kentucky, relatively close to the recently finished Cincinnati Observatory, an impressive observatory building was constructed at Shelby College and a large 7.5-inch Merz and Mahler equatorial telescope, costing $3,500, was ordered, with funds raised at least partly by public subscription.29 When Henry Tappan became the president of the University of Michigan, he set the development of an astronomy program as one of his highest priorities and made a plea for observatory funding at his inauguration in 1852.30 Twenty-nine members of the Detroit elite responded by raising an initial $10,000, and another $12,000 came from a larger pool of Detroit donors when the project required it.31 Although the observatory itself was located in Ann Arbor, it was named the Detroit Observatory as a monument to the civic community that had funded the project. In New York, in 1854–1855, Hamilton College’s fund-raising wizard, Professor Charles Avery, raised $20,000 by public subscription for an observatory building and a large 13-inch refractor. Avery also managed to convince railroad promoter and property developer Edwin Litchfield to provide the rarity of an ample endowment, $30,000, for the honor of naming the institution the Litchfield Observatory.32 All of these examples show the geographic range across which the public-subscription model was applied to the financing of sizable observatories.
Public subscription was, however, not the only way in which communities organized to fund large observatories—nor was the city the only locus of community support. The extravagant Barnard Observatory at the University of Mississippi, which was designed to house the largest telescope in the world, managed to raise its funding directly from the government of the state of Mississippi. As with so many university observatory projects, the Barnard Observatory was the initiative of its president and chancellor Frederick August Porter Barnard. Barnard, whose grandfather had been John Quincy Adams’s secretary of war, developed an early passion for science and astronomy and had been appointed professor of natural philosophy at the University of Alabama at the age of twenty-eight.33 He had been the driving force behind the founding of the University of Alabama observatory in 1844, with its large central dome, transit room, and Simms equatorial telescope, the latter costing an estimated $4,000.34 He became the first president of the University of Mississippi amid concerns over the tide of young men flowing to the North for their education, and he assured the trustees and the state that he could reverse the flow.35
To bring the level of the University of Mississippi up to the best in the world, Barnard convinced the Mississippi elite to allow a special appropriation by the state legislature in 1856 for a $100,000 revitalization project.36 Astronomy was a crucial part of his plan, and a large portion of the funds would be used to signal that Mississippi was second to none by building the largest telescope in the world. Barnard contracted with the American firm Alvan Clark & Sons, for an unprecedented 18.5-inch objective lens, commissioned a massive 11-foot-diameter orrery, and imported thirty-six celestial and terrestrial globes from Malby & Sons in London.37 As at Albany, a grand edifice was built before the telescope arrived, this one copying exactly the layout and appearance of nothing less than the imperial Pulkovo Observatory in Russia. So fundamental was the observatory to Barnard’s vision for the university that he moved his entire family into lodgings within its walls as a symbol of what was to be the new campus’s spiritual and intellectual center. However, before the telescope could be delivered, the Civil War commenced and the state reappropriated all unspent funds for use in the war effort, forcing the university to default on its payment for the refractor. Although the plan never came to full fruition, it is another strong example of observatories being used for community signaling, in this case through state funding support rather than through citizen subscription.
The importance of the civic observatories in astronomy would soon decline, however, and the stories of the two last significant examples of the type—the Allegheny Observatory and the Dearborn Observatory—point to the reasons why. The Allegheny Observatory was established by a shareholder corporation, similar to Mitchel’s organization for the Cincinnati Observatory. Its establishment was driven largely by an interest in exploratory astronomy that had been engendered among the elite in Pittsburgh thanks to the efforts of local educator Lewis Bradley. In February 1859, Bradley called together four men who had expressed an interest in buying a large telescope after viewing the heavens with Bradley through his small refractor. These four consisted of a newspaper publisher, a wholesale shoe merchant, and two leading bankers, one of whom would later become a congressman. By March, through their connections, these individuals had enlisted the support of an additional sixteen, all of whom pledged $100 for membership in the Allegheny Telescope Association, which would grant them the privilege of personal access to the new telescope.38 Unlike the Cincinnati Observatory, which had grown out of a relatively broad-based interest in astronomy, or the Dudley Observatory, which had arisen largely from a desire on the part of the city leaders to signal the cultural prowess of Albany, the Allegheny Observatory’s origin was a handful of members of the Pittsburgh elite who wanted an exclusive location from which they could observe the heavens. No research was to be done at the observatory; the purpose was simply the personal exploration of the Moon and planets by members of the association. Other than a large refractor, which would be one of the largest in the world, there was to be no scientific instrumentation at the observatory, a testament to the singular interest in the personal exploration of the heavens that drove the observatory’s founding.
Although this type of enthusiasm allowed for rapid development, it also made the observatory’s financial situation particularly vulnerable. The initial group secured a lecture series by Mitchel that increased interest and subscriptions to sixty-six incorporators. This ultimately led to some $14,000 being promised in subscriptions by November 1859—a sum that allowed the group to contract with Henry Fitz for a large thirteen-inch refractor.39 An act to incorporate the observatory was passed by the Pennsylvania legislature, and an observatory was built in anticipation of the delivery of the telescope in September 1860. When the Civil War started in April 1861, however, the telescope had still not been delivered. With the onset of the war, the men of industry who had supported the project, none of whom had a prior interest in astronomy, turned to the more pressing and profitable matters of war provision. When the observatory was finally dedicated in January 1862, only a small group of seventeen arrived for the proceedings. The war had also greatly affected the ability and willingness of the individuals to make good on their promised subscriptions, and the organization was forced to go some $12,000 in debt. By 1867, lack of interest and mounting debt caused the Allegheny Observatory to be subsumed into the Western University of Pennsylvania, now the University of Pittsburgh, which had long coveted the observatory’s prestige and extensive land holdings.
Unlike the community engagement that had supported the initial observatory, this reestablishment as part of the Western University of Pennsylvania would be principally enabled by
a single man, William Thaw, a steamboat and railroad magnate who had been one of the observatory’s original incorporators. Thaw provided some $20,000 of the $32,000 required to pay off the Allegheny Telescope Association’s debts and to establish an endowment that would allow for research at the observatory. This endowment led to the hiring of the influential astrophysicist and later pioneer of aeronautics Samuel Pierpont Langley as its new director.40 After the association of gentlemen had failed to properly finance their endeavor, this new funding model—reliance on a single prominent donor—became the mainstay for the observatory. It was also to become the new funding model for American astronomy in general. Thaw and his son William Thaw Jr. would continue to generously support the observatory and astronomy in Pittsburgh more generally. The culmination of their support was the New Allegheny Observatory, begun in 1900 and completed in 1912 at a total cost of $300,000, with its $125,000, thirty-inch Thaw Memorial Refractor—the third largest in the world at the time.41 Astronomy in Pittsburgh, which had begun in the tradition of the civic observatories, ultimately had to rely on a single, major benefactor for its growth.
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