The Long Space Age

by Alexander MacDonald

  The last of the civic observatories would take root in Chicago in the midst of the Civil War. Although our understanding of the observatory’s history is greatly hindered by the loss of its records in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, we can stitch together a general outline of its founding. In November 1862, a man identified in the literature only as “Professor M. R. Forey” came to the University of Chicago looking to sell a large refractor made by American telescope maker Henry Fitz.42 Although the nature of his interest in astronomy remains a mystery, it seems likely that the “Professor M. R. Forey” was the former president of the Chowan Baptist Female Institute in North Carolina and Baptist minister Reverend Martin Rudolph Forey—an individual described in a 1906 history of Hertford County as “a Christlike man, of great literary culture, and of wonderful energy and business sagacity.” 43 After meetings with the university president and prominent university patrons, arrangements were made for Forey to give a lecture called “The Sidereal Heavens” in Bryan Hall, the largest auditorium in Chicago. The objective was to generate support for a university-based observatory. Immediately after the address, a small, tight-knit group of civic leaders, led by banker and railroad owner J. Young Scammon, founded the Chicago Astronomical Society with the objective of building an observatory in Chicago. Membership in the society would cost $100 and would entitle members to visit the observatory once a week with their families; a life directorship of the society could be secured for a $500 donation.44 Although the society’s genesis had its origins in Forey’s offer of a Fitz refractor, the investigations of the newly enthusiastic society members soon led them to discover an even more enticing prize—the large 18.5-inch Clark objective lens, once destined for the University of Mississippi, which had recently become available with the onset of the Civil War.

  Seeing the chance to secure for Chicago the largest refractor in the world, cash donations for an initial installment of $1,500 were quickly raised. The new Astronomical Society’s secretary, Illinois State District Attorney Thomas Hoyne, hurried to Boston in late January to contract with Clark & Sons for the telescope before Harvard, which was also interested in the refractor, could close the deal.45 The $18,187 cost of the lens and mounting was raised by public subscription, likely with significant contributions from the initial group of civic leaders.46 A former Chicago mayor donated $7,400 to import a German transit circle, but it was the business magnate Scammon himself who bore the majority of the cost, paying the roughly $30,000 required for the observatory dome and tower that would crown Douglas Hall, the University of Chicago’s new main building.47 This gave Scammon naming rights for the observatory, which thus became the Dearborn Observatory, after his wife’s maiden name.

  The civic leaders of Chicago, through quick action and by leveraging the initial investment of Mississippi, had secured for their home something no other America city could claim: possession of the most powerful instrument of space exploration on the planet. Although we lack the detailed documentation on the driving motivations of the individuals involved, it nonetheless seems clear that the Dearborn Observatory was the product of a civic community, proud of their city and eager to signal its arrival on the world stage. As it had been at other civic observatories, it was a mark of pride for the community to have a technological capacity that would allow them to see the wonders of the heavens for themselves. As had been the case elsewhere, they organized themselves in significant numbers to achieve this, with the most powerful community members inspired by one another, and by the response of the general public, to put their resources behind the project. This signaling motive would remain strong in the founding of later nineteenth-century observatories. The source of funding, however, would begin to shift. The primary funding role played by the business magnate Scammon in the case of the Dearborn Observatory would become even more pronounced in the later observatory era. As the Gilded Age concentrated increasingly vast wealth into the hands of a few individuals, the scope expanded for observatories to rely largely on a sole patron or founders. It would no longer be civic communities but rather single, wealthy individuals that would be the mainstay of support. The era of the super-rich patron, and the most expensive observatories, was about to begin.

  Prior to considering the surge in large, privately financed observatories funded principally by single individuals, a couple of general observations are worth noting. First, as the nineteenth century progressed, professional American astronomers moved further away from the traditional mainstay of positional astronomy, and increasingly focused on what became known as “the new astronomy”—an approach to investigating the heavens that focused more on the physical nature of the objects in space and that ultimately would lead to the development of astrophysics and the planetary sciences. Popular American interest in astronomy had long been rooted in the excitement and awe attendant with examining heavenly bodies and planetary worlds. Professional astronomers, however, had largely maintained their focus on less-speculative research efforts—namely positional astronomy. The increasing resolution of telescopes and new techniques such as photography and spectral analysis, however, gave astronomers new tools with which to conduct investigations that could go beyond speculation and which began to provide answers to long-standing scientific questions about the physical universe. These investigations and their attendant discoveries, which often had great appeal to the popular imagination and thus received significant media coverage, increased the prestige value of observatories. These scientific discoveries were often heralded as major milestones in human knowledge, thus more closely aligning the interests of the scientists pursuing them and patrons interested in establishing a legacy. At the same time, the shift away from the practical applications of positional astronomy—such as timekeeping, surveying, and longitude determination—narrowed the spectrum of functionality that observatories could seek to claim. These factors decreased the utilitarian appeal of astronomical observatories, but at the same time they increased their signaling value as credible signals of wealth and of commitment to lofty intellectual pursuits.

  A second relevant trend was the increasing concentration of wealth in America over the course of the nineteenth century. America in general was undergoing rapid economic growth in the nineteenth century, but the wealth of the richest Americans was growing even faster. By 1892, a New-York Tribune survey could report that there were over 4,047 millionaires in the United States, equivalent to there being 4,047 individuals with over $1.1 billion in equivalent 2015 GDP-ratio terms—an order of magnitude more than the number of people with control over a comparable share of the nation’s resources in 2015.48 We currently lack the data to demonstrate conclusively that income inequality is positively correlated with private expenditures on space exploration over long periods of time. It does seems a likely hypothesis, however, given that the largest private expenditures on American astronomical observatories came at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and we have seen significant private expenditures on spaceflight capabilities in the beginning of the twenty-first century—times when income inequality in America has been at its highest.

  Although the trend of single individuals endowing large observatories peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trend can be seen throughout the history of observatory funding in America. There is no abrupt or complete moment of transition in the nineteenth century—it is instead a general trend of increasingly important singular observatory donations. Many of the civic observatories already discussed were enabled by large donations from single benefactors such as Scammon, Thaw, Dudley, and Sears. The role of individual patrons in the establishment of astronomical observatories would increase and diversify into new contexts as the century progressed. From the numerous, singularly endowed university observatories to the personal observatories of Rutherford and Lowell—and to the independent, monumental institutions of Lick and Mount Wilson—the private wealth of individuals became the principal source of funding for astronomical obse
rvatories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  It is in the context of university observatories that the prominence of individual donors can first be seen, including in the civic observatories, which tended to be embedded within a university context. Scammon and Sears provided funds specifically for university-situated observatories at Chicago and Harvard, and Thaw’s major contributions came only once the Allegheny Observatory was to be transferred to the Western University of Pennsylvania. Individual patronage has a long history at universities in general, as well as at the early American university observatories, such as Clark’s donation to Yale, Jenkins’s patronage of Georgetown, and Phillips’s bequest to the Harvard College Observatory. This trend continued to fund numerous small-to-moderate-size university observatories throughout the century. In 1852, for example, a $7,000 donation from Boston physician George Shattuck provided the principal funding for the Dartmouth College Observatory in New Hampshire, with an additional $4,000 coming from the college.49 In the mid-1860s, astronomy was a priority for the wealthy brewer Matthew Vassar, who constructed, as the first building on his new Vassar College campus, an observatory with a large Fitz objective lens—at a total cost of more than $14,000—to entice the famous comet discoverer and astronomer Maria Mitchell to join the college as its first faculty member.50 It was during the decade after the Civil War, however, that the rise of patron-funded observatories truly took hold.

  The story of one of the most important patron-initiated observatories, the McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia, is intimately related to the story of the last of the civic observatories, the Dearborn Observatory. The observatory’s founding was initiated by Leander McCormick, the youngest of the three brothers responsible for the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company—the leading producer of American farm machinery during the agriculture boom of the late nineteenth century. Part of the motivation for the project may have been competition between Leander and his older, more-famous brother, Cyrus. It has also been argued, however, that the rivalry at the heart of the McCormick Observatory was not a sibling one, but rather the long-standing American rivalry between North and South.51 The McCormicks were pro-slavery Southerners living in Chicago when the founders of the Dearborn Observatory bought, during the middle of the Civil War, the 18.5-inch lens originally meant for the University of Mississippi. The world’s largest telescope, originally destined for the South, was now installed with much publicity in the North. Thomas Williams argues that the patriotic Southerner McCormick saw this as yet another symbol of the South’s defeat and resolved to donate his own “world’s largest telescope” to the University of Virginia so that it “could have a powerfully restorative effect on morale in the state, and might, if properly exploited, lead to years of newsworthy honor for the institution and for the state itself.”52 Either way, it seems likely that it was signaling and rivalry, whether at the interpersonal or interregional level, that provided a familiar spur to McCormick’s major investment in astronomy.

  Although the motivation was familiar, never before had a single individual in America attempted to personally fund a telescope of such magnitude in its entirety and to personally direct the terms of the observatory. In 1870, as a first step in the project, he ordered a twenty-six-inch refractor from Alvan Clark & Sons for $42,000 and discussed the project with General Robert E. Lee, then president of Washington College, whom McCormick expected to provide an observatory building and endowment for “his” telescope from the university funds.53 McCormick later envisioned providing for the observatory more generally with an unprecedented planned contribution of $100,000–$150,000. Despite these ambitious plans, however, the funding of the McCormick Observatory eventually required more than a single patron effort. The Chicago Fire of 1871 and the financial panic of 1873–1874 hindered McCormick’s ability to proceed with the project. Its completion was only assured in 1881 when the University of Virginia raised some $75,000 in donations from William H. Vanderbilt and university alumni, and also accepted McCormick’s donation of the twenty-six-inch objective lens along with an additional $18,000 to fund the building.54 Although McCormick ended up funding less than half of the observatory, his early ambition of personally funding the world’s largest telescope was a sign of the individualistic nature of the developments to come.

  The early 1870s saw the founding of a number of large university observatories that were made possible principally by the desires of single patrons. After an abortive, earlier attempt to build an observatory at the College of New Jersey—now Princeton University—an astronomical observatory topped the college’s postwar wish list. Brigadier General Nathaniel Halsted, a prominent New Jersey dry-goods merchant, had promised to contribute to the observatory campaign before the war and made good on his promise with an initial gift of a $10,000 bond, a donation that he later increased to the entire cost of the building—$60,000 when completed in 1872.55 This substantial donation meant the observatory building’s completion preceded, by almost a full decade, the installation of its twenty-three-inch Clark telescope—the $32,000 cost of which was raised by subscription.56 A similar generosity took root at Yale, where local New Haven rifle baron Oliver Winchester gave the university land valued at $100,000 in 1871.57 It was hoped, by both donor and university, that the ongoing post–Civil War land boom would raise the value of the property to some $500,000—an amount that would allow the Winchester Observatory to possess the world’s largest telescope and the most impressive of observatory buildings, the designs for which show an extravagantly decorative architecture. The depression of the mid-1870s, however, burst the Connecticut property bubble, and the land never reached the hoped-for value—although it did allow for a sizable observatory with a twenty-eight-inch Clark refractor. Signaling and legacy motives had led to the establishment of the Winchester and Halsted Observatories; with no financial support for astronomers included, scientific interest was at best a marginal motivation.

  The Morrison Observatory highlights the role that personal interests in astronomy could play in these decisions, however. The observatory was founded in 1874 with two $50,000 gifts—for the observatory and for an endowment for its operation—coming from plantation heiress Berenice Morrison.58 Mrs. Morrison’s decision to donate the entirety of the required funds for an observatory at the Pritchett School Institute has been attributed to her viewing of the Great Comet of 1874 with Carr Pritchett, the founder of the institute.59 However, her own autobiographical manuscript, Plantation Life in Missouri, makes it clear that Mrs. Morrison also had a love of the sky that extended from childhood: “I could plunge my eyes into the stars—I felt caught up by a strange power, an unspeakable longing possessed me, a mystery enfolded me and my heart, my childish but untrammeled heart, beat with a great happiness. I would resolve to gaze upon the marvelous heavens all night, feeling myself an intimate part of these wonders.” 60 This intrinsic interest in astronomy may have been part of the reason why Morrison, unlike many of her fellow observatory patrons, also included funds for a research endowment. Personal interest could thus be just as important a driver for the observatory patrons as a desire for legacy. It would be both of these motives together, however, that would drive the most resource-intensive space exploration project of the nineteenth century.

  The Lick Observatory was a milestone in the development of the physical and cultural infrastructure of American space exploration. Although single individuals had wholly endowed observatories before, they had never done so on the scale of Lick. James Lick had made his fortune in real estate during the California gold rush and, as his health began to deteriorate, he decided that he wanted to build a monument by which he would be remembered. He is said to have considered a number of monumental structures, including gigantic statues of his parents that would overlook the San Francisco Bay, and a giant pyramid to be erected in the middle of the city. Through discussion with a number of astronomers, however, including George Madeira and George Davidson, he was convinced that the most spectac
ular monument he could achieve would be to build the world’s largest telescope and to enable it to pursue prestigious, legacy-creating, scientific research—and then to be buried underneath it, which he was in 1887. Although he was unquestionably motivated by the legacy that such an observatory would leave—he had initially insisted that the observatory be built in downtown San Francisco, where it could be seen—the farsighted Lick also had an appreciation for space exploration that went beyond even that of most contemporary astronomers. He once confided to a long-time friend that he thought that someday man would walk on the Moon and that “We will know the secrets of the spheres and it will be as common for man to take an inter-orbital trip into space as it is for you or me to walk down Montgomery Street.” 61 With a vision of such a future, it seems unlikely that his selection of an observatory over other possible monuments was motivated solely by signaling considerations. Lick was evidently a man who had a direct interest in the exploration of the heavens. It was this personal interest that, when combined with his extreme wealth and desire for legacy, resulted in the establishment of the world’s most advanced astronomical observatory.

  Lick’s interest extended to personally directing the earliest phases of the observatory’s development. One of his most significant and telling decisions was to make the Lick Observatory the first mountaintop observatory, selecting the site of Mount Hamilton, around forty kilometers from his adopted home of San Jose. This decision sacrificed some of the public accessibility of the monument, but it resulted in improved seeing conditions that led to major advances in astronomical photography and research. Lick also sacked the original board of trustees when they failed to operate as he had hoped, and he personally lobbied officials in Santa Clara County to pay the $73,000 for the construction of a road up to Mount Hamilton.62 At Lick’s death in 1876, his will left an unprecedented $700,000, 17.5 percent of his nearly $4-million estate, for the establishment of an observatory in his name that would house the world’s largest telescope—the cost of which represented a share of U.S. GDP equivalent to roughly $1.3 billion in 2015.63 The Lick Observatory, which became one of the central institutions of American astronomy and astrophysics in the decades after its construction, is an example of the significant resources that can be mustered by the private sector for the exploration of space, based solely on an individual’s personal interest and desire for legacy.