Title: |
American Eclipse |
 |
Author: |
David Baron |
|
Category: |
Non-fiction |
|
Rating: |
||
Date Reviewed: |
February 21, 2025 |
In 1878, the United States was forming into a powerful nation. Reconstruction after the Civil War was ongoing. Transcontinental railroads linked all parts of the country, and newly installed telegraph lines shortened the delay for news to travel. The European scientific community scoffed at the New World scientists. The American scientists were determined to demonstrate that their ideas and discoveries measured up to their European counterparts. When the news of the 1878 eclipse came out, that the zone of totality would arc from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, teams of American astronomers prepared to journey out to Wyoming and Colorado to make measurements and advance science. The most famous person who traveled out west was Thomas Edison. Edison was already famous for inventing the phonograph (the light bulb would come after his return from this Western journey). Edison claimed that his newly invented tasimeter would allow him to measure the temperature of the solar corona. Edison's boasts assumed that he could get his new instrument to function properly - it was untried and uncalibrated, but Edison commonly claimed success well in advance of actual reality. The same would be true of his forthcoming incandescent lightbulb, where Edison announced he had fabricated a bulb when in reality he and his team was just beginning to work on the problem. In the end, Edison struggled with windy conditions in Wyoming, trying to get his tasimeter pointed at the sun. When totality started, the wind suddenly died, and Edison had a couple minutes to get the tasimeter to function. When it was finally aligned right, the needle on the meter pegged - no meaningful data could be collected. In the end, the tasimeter proved to be a failure because no one could ever get repeatable accurate measurements with it. American Eclipse did note, however, that Edison's idea of measuring the skies looking for heat predates our current infrared telescopes. Another famous man who journeyed out west was James Craig Watson. Watson had earned his renown by discovering asteroids - 22 in total. Watson was determined to find the long speculated planet, dubbed Vulcan, that orbited between the sun and Mercury. Perturbations in Mercury's orbit suggested that there was another, as-yet-undiscovered, body exerting gravitational tugs on Mercury. Watson planned to use the eclipse to search the sky near the solar disk for this long-sought inner planet. During the eclipse, Watson did see a pinpoint of light where no star was expected to be. Watson received wealth and fame for his discovery of Vulcan, though skeptics doubted his discovery because it couldn't be corroborated. Watson ended up trying to build a giant underground telescope that theoretically would allow him to observe the sun during daylight hours - Watson spent so long out in the cold of Wisconsin overseeing the construction of this new telescope that he got sick and subsequently died. We now know that Watson was wrong, Vulcan does not exist. Einstein later explained that light rays are bent by massive gravitational objects, so the pinpoint of light that Watson observed was actually a star that was expected to be obscured by the disc of the sun. The third character that Baron focused on in American Eclipse was Maria Mitchell, an astronomer at Vassar. She and a team of women journeyed out to Denver to show that women were capable of performing science. The prevailing belief at the time was that women could not handled complex thinking, that their femininity would be compromised by attempting to "do a man's job". Mitchell and company did not achieve any notable scientific breakthroughs during the eclipse, but the mere fact that she and her team could actually wield telescopes and make measurements apparently astounded the nation. (I know that sounds absurd, but just before the eclipse, the bishop of Denver, Joseph Machebeuf, announced "Women are not needed as men; they are needed as women, not to do what men can do, but to do what men cannot. Woman was created to be a wife and a mother.") From the introduction, I thought that the scientists observing the eclipse would face perils in the wilderness. The first page of this book tells us that General
Custer and his men perished at Little Big Horn in 1876. But the worst obstacle that the scientists faced was the threat of bad weather - in the end, all the viewers in Wyoming and
Colorado had clear skies and perfect viewing conditions. Edison traveled by luxury railroad car. Maria Mitchell lost her luggage, which meant that the lens for her telescope was missing (it
was retrieved before the event occurred).
What I liked best about this book was the description of the moon's shadow rapidly advancing across the Earth's surface. The viewers at
the top of Pike's Peak could see the advancing line of darkness sweeping across the terrain, as peak after peak suddenly disappeared. The moon's shadow moves at more
than 1000 miles per hour during an eclipse. During the 2024 event that I witnessed in Cleveland, it was impossible to see the onrushing fall of darkness - the sky
simply went black in an instant. But at the lofty elevation of Pike's Peak, the observers were able to actually see the wave of darkness approach and then rush away. One of the stories in this book is about Cleveland Abbe, an astronomer who suffered from dangerous altitude sickness while on Pikes Peak. He
was carried partway down the mountain, and observed the eclipse while lying on the ground. Abbe was surprised to see two light beams extending far out from the sun during totality.
Unfortunately, the book does not explain what that phenomena was that Abbe observed. Was it real? |
