From the Vaults: The American Eclipse – part 2
In From the Vaults: American Eclipse (4-10-23), we chronicled how a group of scientists and astronomers set out to elevate America’s scientific reputation around the world in the wake of the Total Solar Eclipse of 1878. Prior to that event, the European science community did not have a favorable view of what was happening in the field on our side of the pond. David Baron’s book American Eclipse (Liveright Publishing, 2017) explored how the lives and careers of some well known Americans intersected as they mounted expeditions to the western lands of the young United States to observe the 1878 eclipse. Most of the American Eclipse article was focused on Vassar College astronomer Maria Mitchell’s cohort traveling to Denver, Colorado to make their observations. The woman from Vassar were there to catch three minutes of eclipse totality as the Moon’s shadow sliced across Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas as were a host of other American scientists and astronomers.
In his book, Baron tracked the movements of several groups of prominent American scientists who planned excursions to observe this event. A secondary goal of these expeditions was to raise the second rate status many other countries seemed to apply to American science and scientists. Professor Simon Newcomb was one home grown scientist who was alarmed by the state of scientific progress in the United States. After being asked to review said progress in 1876, he declared this country was, “in a period of intellectual darkness” that was just beginning to lift. Like Maria Mitchell, Newcomb had landed his first paying job as a computer at the Navy’s Nautical Almanac Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These ‘computers’ were not the electronic devices we are familiar with today but mathematicians charged with computing tables derived from astronomical observations. Of course, Mitchell curried no favor in the male dominated astronomical field. As concerned as he was about ‘the state of science’, Newcomb’s comments after reading an account of his older and more famous colleague were telling: “Miss M. is the only female astronomer after all.”
Newcomb was appointed superintendent of the Nautical Almanac (where he worked before his long stint at the Naval Observatory) in 1877 by President Rutherford B. Hayes. As the highly anticipated American eclipse approached, he charged his assistant George W. Hill with constructing a chart of the path and limits of totality. Hill was socially awkward with Newcomb describing him as, “The finest mathematician in America if not the world, but he can’t say two words.” Hill was a brilliant computer and his chart of the eclipse was published in a special bulletin. It showed the first strike of the Moon’s shadow taking place in Irkoutsk, Siberia. After it left Asia, the path would follow a gently curving line from the western end of the Montana Territory through Yellowstone National Park, the Wyoming Territory, and on to Denver, Colorado before crossing Northern and Eastern Texas before it entered the Gulf of Mexico.
Newcomb’s bulletin added an appeal to the public: “Total eclipses of the sun are so rare at any one point that the opportunities they offer for studying the attendant phenomena should be utilized in every way.” Regardless of these public utterances, he confided in his European colleagues his doubts that the U.S. Congress would appropriate the money needed to fund any organized government observing parties. Newcomb was wrong about Congress and when they did indeed pass funding for an observing party, he proposed the area around Creston, Wyoming Territory as the ideal location to set up shop. He favored this area because he felt clear skies were more likely there than closer to Denver.
Through Newcomb’s membership in America’s National Academy of Science he was acquainted with physicist George F. Barker from the University of Pennsylvania. Barker stayed at Newcomb’s residence when the Academy met in Washington, D.C. in April of 1878. Barker’s good friend Thomas A. Edison was also in attendance at this meeting where he demonstrated his newest invention. When his assistant placed it upon a table and turned the crank, the onlookers heard a thin, tinny voice say, “The speaking phonograph has the honor of presenting itself to the Academy of Science.” As they stared in awe at this new contraption, someone who had seen a previous demonstration said, “I declare, it sounds more like the devil every time.” It was Barker’s connection to Newcomb that got Edison involved in the Wyoming eclipse party.
Thomas Edison’s invention was ‘astonishingly simple and, simply, astonishing’ (Baron’s description of the speaking phonograph)and it propelled him from obscurity to international celebrity in the early months of 1878. New York journalists heaped superlatives on him like, ‘The Napoleon of Science’, ‘The Jersey Columbus’, and ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park’. One began calling Menlo Park ‘Edisonia’. Some viewed Edison’s invention as some sort of trickery with one college professor musing, “The idea of a talking machine is ridiculous.” Baron describes the historic moment as, “The notion that one could capture sound and release it at will seemed magical, like dabbling in the dark arts. After all, the phonograph was mere metal – not lips, no teeth, no tongue – and yet it spoke, enabling a person’s voice to live beyond the grave. ‘Speech has become, as it were, immortal,’ commented Scientific American. Everyone wanted to see the device, to hear it, to talk about it.”
The thirty-one year old Edison had gotten the world’s attention and at the Washington meeting, he showcased another idea he had come up with to improve Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. While the Bell’s telephone was also an amazing invention, one literally had to yell into it to (barely) be heard on the other end. Edison devised a solution when he noticed an interesting property of carbon – its electrical resistance varied dramatically with pressure. Edison collected carbon soot from his kerosene lamps and compressed it into small disks. These
‘carbon buttons’ (as he called them) were then placed in the mouthpiece of his own telephone design. When connected to a battery, the carbon amplified the vibrations of the human voice into an electrical signal strong enough to produce a clear, loud sound from the telephone receiver. Edison also coined the greeting ‘halloo’ (which evolved into today’s standard ‘hello’) that became the accepted norm, replacing Bell’s greeting of ‘ahoy’.
The carbon buttons would be Edison’s entry point into the American Eclipse story through astronomer Samual Peirpont Langley. Langley became interested in science as a young boy when he would hold his hands up to the sun and wonder how the rays made them warm and where the heat came from. This early interest was the first basis of his later career studying the radiant heat of our star using a sensitive electrical thermometer called a thermopile. Seeking an instrument that was even more responsive than his thermopile, Langley asked Edison for help: “If you could make something . . .say one hundred times as sensitive, you would not perhaps produce anything commercially paying, but you certainly would confer a precious gift on science.” This suited Edison fine as he always considered himself a ‘discoverer’ of useful things and not just a ‘crass promoter’ seeking to capitalize on other’s discoveries.
Asked by a journalist, “Have you made any recent improvements or discovered any new applications of your instruments?” Edison revealed how he planned to enter the astronomical field. He told the reporter, “Well, nothing recently, so far as the phonograph is concerned. Night before last,I found out some additional points about the carbon which I use in my carbon telephone. It may be used as a heat measurer. It will detect one forty-thousandth of a degree Fahrenheit. I don’t know but what I can make an arrangement by which the heat of the stars will close the circuit at the proper time automatically and directly. It is a curious idea on this miserable little Earth, isn’t it? But I do not think that it is impossible.”
Edison christened his new device a tasimeter (tas-sim-i-ter) from the Greek for ‘extension’ and ‘measure’. The device used a carbon disk compressed between two metal plates attached to a battery. A rod of vulcanized rubber was set in place to push against the carbon when heat caused it to expand. In demonstrating the tasimeter, Edison now claimed it was accurate enough to measure the millionth part of a degree Fahrenteit (and twenty-fold increase in his previous prediction of fifty-thousandth of a degree made a month earlier). Not wanting to be seen as a huckster profiteering from his inventions, it is interesting to note the demonstration was done before a select audience invited to attend after a musical performance held in New York’s entertainment district that featured his phonograph in concert with a pipe organ and trumpet.
During this press event at Irving Hall, the Wizard of Menlo Park explained that by focusing starlight gathered with a telescope into the tasimeter, one could measure the tiny amount of heat arriving from a far-off celestial body.
Though Edison’s friend George Barker was unable to secure a spot on the Congressionally funded trip west organized by Simon Newcomb, he was able to find a slot in a private eclipse expedition being assembled by New York University professor Henry Draper. Draper was also acquainted with Edison and invited ‘the Wiz’ to visit him. Edison replied, “I will try and call at your place and see how you peek at the almighty through a keyhole.” After accepting Draper’s invitation to join the eclipse party, Barker then invited Edison who accepted. Edison had been stressed by a furor over a theory involving something he called ‘etheric force’. It would take too long to explain this episode but suffice to say in the era of snake oil remedies and magical devices, Edison didn’t always hit home runs. ‘Etheric force’ was one of those times he struck out. The trip west was seen as a way to distance himself from the uproar his ‘etheric force’ idea had caused and to test his tasimeter.
There was only one major problem with the tasimeter: he had assembled the internal components, but he had not yet assembled a complete device. From his demonstrations, it was also clear such readings from such a sensitive instrument could be unduly influenced by things like the body heat of the person operating the device. The heat from a human hand held up in line with the tasimeter at a distance of 30 feet would cause the needle to swing wildly to the right. Edison staked his reputation on a device that didn’t actually exist, yet he proposed using it to measure the heat of the Sun’s corona during the eclipse. He had little time to experiment with it before he headed west. One of his distractions was a public spat with an inventor in London who designed something he called a microphone that worked on the same principles of the carbon phone (Edison accused David Hughes of ‘stealing’ his invention). On July 13, Edison left his family to meet up with the rest of the expedition in New York.
The Draper party set up shop at a home next to the Union Pacific railroad station in Rawlins, Wyoming. Thomas Edison needed a shelter to house his telescope and apparatus and the only suitable one was the homeowner’s chicken coop. With the prairie winds buffeting the structure, they spent a good deal of time trying to shore up the building to prevent the constant shaking from disrupting the readings he hoped to obtain. As the final thirty seconds of totality ticked away, the wind abated and Edison was finally able to focus his telescope and device on the corona. The needle shot to the right indicating there was indeed heat being emitted by the Sun’s crown, but the device was too sensitive to get an accurate measurement. Edison was ecstatic – he had proven his tasimeter worked and even though the wind picked up again, preventing him from trying to get another reading, he had what he came for.
The press breathlessly reported Edison’s success with the tasimeter – everything Edison did was newsworthy. Conflicting reports, however, said ‘it was an unqualified success’ and ‘Edison’s tasimeter failed to work satisfactorily’, sometimes in the same dispatch. The Wizard went so far as to say the instrument was so sensitive that it might be used to discover the heat of stars too faint to see with the human eye. Unheard of at the time and not privy to what would be achieved in the future, Edison had more or less predicted the invention of infrared telescopes – devices that a century later would be used to ‘see’ through interstellar dust clouds and discover hidden galaxies that eluded detection with conventional telescopes. Edison assured all he could refine the tasimeter’s calibrations to make it a valuable scientific tool.
In the end, Edison declined to patent his invention. He felt it would only be of interest to scientists (meaning ‘no real commercial value’) so he allowed companies in London and Philadelphia to manufacture them royalty-free. Ultimately, tests revealed the tasimeter to be too erratic for quantitative measurement purposes, and it was soon abandoned and forgotten.
About two miles west of the Continental Divide, Battle Lake sits among the Sierra Madre Mountains of southern Wyoming. A bronze plaque next to State Highway 70 commemorates Edison’s next, and perhaps most famous, invention. After the eclipse observing party left Rawlings, George Barker, Edison, and a group of men took time to go fishing. Some fifty years later, Robert Galbraith (the Union Pacific railroad mechanic who had loaned Edison his chicken coop during the eclipse) related the events depicted on the historical marker: “After we had been [at Battle Lake] about three days, one morning at the breakfast table, Edison was asked by Professor Barker ‘Well, Tom, how did you rest last night?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t thinking about resting. I lay and looked up at the beautiful stars and clear sky light, and I invented an incandescent electric light.’” Barron points out later versions explained Edison had been inspired by the burning fibers of a bamboo fishing pole – the brightly burning strips of wood giving him the idea of a heated element in a glass bubble to produce electric light.” It is a fanciful story passed down by locals to remember the Wizard’s stay in Wyoming.
Edison detailed the invention of the light bulb with one of his own quotes: “I didn’t fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.” Some misapplied his answer to a question about finding a way to store electricity in a container, he replied, “I now know 999 different ways that won’t work.” What we do know is these accomplishments awaited him back in Menlo Park after the Great American Eclipse of 1878.
It has been 146 years since the Great American Eclipse. On April 8, 2024, over 20 million Americans will get a chance to see the next Great American Eclipse. The path of totality on April 8 will stretch from central Texas to the Michigan / Ohio border and on to Maine. Those living along the shore of Lake Superior will see anywhere from 85 percent coverage (Sault Ste, Marie) to 70 percent (Duluth, MN). Coverage for the Ontonagon Country area will be about 75 percent, but remember, NEVER look at the Sun, even in eclipse, without approved glasses designed to protect your eyes. Damage to the retina does NOT heal like a cut on your finger!
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