Professor Einstein, the chief developer of the theory of relativity, has been quite anxious that eclipse observations be made to decide the question of the existence or non-existence of such a deflection of light when passing thru a strong gravitational field.
—William Wallace Campbell, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 1914
SAMUEL WILLIAMS MAY have headed the world’s first and best-funded eclipse expedition during wartime, but that wasn’t the first time a solar eclipse visited the planet during a period of fighting. Wars are too common. It’s believed that as early as 585 BCE fighting between the Medes and the Lydians at the Battle of Halys ceased during a total eclipse and a truce was agreed upon. If the 1912 eclipse had appeared as an omen of the Titanic’s misfortune, this eclipse of 1914 looked as if a heavenly finger had traced a line across the war zone. But in the western countries, most people were not thinking about the upcoming eclipse. They were concentrating on the chess moves by their governments and waiting to see what would happen. Before Germany declared war on Russia, the astronomers who were already in Russia went ahead with their plans. Down along the path of totality, from Minsk to Kiev to Theodosia on the Black Sea, the teams began arriving and setting up their camps.
When Heber Doust Curtis, a former Greek and Latin professor turned astronomer, arrived in Kiev on July 11, the war was still a rumor. Having traveled ahead with the Lick instruments, Curtis was frustrated to learn that many officials and local scientists were enjoying their summer vacation and were thus away from the city. He found assistance from the Kiev Circle of Amateur Astronomers, however, and began preparing for Campbell’s arrival ten days later.1 Finding a home for the team meant turning down generous offers of lavish estates and villas, including one from the court chamberlain to the czar, all for free and including travel and labor. It was an honor, after all, to have these astronomers as guests. But the fact that those homes sat several miles from the path of totality meant they were too far away. Campbell wanted his campsite to be at the place of action and to be self-sufficient. Perhaps he had learned a lesson at the 1900 eclipse that he and Charles Perrine had viewed in Georgia. He referred to his landlady as “a terror.” Perrine had even come down with a case of food poisoning so serious he bled internally and was barely able to perform his tasks. Campbell had learned the hard way not to rely on outside resources when it came to food and water. His campsites were well stocked and as comfortable as possible.
Kiev was a modern city with half a million people, so the offer of a dacha at Brovary, twelve miles northeast and right on the eclipse track, proved the perfect site. The home sat on eleven enclosed acres with plenty of protective fruit trees and hardwoods. The expansive lawn provided ample room for the tents that would protect the instruments, and there were barns and a cellar if extra storage space was needed. The greenhouse had an underground compartment used in winter; this windowless room was quickly converted into a darkroom for developing the plates. The judge who owned the estate had been transferred to another district, and his wife was leaving shortly. Since the two-story residence would be empty, it was also available to the team. This meant they could dispense with setting up a kitchen and dining tent. Coming with the dacha was a domestic staff to help Elizabeth Campbell oversee household duties, which included boiling all drinking water, another of her husband’s expeditionary rules. Also in the deal was a German-born cook who had been in Russia for so many years that her German was rusty.
The place was perfect, and Curtis rented it at once. The 4½ tons of equipment, which included the forty-foot telescope, were delivered on July 18. The Campbell entourage—William, Elizabeth, her mother, their three sons, and the sons’ friend Brush—arrived three days later.
The Crimean Peninsula is surrounded by the Black Sea on three sides, with the Sea of Azov bordering its northeast boundary. The Crimean Mountains trail along the southeast coast, just a few miles inland from the water. Before arriving at Theodosia, the steamer from Odessa carrying the British team, the German team, and the Argentinian team stopped at port cities along the coast. At Sevastopol, which was home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the astronomers watched as warships went through their maneuvers. Perrine was impressed with the beauty of the place. “It was the best time of the season along the coast of the Crimea, ‘the Russian Riviera,’” he wrote. It was the Russian Riviera. When railways were laid down in the 1870s, over a hundred thousand tourists began visiting the peninsula annually, either for pleasure or to seek cures for tuberculosis and other ailments.2 Many came to Yalta, which is where the steamer carrying the teams stopped next. Perrine described it as “the most beautiful and most renowned of all that region, where the Tsar’s summer palace is located.”3
Germany was still a week away from declaring war on Russia when the ship arrived in the early morning hours at Theodosia, on Crimea’s southeast coast. As the crow flies, this was about five hundred miles southeast of Campbell’s rented dacha at Brovary. The three teams immediately began the search for a perfect area to set up their camps. By noon, they had found one, in a vineyard on the slopes of a hill two miles northwest of the city. Theodosia, with a population of about thirty-five thousand, lay twelve miles from the center of the umbral path and thus would have three seconds less viewing time during totality. The astronomers had decided early on that such a minor forfeiture of time would be worth the conveniences of town. Now that they had their campsite, they looked for a suitable house to rent. When a resident offered them an empty bungalow that stood only a few hundred feet from the vineyard, they spent the next five days furnishing it to suit their needs. A local couple was hired to help with the household chores, to buy food supplies, and to cook daily meals for the group of ten.
Many expeditions from Europe had come to the Crimean Peninsula and were set up in or around Theodosia, including ones from Russia, Italy, France, and Spain. From Germany were four teams, including Freundlich’s. From England, and sharing the vineyard campsite with Perrine and Freundlich, was the team from the Solar Physics Observatory. With astrophysicist Hugh Frank Newall was his wife, Margaret, an accomplished pianist. His three team members included Frederick Stratton, also an astrophysicist and a temporary officer in Britain’s army reserve, Charles Pritchard Butler, their senior observer, and R. Rossi, an Italian volunteer who had joined the group as they came through Trieste. Newall, who had gone to Algiers for the 1900 eclipse, also enjoyed traveling on the same steamer to Sumatra with Dyson and the amusing Atkinson for the 1901 eclipse. He had become director of the Solar Physics Observatory a year earlier, and Stratton was made his assistant director.
All of the instruments that the British party had shipped ahead were safely stored and waiting for them in warehouse sheds at customs. The party had the cargo transferred by horses and wagons up to the vineyard. The teams decided that Perrine and Mulvey would share the bungalow with the British. Freundlich and his two colleagues would find rooms in the city less than a mile away. But they would join the others for “mess,” which meant a diverse group around the table for daily meals.
Perrine had brought from Córdoba his capable engineer and designer, the Indiana-born Mulvey. The instruments they shipped from Córdoba to Crimea included their forty-foot telescope, which had also gone with them to Brazil in 1912. As in previous eclipses, they had plans to study the solar corona. But their most important mission was to photograph star fields in the vicinity of the sun to determine any degree of light deflection. It had been a costly expedition for the National Observatory of Argentina to finance, and coming on the heels of the failure in Brazil, it was not a popular venture back in Córdoba. Much was riding on good weather. But advance climate reports had depicted Theodosia as an excellent spot, with frequently clear skies and the sun higher there on the horizon during the eclipse. The problem was that there was no sign yet of the instruments that had sailed from Genoa without them. As they waited, Perrine and Mulvey concentrated on getting the piers built.
Freundlich must have been jubilant. For almost three years now, he had championed Einstein’s groundbreaking work. The astronomer had solicited others in Europe, North America, and South America, hoping to enlist them in the cause. He had remained unwavering during the increasing criticism from German scientists who dismissed Einstein’s theory. He had even held fast during the growing disapproval from his own director at the observatory. Hermann Struve believed that Freundlich needed to concentrate on his job. Now here Freundlich was, as prepared as possible and about to witness his first total eclipse. With him to Crimea had come two capable colleagues, Walter Zurhellen, also from the Berlin-Babelsberg Observatory, and R. Mechau, an optical engineer who worked for the Zeiss company.
Charles Davidson and the chief assistant, Harold Spencer Jones, set up camp near Minsk, about nine hundred miles northwest of Crimea. Dr. and Madame Kodis, the chief surgeon of the town and his wife, a volunteer nurse for the Red Cross, had kindly offered the Englishmen their country villa, three miles from the city. Sitting on a swell of hill surrounded by flat land and with a large garden, the villa provided a perfect location. The amateur astronomer along with the team, London solicitor Patrick Hepburn, would assist by taking photographs and changing the plate holders. Davidson’s program was the same as it would have been in Brazil two years earlier with Eddington, had they not been rained out. But he was still concerned only with the solar corona and the flash spectrum, not with Albert Einstein.
Within days of his arrival, William Campbell noticed that bad weather seemed to be the norm for that part of Russia in August. It was often cloudy, even rainy, around the eclipse time of day. Mid-totality at Kiev had been estimated at 2:47 p.m. Campbell knew that weather reports could be unreliable, and information from Russia had been difficult to obtain. But he was confounded by just how unreliable the reports he had been given were turning out to be. They had predicted that the cloudiness factor would be higher—6.8 on a scale of 1 to 10—in both Sweden and up north at Riga, where the eclipse would first enter Russia.
The farther south one traveled in the country, the better the odds of less cloud cover. Kiev, near where Campbell’s dacha sat, was six hundred miles southeast of Riga. Theodosia, on the Crimean Peninsula, was another five hundred miles southeast of Kiev and registered very low, with a 2.3 factor. That’s why the peninsula was now crowded with eclipse expeditions from all over Europe. Campbell had chosen Brovary, near Kiev, and yet every day brought rainstorms or cumulus clouds. At sunset, the clouds dispersed and the nights were perfect. As the Campbell team waited for August 21, there was no single day in Brovary with decent weather. But it was still early. Perhaps by midmonth, the days would break clear in the early afternoons and stay that way until the eclipse was over.
Down in the vineyard at Theodosia, the teams headed by Newall, Perrine, and Freundlich had a different kind of problem. Their enemy was the wind. Shortly after arriving, they had noticed that if the wind came from the southwest, it tended to bring cumulous clouds with it. Around noon, the clouds would form on the mountain peak near the small town of Staryi Krym, some fifteen miles distant. This sizable feature, Agarmysh Mountain, lay in almost exactly the same azimuth as would the sun during totality, the same arc of horizon. By afternoon, or eclipse time, the clouds would be blown in broken, gray masses across the sky. Often, they were followed by angry thunderstorms. But if the wind came from another direction on August 21, then the chance of a brilliantly blue sky was almost guaranteed. Two years of planning and considerable expense now rode on the direction of the wind.
Another kind of storm was also building. On July 28, the Austro-Hungarian Empire invaded Serbia. Throughout the Russian cities in the path of totality, all of the individual teams had been noticing signs of growing tension as the country mobilized. At the dacha, the Campbells watched crude wagons creaking past as the carts carried the local husbands and fathers, sons and brothers into Kiev, one of the main mobilization depots. Following along behind were priests with glittering icons in their arms, blessing the soldiers as they went. Stoic and patriotic, the women said goodbye to their husbands as they comforted the children. “It was already a tragedy for these peasant women,” Campbell wrote, “left behind to gather in their little crops for the winter. And we could but recall that this same tragedy was doubtless at that time being multiplied ten thousand fold by similar scenes in nearly every square mile of Europe.”
In all the cities, the astronomers were impressed with the orderliness of the Russian mobilization. Troop trains now passing through Kiev began to number forty a day. The same was happening at Minsk. At Theodosia, the soldiers sang patriotic songs as they marched to the trains that would carry them away to possible death. War was in the wind, and it was being blown in all directions. The four teams of German astronomers in the country were warned that Russia was not responsible for their safety if they remained to view the eclipse. On the morning of August 1, the German ambassador to Saint Petersburg, representing the German Empire, issued a declaration of war. Germany had regarded Russian mobilization as an act of aggression and had retaliated. Now war was no longer a whispered speculation.4
That summer, Frank Dyson and Arthur Eddington had sailed on the Ascanius to Australia, as part of a seventy-member advance party for the BAAS meeting. They would give lectures and enjoy the sights until the forum officially commenced. For five years, Australia had planned a grand welcome, with placards going up in shops windows to announce the lectures. Hansoms, taxis, and private autos would meet the ships and fetch the scientists to their hotels or the private homes that welcomed them. The sea voyage from Liverpool via the Suez Canal would be over thirteen thousand miles. By the time the advance party landed at Perth, on the western coast, the two ships carrying the rest of the members were already many days at sea. The usually optimistic Dyson was now apprehensive. The news being transmitted to his steamer had been all about the mess in Europe. He worried about his astronomers, Davidson and Jones, who were in Russia. “The war and rumour of war is very dreadful and makes me wish I was home,” he wrote to his wife. “The papers say that the Stock Exchange is closed, and that prices are going up; so I am afraid you are having a very anxious time in England. Perhaps things are exaggerated, but the idea of England and Germany being engaged in a war over some trumpery Austrian and Serbian question seems too ridiculous for words.”
At Perth, Eddington gave a lecture titled “The Stars and Their Movements” to an absorbed crowd of four hundred. The next day, August 2 in Australia, Dyson stepped out for an evening stroll. On a placard in front of a newspaper office, he read the words GERMANY DECLARES WAR. On which country? He, Eddington, and the others could only assume it was Russia. The paper would not be printed and available until 6:30 the next morning. The astronomer royal wrote again to his wife that same night. “How you will get on, I don’t know, but am afraid you will have difficulties with money and prices. If England declares war, I don’t know how I am to get back.… This won’t reach you until the beginning of September, and no one knows what may happen before then.” Dyson was the father of two sons and six daughters by this time, the youngest girl having just turned a year old.
Eddington also wrote home while still in Perth. “We heard definitely of the war between Germany and Russia. Everyone here seems to take it for granted that England will join in. It all seems incredible. We are anxiously awaiting news.” They didn’t have long to wait. Back in Europe, on August 2, Germany invaded neutral Belgium. Great Britain protested this act as a violation of the 1839 Treaty of London and quickly gave Germany an ultimatum to leave Belgium. When the German imperial chancellor asked the English ambassador why England would go to war over “ein fetzen papier,” a scrap of paper, Winston Churchill would get the fight he had hoped for.
As Dyson and Eddington sailed out of Perth, bound for the official opening of the meeting in Adelaide, breaking news was telegraphed to their captain. On August 4, England had “joined in” by declaring war on Germany. This declaration bound all British dominions to follow suit, Australia being one of them. The seven German scientists and one Austrian who were at that moment sailing to Australia to attend the meeting would now be coming ashore in enemy territory. The mood at the meeting, however, was one of friendship, with toasts being raised to science, not war. Sir Oliver Lodge, the group’s previous president, gave a conciliatory speech and read the welcoming telegram from the governor-general. While many members were obliged to change their plans and return home, the rest would be shown Australia’s hospitality. Among the honorary degrees given out that night were one to a visiting German, the brilliant geographer and geologist Albrecht Penck, and another to Lodge. The aura of camaraderie would not last.5
Campbell and Curtis found Russian volunteers who had not been called away to the military. But the automobile the team needed to transport everyone to the dacha for the important drills had been called away. Now any civilian needed a permit to ride in a car on Kiev streets. Another impediment was that the 2,500-foot Nicholas Chain Bridge, a suspension bridge over the Dnieper River, was often closed for marching troops and the movement of heavy artillery. Campbell’s “self-sufficient” campsite had been disrupted. But he understood that these inconveniences were due to war restrictions. The Russian government had been as hospitable as it could be, otherwise. The local peasants were also kind and unassuming. Still, the Campbell team members wondered if their American presence, added to a total eclipse that would turn the world to darkness, and the outbreak of war, might set the residents in a panic against the foreigners. The local authorities issued brief proclamations explaining the upcoming event, which somewhat eased the team’s worries. But the district police chief went as far as to warn that children should be kept inside and cattle not allowed to go to the fields.
The Russian military turned up at the dacha one day because of what Campbell would call “international complications.” The soldiers had come for the Berlin-born cook who had been part of the dacha deal and for whom the Campbell crew already had a great deal of fondness. The Americans knew that her German was rusty and that she couldn’t read or write any language, and they hoped those shortcomings would work in her favor. But she was arrested under the general rule that applied to all subjects born in Germany or Austria. “The arrest of this energetic character left such a gap in the internal economy of the camp,” Campbell wrote, “that all our influence and that of our Russian friends was at once exerted, with the result that after four days she was brought back rejoicing to a welcoming camp.”
This Lick expedition had started out as an adventure for the Campbell sons and their good friend Charles Brush. Even with the bedrooms in the dacha available to them, the four young college men chose to erect tents on the large lawn and sleep out under the stars, nights being in perfect contrast to the cloudy, rainy days. When the eclipse was over, Campbell planned to show his sons some of Europe’s great observatories. He and Curtis put the boys and the volunteers through their drills as they waited for August 21 and hoped for clear skies. As it was, not one day so far had indicated good weather for success. Clouds and war were not what they had come to Russia expecting to find. All they could do was pray.
Shortly after arriving in Theodosia, Perrine, Freundlich, Newall, and the others had watched as ominous red mobilization notices went up along the streets, on lamp posts and in shop windows. The pebbled beaches of the Russian Riviera would see different days as the steamers loaded with tourists slowly vanished. With the country now mobilizing, most of the qualified men in all the viewing cities—the astronomers had expected to find their volunteers from these ranks—had disappeared to become soldiers. Automobiles were seized for military usage, and any available gasoline was commandeered. Even horses that the scientists were depending on to pull the carts, once the instruments arrived, were called into service if the animals were worthy.
But a bigger problem lay in the fact that three of their friends at dinner each night, and beside them in the vineyard each day as they made ready for the eclipse, were German. Two more German groups were expected to arrive soon, from Munich and Potsdam. Another team from the Hamburg Observatory was already set up fifteen miles to the west, in the small town of Staryi Krym, where the mountain liked to catch the clouds. Freundlich had to have known the dangers of going to Russia, given that a possibility of war with Germany was resting on the horizon. He had just turned twenty-nine years old. In his enthusiasm to be personally involved at last with Einstein’s theory, he had gone anyway.
Caution had become the daily mantra as the astronomers waited to see what would happen next. Worried residents in Theodosia had advised the teams to move down to the city, where they would be safer. After discussing whether they should listen to these “sage counsellors,” the astronomers decided unanimously to stay put. The orderly calm of the Russian troops they saw passing by each day to the trains gave them reassurance. “We followed our own inferences,” Newall wrote of that decision, “and holding quietly to our camp, we gained a wonderful experience in the peace of the vineyards.” Things were soon to change. The same day of Germany’s declaration of war against Russia, the local military authorities sent a notice up the hill to the rented bungalow. Freundlich, Zurhellen, and Mechau—they hadn’t even had time to fully set up their instruments—were ordered to leave Russia immediately.
The Russian authorities also sent word to the members of the Hamburg Observatory team, at Staryi Krym. They were to dismantle the equipment and prepare to leave the country. The two other German expeditions, from Munich and Potsdam, had arrived in Theodosia the day before war was declared. By August 5, all the German teams, as well as any German nationals in the country, had reported to customs in Theodosia. Passports were checked and the teams reassured that they were not accused of any wrongdoing. They were simply being repatriated to Germany. Two days later, when their steamship arrived in Odessa, they were declared prisoners of war and detained there. With the fighting now begun in earnest—the Battle of Liège, the first clash of the war, had started on August 5—what had become of Freundlich, Zurhellen, and Mechau would evolve into rumor and speculation among the remaining astronomers as the days wore on. Some reports had them deep in the Volga region, or at an internment camp up north, or sent by train several hundred miles east to Orenburg. Everyone agreed, no matter where the Germans were, they were prisoners of war.
On August 4, the day that England declared war on Germany, the British vice consul had come at midnight to the bungalow to alert the team from the Solar Physics Observatory. Hugh and Margaret Newall and the two other team members could carry on if they chose to remain in the country. But Lieutenant-Colonel Stratton, the astrophysicist professor, was being recalled, as were other military reservists in Russia as part of the expeditions. Stratton left a few days later for England.
Still at the bungalow with Newall and the others were Perrine and Mulvey, who had not yet received their instruments. Having carried the optical parts with them in their baggage, the men began to improvise scaffolding and tubes as best they could for possible replacements. Adding to the problem, Freundlich’s equipment had been confiscated when the Germans were declared prisoners of war, so it was not at Perrine’s disposal. And yet some of it belonged to the Córdoba Observatory. Carrying on with an expedition under the umbrella of war was a stressful undertaking for all the astronomers in Russia.
The ninth of August brought good news when the customs office at Theodosia received a telegram that the Córdoba equipment had been shipped from Odessa. When it arrived the next day, Perrine and his volunteers were waiting with horses too unfit for the war effort to cart it in wagons up to the vineyard. But a heavy rainstorm had also arrived, making it impossible for them to navigate through the mud and water. The downpour ceased long enough for the team to transport the equipment up to the tents before the rain started again. This time, the storm had such power that it would last two more days. It was recorded as one of the worst to hit the Crimean Peninsula in many years. The deluge washed out bridges and vineyards and flooded local farm fields.
Some good luck also arrived. Two English merchant ships loaded with grain were anchored in the harbor at Theodosia, prevented from leaving on orders by the Russian government. Both captains and several crew members offered their services for the drills and the photographing during the eclipse. More volunteers were found among local residents. The drills began on August 18, and the sailors proved to be skillful helpers. Now, with the instruments in place, Perrine and Mulvey had the largest and most proficient viewing station in Crimea. What they needed on August 21 was wind coming from anywhere but the southwest, if it blew at all. And they needed two-plus minutes of clear sky during totality. Even half of that would do.
Beginning in the cool waters of the Beaufort Sea and advancing with dazzling speed, the eclipse’s shadow crossed Baffin Island, then Greenland and the Norwegian Sea before it moved over central Norway and entered Sweden. Cortie, the “Jesuit astronomer” who had been refused permission to join the English team at Kiev, was ready for it in Sweden. Despite having to report daily to the local police station because neutral Sweden had nonetheless mobilized, Cortie’s impromptu team of himself, another priest, and their volunteers would be fruitful. Only two days of the three weeks they were in Sweden were not cloudy at totality time, just as the ominous 6.8 cloud factor had indicated. But those two days happened to be August 9 and the day of the eclipse. As curious locals gathered respectfully around the roped-off instruments, the two Jesuits captured wonderful images of the solar corona. Capricious as governments, solar eclipses, and the weather can be, this unplanned and rushed expedition to Sweden was highly successful.
The moon’s shadow left Sweden behind, moved across the tip of Finland and eastern Estonia, and then reached land at Russia. With no English team in Riga, the umbra would next visit Davidson, 250 miles down the line at Minsk. He was waiting in the garden of the lovely villa, three miles from town, where his team had set up camp. They had found “four sorry beasts” to pull the carts of equipment when it arrived, and all was ready. Dr. Kodis, the surgeon who owned the estate, and his wife, had been recruited as volunteers. As with the other stations, Davidson had so far witnessed only two days that would be satisfactory for observations. On this day, after a clear-sky morning, the usual cumulous clouds moved in and gathered in earnest.
With the eclipse approaching, the sky was still overcast in patches and the wind was blowing. As clouds moved away from the sun, Jones watched the crescent on the ground glass of the coronagraph. On a sheet of paper, he had marked the lengths for 3 minutes, 2 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds, 20 seconds, and 15 seconds. At 3 minutes, Jones shouted, “Get ready!” It was his signal to the volunteers with the spectroscope to start the exposures for the flash spectrum, and for the others to be on their guard. The first plate was inserted into the coronagraph. At 15 seconds, Jones shouted, “Go!”
Madame Kodis, situated at the metronome, began counting down the seconds, but in French, which the astronomers could understand more easily than Russian. Jones saw the crescent of the sun grow smaller and smaller as Madame Kodis counted, “Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq.” Then, as he watched, the last bright bead—the phenomenon named for Francis Baily, not for Samuel Williams—vanished. Totality had begun just as a mass of clouds drifted in. The wind suddenly slacked. It gave one last gust before it died completely. And then, as if by magic, the clouds parted. The world around the villa fell silent for a few seconds before the insects began chirping and buzzing, thinking it nighttime. Dr. Kodis was not as attentive as his wife. Having been given the job of starting the stopwatch at totality, he forgot. In his defense, he had also been handed a spectroscope to manage, not a stethoscope. He could be forgiven in seeing for the first time the overwhelming spectacle above his villa and garden.
According to Davidson, the darkness during totality was not intense. Both Mercury and Venus shone brightly, as did the sparkling star Regulus, in the constellation Leo, which was visible through the corona. One of the brightest stars in the northern night sky, Regulus was the one that would command attention from Campbell, Curtis, and Perrine during this eclipse. Relying on Lick’s extensive experience with intra-mercurial plates, Curtis had, the year before, published an article that detailed for interested astronomers how to photograph the eclipse during the 1914 event, should they wish to test light deflection according to Einstein’s recently revised theory. He had explained that they must let Regulus guide their telescopes. But as Dyson had written to Freundlich in early 1913, the Greenwich team was not interested in “extremely delicate research,” which might even have been “quite beyond present possibilities.”
Davidson was lucky. Through this break in the clouds, his team captured good photographs. In the town of Minsk, three miles away, a colleague who hoped to sketch the corona had been clouded out. But Davidson was not interested in light deflection. Not yet.
A few minutes and 270 miles farther on, the eclipse shadow reached the dacha near Kiev. The 4½ tons of Lick instruments—Campbell proudly referred to his expedition as “powerfully equipped”—had long been set up on the lawn, and the drills run. The forty-foot telescope, which Campbell would oversee, was mounted and ready to take large-scale photographs of the corona. The polarizing photometers were ready. The one-prism and the three-prism spectrographs were ready. The objective grating spectrograph was ready. The ultraviolet objective spectrograph was ready. The moving-plate spectrograph for the flash spectrum was ready. The Floyd telescope, with its five-inch aperture and seventy-inch focal length for smaller-scale photographs of the corona, was horizontally mounted and ready. The extra-focal photometers were ready. The chronograph, connected to the forty-foot telescope for recording the times of second and third contacts, was ready. Four cameras, each with a three-inch aperture and a focal length of eleven feet, four inches, were also ready.
“As Regulus was very favorably placed, slightly over a degree from the eclipsed Sun,” Campbell wrote in his report, “a fifth lens of the same size and focal length was mounted with the other four, having an ocular provided with cross-wires, and set by calculation so as to have Regulus central when the Sun’s image was central on the large plate; it was hoped to be able to use Regulus in this way as a guiding star, to insure perfect roundness in the star images.” The mounting of the fifth lens was Curtis’s responsibility. All the volunteers assigned to the other instruments were set to perform their rehearsed jobs. The signals before totality, and the counting of the seconds, would be given by the Campbell’s youngest son, Kenneth.
Of the last eight Lick Observatory expeditions, seven had been major successes. This good record was due to staff decisions to bypass many viewing opportunities if conditions there seemed unfavorable. And the decisions had been proven right over the years. Having planned this trip on unreliable weather reports, Campbell needed luck on his side more than ever. He and his former right-arm, Perrine, and Curtis were known for the experience and skill that had amassed for the Lick Observatory the finest collection of eclipse observations in existence. The comparison plates had been done earlier at Mount Hamilton with the same instrument setup as in Russia and with exposure times of the same length, as needed. The Lick expedition was more than ready.
The Campbell sons and Charles Brush were at their stations. As usual, Elizabeth Campbell was also assisting. As they watched the cumulus clouds gather overhead, they waited nervously. The storm that had swept first over Cortie’s team in Sweden and then down to Riga had passed quickly enough that it left behind clear weather for those lucky astronomers. But the tail of that same storm now reached the Brovary dacha at exactly eclipse time. The sky was completely blocked by clouds, a heavy gray blanket. “Nothing could be seen of the Sun,” Campbell wrote, his disappointment lacing every word, “and no observations of any sort could be made. Ten minutes later a little might have been secured thru a cloud gap, and one hour later the region about the Sun was beautifully clear.”
The forty-foot telescope from Córdoba was pointed like a giant finger at the heavens. Perrine had brought with him an impressive array of instruments, including the camera mounts and frames made of wood, not metal, as they were at other observatories. He was convinced that wood could better tolerate the drastic temperature drop that occurred during totality, and he had been ready to prove it in Brazil in 1912. The brilliant James Mulvey had designed and built the mounts back at Córdoba, with a clockwork system for motion tracking. Mulvey had also invented a new speed-control system. Much preparatory work had been done in Argentina to ready the instruments for shipping and for faster installation once the team arrived in Theodosia.
After the rains stopped, the two men had worked hard in the Crimean heat to set up camp. But at least the climate was such that Perrine did not suffer from asthma attacks. Their camp in the vineyard was close to Newall and his English team from the Solar Physics Observatory. A camaraderie often developed among like-thinking astronomers who traveled the world together. And these two men had eaten their meals at the same table each day, even slept in the same bungalow each night. While Perrine and Newall could not have come from more dissimilar backgrounds—Newall was the son of famous Scottish engineer and astronomer Robert Stirling Newall—they spoke the same language. They were able to discuss their work and their concerns about the war. They hoped that Erwin Freundlich and the others would be safe, wherever they were interned. And they talked about what kind of weather they might expect on eclipse day.
On Friday morning, after an early breakfast, the men from both teams went into the vineyard to make the final adjustments on their instruments. Newall commented on the wind. It was coming from the southwest, exactly the direction they had hoped against. But the day was still clear and the sky blue. Maybe the wind would change. It didn’t. At 10:00 a.m., a cluster of gray clouds began to gather around the mountain’s peak at Staryi Krym. By noontime, they had broken free and were floating lazily in the direction of the vineyard. The sky overhead was soon filled with them. Perrine and Newall could see that the sky just a mile or two to the north was perfectly open. The eclipse would begin at 3:20 p.m. Newall was still optimistic. “Our only hope lay in the unlikely chance that the total phase would be visible in a small patch of blue sky between the masses of cloud.”
Perrine told the volunteers to take as many photographs between cloud patches as they possibly could. Even though a mist seemed to cover the sun’s surface, many shots were indeed taken. The photographs would not amount to much value compared with those successful images that Perrine and Campbell had captured at Lick expeditions in the past, or even those taken at other viewing stations in 1914. The Italians, for instance, down in the town and just three miles from the vineyard, were successful. And so was a nearby French team. But these Italian and French astronomers had probably never heard of Albert Einstein. Imperfect though they were, Perrine’s photographs nonetheless come attached with historic value. They were the first ones taken in an attempt to verify light deflection according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
A half hour after totality was finished, so was the wind. The sky over the vineyard was clear and blue and remained that way for the rest of the day. By then, the moon’s shadow had already reached its destination off the coast of India. The eclipse of August 21, 1914, was over.
Remarkably, many of these post-Edwardian astronomers were world travelers of the highest degree. Once they were done with the questions that lay among the stars, they concentrated on the wonders to be found on earth. They would visit art museums, gothic cathedrals, and ancient ruins. But now, with the outbreak of war, when trains and steamers were commandeered by the military, the teams were only concerned with going home. With forty troop trains a day still running through most cities, civilian trains were rare, especially ones that carried freight. One detail soon became obvious. The valuable instruments, the pride of many world observatories, were not leaving Russia.
Transporting them safely to a place of storage now became a major problem for all the teams. A government official stepped in to secure special passage for the Lick instruments from Kiev to the Pulkovo Observatory in Saint Petersburg. Backlund would safely store them, as he would for many others. But no one knew how long the war would last. It was an expensive cargo to leave behind, and in the future, this restrictive measure would prove costly in more ways than one. The Campbell family had prepurchased their tickets and originally had plans to travel by rail through Berlin and Paris and then by steamer to London. But these plans were now pipe dreams. “For two weeks before we left the observing station,” Campbell wrote, “we gave considerable thought to the problem which was always referred to as ‘getting out.’” He soon found this would not be easy. “Only one passenger train a day ran from Kiev to Moscow, and neither money nor influence could guarantee a seat on this slow and crowded train.”
Yet the Campbells managed to book passage. In Moscow, they heard rumors that even if they reached London, they might not be able to book tickets on an Atlantic passenger steamer, since the vessels were being taken for troop transports. It’s an amazing coincidence, given the chaos of travel arrangements and canceled tickets, that in Saint Petersburg, Campbell would meet up with his longtime friend Perrine and the mechanic Mulvey. Also arriving at this frenzied time were Davidson and his team, who had been successful at Minsk.
Perrine and Mulvey had said goodbye to their English roommates at the bungalow and had left Theodosia on August 25, headed north by train to Moscow. It was time to get out of Crimea. They had just received word that a man who had been caught taking photos of a local arsenal had been accused as a spy and killed in the streets while trying to flee. Berths weren’t available for half of the nearly three-day trip. The two men slept in the passageway aisle of the train, but at least they were on their way out of Russia. They had a long way to travel before they would reach home. Perrine’s firstborn, his son and namesake, had celebrated his third birthday back in Argentina a week before the eclipse. His daughter was eighteen months old. Expeditions were tough on families.
Perrine’s disappointment had to have been deep. His hope now was that Campbell had enjoyed better luck near Kiev. But after a few days spent with Backlund in Saint Petersburg, he met up with Campbell and learned the bad news. However, Dyson’s team at Minsk, the one from the Royal Observatory, had been successful. The realization now settled on Perrine and Campbell. Of the three teams prepared to test for light deflection, none had done so. They would have to wait for the next eclipse, if the war ever ended. And if they could get out of Europe alive. In Saint Petersburg, Perrine had read in the newspapers that the Arlanza, the steamer he was scheduled to take from Southampton back to Buenos Aires, had been sunk off the coast of Brazil.6
The astronomers and their teams had determined in Saint Petersburg that the best way back to England would start with a train ride north to Finland. Troop trains loaded with soldiers and weapons seemed to be everywhere. While the visitors managed to secure passage on the rare civilian train, they were not guaranteed berths. But the three teams—Campbell’s party, Davidson’s party, and Perrine and Mulvey—didn’t care. They were happy to be leaving Russia, much as they had been impressed with the quiet confidence of the troops and local citizens. Coincidentally, the same day they left Saint Petersburg, on September 1, the city was officially renamed Petrograd, a more Russian-sounding name.7 They changed trains in Tammerfors, Finland, for a rail line that would carry them across the country to the west coast. From there, they hoped to book a steamer to Stockholm, which meant traversing the Gulf of Bothnia. With numerous delays and inconveniences—passports had to be checked often by police, and travel permits issued—they were finally escorted from the train in Rauma, Finland, and put aboard a steamer for Stockholm.
Sailing over this body of water rumored to be rife with mines and German U-boats was worrisome. Steamships had their own navigational devices to detect mines, but they also received signals from coastal stations as they steered past the southern tip of Finland to approach Stockholm. Twice, the passengers were called below deck for their own safety. Perrine commented on the unnerving situation: “While we were passing through these channels and between the islands, we were almost continuously watched by Swedish torpedo boats which appeared between the islands, gave us a look and retreated out of sight again.” Only the youngest member of the travelers, Kenneth Campbell, was hoping to see a German warship.
Two days after Perrine and Mulvey left Crimea, the Newall party had emptied the rented bungalow and caught a steamer for Yalta, where they would visit the Simeiz Observatory before heading north to Moscow. As they were passing through customs in Theodosia—they left their many crates and cases there to be stored by agents—they noticed the Hamburg Observatory’s instruments stacked in a corner. The information they were given was that the three older German astronomers had been repatriated from Odessa back to Germany. But Freundlich, Zurhellen, and Mechau had been sent by train to an internment camp in Orenburg, or so it was believed. Rumors were now as rampant as the clouds that had floated over the vineyard.
Arriving in Saint Petersburg days after the other teams had already left by train for Finland, Newall would learn of Davidson’s successful observation at Minsk and Campbell’s disappointing results at Brovary. During Newall’s visit to Backlund at the observatory, he saw the amazing photographs that had been secured by the Russian team in Riga. Newall could only acknowledge, “What a superbly interesting corona we had missed.” He realized that the big mistake in Crimea had been that the teams were set up too close to each other, even in a restricted area. But what Campbell, Perrine, and Freundlich had missed was so much greater: a chance to be first in determining if light had weight.
As Albert Einstein struggled with the remnants of his marriage and further work on his general theory, he wrote to his friend Paul Ehrenfest on August 14 of that same year: “My good old astronomer Freundlich, instead of experiencing a solar eclipse in Russia, will now be experiencing captivity there. I am concerned about him.” While the astronomers who had traveled to Russia would not learn the facts until weeks later, and despite even more false rumors, Erwin Freundlich had fared better than was feared. After examining the situation, the governor of Odessa released seven of the older German team members, including one Danish American who had come with the Hamburg expedition. Within a few days, these men were sent back to Germany.
The governor then telegraphed the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, which had issued letters of recommendation to the astronomers before they came to Russia. The academy quickly renewed the letters at the governor’s request, and he allowed Freundlich, Mechau, and another member of the Hamburg team to return to Germany. However, Zurhellen and the remaining three Germans, being army reservists, were sent to Astrakhan, in the Volga district, where they were not released until a year later. Instruments belonging to all the German expeditions were confiscated by the Russian government and stored at a university in Odessa until after the war. According to some reports, Freundlich was back in Berlin as early as September 3. He had beaten all the British and Americans home.
From Stockholm, the three teams still traveling together—Davidson’s, Campbell’s, and Perrine’s—went to Christiana by rail, the city that is now Oslo, Norway. Once there, they booked passage on the Bergen Line, which had just been completed a few years earlier. They boarded the train in Oslo, sped across the Hardanger Plateau, with its alpine climate, and arrived in coastal Bergen, three hundred miles later. They left Bergen aboard a steamer bound for Newcastle upon Tyne, in northern England, where they expected to arrive on September 7. Again, the dangers of now crossing the vastness of the North Sea during wartime were evident. The ship demanded a lights-out at night policy, with port windows boarded and no smoking on decks. The Titanic still fresh in their minds, the passengers found it impossible not to count the lifeboats, which were there at the ready.
From Newcastle, it would be another train ride down to London, some three hundred miles to the south. Charles Brush Jr. left the party and took a train across England to catch the steamer he had originally booked for return passage to the states. Douglas and Kenneth Campbell, unable to make their previously planned connection to Rotterdam, went back to the states, traveling in ship’s steerage. It had been a world education after all. The remaining four Campbell family members and Curtis; Davidson, Jones, and Hepburn; and Perrine and Mulvey rode south on the train to London, where Campbell cabled Mount Hamilton that all party members were “in good health.” The Englishmen were now home, but the Campbells would spend two less-dramatic weeks before catching a steamer to Boston and then a train across country to San Francisco. They would be back on Mount Hamilton in mid-October. Perrine and Mulvey would sail back to Buenos Aires on the Arlanza after all—its sinking off Brazil’s coast was another “steamer rumor.” As Perrine saw it, “Argentina is currently one of the few quiet places in the world.”
A week after these three teams reached London, Hugh and Margaret Newall were presenting their passports on the quay at Newcastle upon Tyne. Now, everyone was safely out of Russia, even American aviators David and Mabel Todd, who, according to the August 14 edition of the New York Times, were lost there while “chasing the sun.” With the outbreak of war—they could find no airplane to do the chase—the Todds left the continent via Sweden and Denmark.8 Campbell and Perrine managed to visit Dyson at the Royal Observatory. As they waited to say their farewells, they found the city of London serene, except that there were more officers than usual in the restaurants and hotels. But the war was still young. And dozens of the world’s best scientists were still trying to get home safely.
The world was about to change. All three fancy ships the BAAS members had boarded for the long trip to the Southern Hemisphere—the Ascanius, the Euripides, and the Orvieto—had been immediately requisitioned by the local government and turned into troop ships for the Australian Expeditionary Force. The members were now obliged to sail on less lavish steamers back to England, and through dangerous waters. Newspaper accounts told of notorious German cruisers running wild in the Indian Ocean, patrolling the same route the members had to take. Passengers were given restrictions. There would be no lights at night, whether the lights were in cabins, up on deck, or on the glowing tips of cigarettes and cigars. That benevolent aura of goodwill that had embraced the scientists back in Adelaide was fading fast among many of the meeting attendees. Rumors of babies bayonetted by “the Hun” had been in circulation even before the outbreak of war. That it was untrue made no difference. Now reports of German soldiers destroying rare works of art in Belgium prompted many of the intelligentsia to join the anti-German mood of the day.9
Dyson was eager to get back to his family. He and the other passengers feared that at each port stop along the way, they would hear that Paris had fallen. As they passed the Cocos Islands, the steamship rumor was that things were going better for the Allies. At Sri Lanka, when they learned of victory at the Battle of the Marne, hope swelled on the ship. The signs of war became more evident the closer they got to home. At Bombay, Dyson would watch as General James Willcocks came aboard with a large number of Indian officers, all with a cheerful disposition that the war would soon be over. They crossed the Arabian Sea and sailed up the Red Sea to enter the Suez Canal. After reaching the Mediterranean, they were twice boarded by French sailors assigned to destroyers guarding those waters. The refrain among military and passengers alike was “over by Christmas.” But Dyson wasn’t so certain. He had been concerned for weeks about the whereabouts and welfare of Davidson and Jones. Had they been able to leave Russia safely? He wouldn’t know until early October, when he reached Plymouth—the steamer escorted into the harbor by British destroyers—and was finally home again at Greenwich.
With over half the BAAS members leaving after the last meeting, Arthur Eddington was among those who chose to finish sightseeing to the end. Before Dyson left, the group had toured a sugar factory at Brisbane. “It was amusing to see the whole British Association, 150 of us, sucking sugar cane,” Eddington wrote. With Dyson gone, Eddington’s ship, the SS Montoro, began its scheduled stops around Australia as it headed for England. He and the current BAAS president, William Bateson, went exploring for butterflies in Townsville. Bateson was the main popularizer of Gregor Mendel’s ideas, was the originator of the term genetics, and was considered by many to be a militant atheist. Yet he excitedly counted butterflies, “thirteen on one twig, many very fine ones.” Eddington also wrote home of “lizards and fine centipedes.” He was excited to find the skull of a spiny anteater. It wasn’t until the ship stopped in Singapore and 140 British soldiers boarded, on their way to the Western Front, that the war was no longer distant words in a telegraph.
Yet, the sightseeing continued for Eddington during stops along the way, with Buddhist temples in Sumatra and the botanical gardens in Sri Lanka. Unlike Dyson, he was a bachelor and seemed in no hurry to get back to England. He did note in a letter home that the ship, with so many renowned scientists aboard, would be a “fine prize for the Emden.” The SMS Emden, a light cruiser with ten guns, had been built for the Imperial German Navy. The vessel was the most famous and feared on the Indian Ocean, having already captured two dozen ships and torpedoed a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer. All the passengers crossing the Indian Ocean—this was true for Dyson’s ship as well—dreaded the thought of the Emden appearing out of the fog since they were all treading the same waters. Tension was widespread on the decks of civilian ships until the Emden was run aground off the Cocos Islands just as Eddington was arriving back in England.
As Charles Perrine sailed back into the harbor at Buenos Aires on October 3, the Rio de la Plata flowing into the ocean was a welcoming sight from the deck of the Arlanza. Proficient by now in Spanish, he wrote in his notes that the map of Europe would be drastically changed once the war was over. “I will be very optimistic maybe, but I cannot stop thinking that the world is too civilized and the great fundamental laws of nature too powerful for the right of force rather than the force of law to win even in war.” As he and James Mulvey rode the thirteen hours by train back to Córdoba, he wouldn’t know that on his horizon were concerns that no amount of optimism could change.
No doubt speaking for many astronomers who had gone to Russia in 1914, a frustrated William Campbell would remark in his report to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific about the unreliable weather information they had been given. That the maximum cloudiness had occurred at the same time of day as the eclipse spelled certain failure for many expeditions. Had Campbell known this likelihood in advance, Lick would never have sent the expedition to Russia in the first place. “Observers at Minsk, Theodosia, and other places on the line of totality report precisely the same state of affairs, and examination of weather records for the past ten years shows that this is the rule in the summer weather of western Russia.” The conflict between the weather information the Russians provided and actual historical weather data was an astonishing piece of information for any expedition that had spent months in planning and funding and whose participants might have been killed in the outbreak of war.
When Campbell finally realized how the discrepancy had come about, it was a lesson so severe he hoped to apply it to future expeditions. The Russian government had done its observations in the mornings and evenings, when the skies were often beautifully clear. But the total eclipse had arrived in Kiev at 2:50 p.m., in the midst of clouds. It was now obvious that weather observations needed to be done more often during the day, not just morning and evening. And they should be taken three or four years in advance, at the exact hour when future eclipses were expected to occur. There had been a glitch in the information, that’s all.
Campbell’s letter to George Hale, on October 16, 1914, best reflects the heartbreak that can come with courting an eclipse in the early twentieth century: “I never knew before how keenly an eclipse astronomer feels his disappointment through clouds. Eclipse preparations mean hard work and intense application, and I must confess that I never before seriously faced the situation of having everything spoiled by clouds. One wishes that he could come home by the back door and see nobody.”
There were more total eclipses coming.