In your schooldays most of you who read this book made acquaintance with the noble building of Euclid’s geometry, and you remember—perhaps with more respect than love—the magnificent structure, on the lofty staircase of which you were chased about for uncounted hours by conscientious teachers. By reason of your past experience, you would certainly regard every one with disdain who should pronounce even the most out-of-the-way proposition of this science to be untrue. But perhaps this feeling of proud certainty would leave you immediately if some one were to ask you: “What, then, do you mean by the assertion that these propositions are true?”
—Albert Einstein, Foundations of the General Theory of Relativity, 1916
IN HER DIARY, Virginia Woolf jotted down a comment she had made one day during a chat with the poet William Butler Yeats. “Unfortunately, one can’t unriddle the universe at tea.” Another side to that reasoning, amusing and literary though it may be, is that no one had really wanted to “unriddle” the universe, not when it came to an orderly cosmos as viewed through the eyes of Sir Isaac Newton. At least, for over two centuries, no one had done it. The one belief that all prominent scientists of the day agreed on was that the universe was static. It was unchanging and eternal. It took many years for the schoolboy in Albert Einstein to reach the top of Euclid’s “lofty staircase.” He had asked the question, “What, then, do you mean by the assertion that these propositions are true?” With the answer, he had unriddled the universe, at least on paper. And at least for his place in time. But he still needed someone to prove it.
Arthur Eddington’s interest in the final paper, which he saw as pure mathematical artistry, would trigger British interest. Eddington was among the small group of astronomers who, like Karl Schwarzschild, had the mathematical skills to understand what Einstein was proposing. That he believed in camaraderie among scientists was even more good fortune. Not all of Eddington’s colleagues were so academically gracious. The German-born Einstein might have attained Swiss citizenship, but the postmark on his letters was still Berlin.
If the history of discovery is fickle, it can also be enigmatic, and Karl Schwarzschild is a perfect example. Schwarzschild might have been able to unriddle the theory of general relativity earlier than Einstein, had he tried. The Schwarzschild solution is, in fact, the introduction of the first mathematically rigorous evidence to humanity’s consciousness of the concept of the black hole as a phenomenon in physical reality. How had Schwarzschild, under the arduous conditions of serving on a battlefield, and within a year’s time of Einstein’s 1915 paper, managed to conceive of it? It surprised even Einstein, and over the years it has puzzled many physicists who are unaware that in 1900 Schwarzschild had presented a paper at a meeting in Heidelberg: “Concerning the Possible Measure of Curvature of Space.” This paper meant that he had mastered Bernhard Riemann’s mathematics more than a decade before Einstein ever began a similar educational effort. With this longer period of familiarity, then, Schwarzschild had probably acquired a deeper understanding of these mathematical ideas and was able to use it to go beyond Einstein.
With the solution of one puzzle, however, a different one arises. In 1908, after first dismissing the mathematical suggestion of his former teacher Hermann Minkowski, Einstein reversed his direction and declared that Minkowski’s idea of the “space-time continuum” would be the basis of his further progress. If Schwarzschild had heeded this declaration, and as he already understood the necessary mathematics, he could have beaten Einstein in the race to general relativity by almost a decade. The new puzzle to solve is, why did Schwarzschild not do it? Had he not died in 1916 from the disease he contracted in the wartime trenches, we may have gotten an answer. Given the circumstances, it’s likely lost to history.1
Early in 1916, before Eddington received Einstein’s paper from Willem de Sitter, he had been faced with a moral dilemma. In the beginning, Great Britain had relied on volunteers to join the military for a war that was escalating by the day. Given the enormous number of causalities, an all-volunteer military was soon no longer possible. Even with Parliament divided on the subject, the Military Service Act was passed and went into effect in March 1916.2 Religious ministers, widowers with children, and married men were exempt from serving. But single men between the ages of eighteen and forty were liable to be called if needed. By June, married men were no longer exempt, and the service age was raised to fifty-one. Local tribunals were put in place to resolve exemptions being claimed for poor health, domestic hardship, employment of civilian or national importance, and moral or religious reasons. Conscription would pull in 2½ million men while it was in effect and would recognize over 16,000 conscientious objectors, or “conchies” as they were called. Those the tribunals refused to exempt were either put into service anyway or sent to prison. Others who were exempted from fighting took part in noncombatant military jobs.
Eddington, a devout Quaker, was ready to claim exemption on grounds of conscience until Cambridge University—perhaps having a conscientious objector among their ranks during such national patriotism would be an embarrassment—asked the tribunal to let him remain at his post as a matter of national importance. The Ministry of National Service granted Eddington an occupation exemption until April 1918. He was sent a letter asking for his signature. At the bottom, as a postscript, he wrote that if he were not deferred for his occupation and work, he would claim conscientious objection. This unnecessary admission on Eddington’s part put the ministry in a difficult place and caused an angry backlash among many academics at Cambridge. But Eddington’s faith was his faith. He believed that if other Quakers were “peeling potatoes” in camps in northern England, then he should also be doing so.3
H. H. Turner, a seismologist interested in earthquakes as well as an astronomer, was still penning his monthly column for the Observatory. While the column usually related to the life of an astronomer and was often humorous, topics sometimes went beyond that. One Turner article, for instance, mentioned the atrocities that German soldiers were rumored to have committed. It wasn’t the best time for Eddington to resist fighting on any grounds. Many of his colleagues believed that pacifism meant taking the side of the enemy, or as Turner put it, “shrinking from the horrors of war.” Before the war, Turner had been known for his comic entertainment at RAS dinners by reciting light verse and doggerel he had written.
Then let us be glad we’re astronomers born,
Handling a glass from the dusk to the dawn,
All observations and all computations,
And in-vestigations can wait till the morn.
But not anymore. The war was taking a social toll at home, as well as wiping out lives on the battlefronts. But for the time being, Eddington was free to pursue his interests, which now included general relativity. After the publication of de Sitter’s paper on Einstein’s theory that autumn, Eddington knew it was time to act.
As the war blazed on, with casualties mounting on both sides, more and more scientists from England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and France severed all ties with their German counterparts. Eventually, the RAS voted to expel any members of German nationality. Despite this atmosphere, Eddington became the staunchest supporter of general relativity in England. On the heels of de Sitter’s paper, he felt competent enough to present the theory to the members of the BAAS, at a meeting held in Newcastle upon Tyne in early December. But he needed an ally, and this support would come from his old boss at the Royal Observatory, Sir Frank Watson Dyson, the astronomer royal.
Dyson, an expert on double stars, was not a mathematician and was personally skeptical of the new theory. While he knew little about this theoretical physicist in Germany, he did trust Eddington’s talents and instincts, not to mention his enthusiasm. The astronomer royal knew solar eclipses well, having been on four expeditions that had added much to the data of the sun’s corona and atmosphere. He quickly became interested in what the general theory proposed, that light would bend twice what Newton had predicted when it passed a large gravitational mass. Speculative as it was, the theory was certainly important enough in scope to warrant British attention, even in wartime. Dyson knew that the only way to test it would be the way others had tried in the past: photograph the stars during a total eclipse. It wouldn’t be easy. Not only were men scarce during wartime, but money and metal were as well. But if the British were to get in the game, it was time to start planning. Sir Frank Dyson’s voice would hold much sway.
Frank Watson Dyson was born on January 8, 1868, in Measham, a village in the English Midlands in the very heart of the country. He was the oldest son in a family of seven children. His father, Watson Dyson, was a Baptist minister descended from a long line of ministers and farmers. To increase his meager salary of a hundred pounds a year and support his growing family, the Reverend Dyson preached a sermon in Measham on Sundays and then a second sermon later in the day in a neighboring village. Unable to afford a horse and carriage, he was obliged to walk the three miles each way. Dyson’s mother, Fanny, gave music lessons and opened a small school for local girls in the stone house where the minister’s family lodged.
On the night Frank was born, the Reverend Dyson predicted that his first son would grow up to be a senior wrangler at Cambridge and then astronomer royal.4 It was an extraordinary prophesy for a country minister. Astronomy was certainly not among the traditional “learned professions” of that period, such as law, religion, education, and medicine. But the reverend, when still a young boy, had met the astronomer-clergyman William Rutter Dawes—craters on the moon and Mars are named for him—whose family lived in the same village. Frank liked to imagine that the astronomer, who also studied double stars, had let his father gaze through the telescopes at his private observatory. One of the best observers of his day, Dawes had died six weeks before Frank’s birth.
The family moved several times over the years. Like many other families of any period, the Dysons knew hardship. All clothes, even shirts for the four boys, were handmade and passed down as the children grew. The two daughters helped their mother with the daily household chores, which included making drinks, such as nettle beer and raspberry vinegar, from the berries and plants that grew near the house. At a very young age, Frank was made the family babysitter when his parents were away. Once, left in charge of his baby sister, he accidentally overturned her pram and, in breaking her fall, hurt his hand quite badly. For years, he would use the scar that resulted to determine which was his left hand and which his right.
Christmas trees were only for the wealthy then, but the Dyson children could expect sweets in their stockings, and a shiny half-crown that they were to save for something important. Their parents believed in education, and the reverend spent a third of his salary keeping his seven children in school. Frank was already intelligent and vivacious when he started Bradford Grammar School. The headmaster believed in finding the smartest boys in the village, giving them scholarships funded by wealthy Bradford manufacturers, and then sending them on to Cambridge or Oxford.
Frank Dyson excelled in school. At the age of eighteen, he had earned a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. His father’s prophesy on that cold January night when Frank was born was on its way to coming true. But in 1889, he ended up as second wrangler instead, in a close competition with a classmate and friend who became senior wrangler that year.5 Frank had been given a fellowship at Trinity when he met and fell in love with Caroline Bisset Best. Her father was a doctor who had been raised in a saddle shop by a widowed mother. It was a good fit. Carrie, as she was called, was highly intelligent and had studied abroad, learning French and German and earning a degree in modern languages. Frank wrote to his sister, “Undoubtedly, I have found a much better woman than I am a man.” He admired Carrie’s sincerity and down-to-earth sensibilities. She liked to note that the village she had grown up in was similar to Middlemarch, the one in George Elliot’s famous novel of the same title. He preferred this unpretentiousness. Once, when talking to a snob who was boasting about his family lineage, Dyson said that he had traced his own forebears back to a lowly tavern owner and decided to quit there.
On an early summer morning in 1894, the Reverend Dyson married his oldest son to Carrie Best. The new couple moved to Greenwich, where Frank had been appointed chief assistant at the Royal Observatory. The facility sat atop a steep hill on the south bank of the Thames River. But Greenwich didn’t share the pastoral tranquility he had known back at Cambridge. The rising factory smoke of industrialism filled the air, the streets noisy and far from clean, given the numerous horses pulling carriages. Yet the history of the area was rich enough to overlook all that in Frank Dyson’s eyes. The observatory had been designed by Christopher Wren. Eight astronomers royal had lived there, with names like John Flamsteed, Edmond Halley, and George Airy. Nevil Maskelyne, the fifth astronomer royal, had dressed in a one-piece thermal suit made of wool, silk, and linen to keep him warm at night while he observed the stars. Henry VIII had been born in Greenwich, as had his and Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. This was the kind of British history that could rise above the factory smokestacks.
Dyson didn’t know it then, as he searched for a home atop an even steeper hill where he could bring his bride and raise a family, but most of his life would be spent in Greenwich. Besides Sir William Christie, the current astronomer royal, the observatory then employed fifty or so personnel, consisting of astronomers, assistants, computers, clerks, mechanics, and other skilled workers. When his and Carrie’s first child was born the following year, Frank named her Stella, a popular girl’s name among astronomer fathers. He was observing the Leonids when his first son was born, but Carrie refused to let him name the baby Leo, which had been the name of Frank’s beloved childhood dog. In 1905, when he became astronomer royal for Scotland, he packed up his family—he and Carrie had six children by then, one a new baby—and moved them to Edinburgh in the dead of winter.
In 1910, when Christie retired, Dyson returned to Greenwich to become the astronomer royal, the only man to have occupied both posts. He was now living in Flamsteed House, named for the first astronomer royal. Dyson’s father, who had died in 1904, did not live to know that although his son may not have fulfilled his prophesy, he had surely satisfied it.
Arthur Henry Eddington, father to the astronomer, was born in Somerset County in 1850, to Quaker parents. He was descended from tenant farmers who cultivated the nearby fields that had been grazed by cattle. Growing up with a love for books, Arthur Henry followed a different path than farming. After receiving a solid education, which included study in Heidelberg and Paris, he taught at a Quaker training college. In 1878, he moved to Kendal, in northeast England. That summer, he married Sarah Ann Shout, who had been born and raised in Darlington, a small market town not far from Kendall. Sarah’s roots went all the way back to John Camm, an early supporter of Quakerism and a contemporary of George Fox, a founder of the society. When Arthur Henry became headmaster of Stramongate School—the institution was established in Kendal in 1698 by the Society of Friends—the young couple settled down to raise a family. They had two children, first Winifred and then Arthur Stanley, who was born on December 28, 1882.
When Winifred was five years old and Arthur fourteen months, an epidemic of typhoid fever swept through the country. Many people succumbed to the disease, including their father, on February 14, 1884. Later that same year, pathologists would discover that a certain bacterium was the cause of the disease. People afflicted could pollute the surrounding water supply through their stool, which contained a high concentration of the bacteria. The water supply would then contaminate the food supply. And the bacteria could survive for weeks in water or dried sewage. When the Leeds Mercury newspaper published a story about the illness and referred to Kendal as a “Fever Stricken Town,” the Society of Friends took offense.
In January 1885, its monthly magazine, The British Friend, published a letter that referred to the sickness in an attempt to assure readers that the town was a safe place to live. The letter reminded them that in a population of fourteen thousand, only twelve people had died, and the deaths were due to poor sanitary conditions within the home in nearly every outbreak. Of the dozen dead, only one person was mentioned by name, and that was Arthur Henry Eddington, headmaster at the Quaker school. “We regret to say that in the dwelling house belonging to the school serious defects were found, caused, as in so many instances, by carelessness on the part of workmen employed about the drains.” Now that the house had undergone “sanitation,” it had received a glowing report by the government inspector.6
The death of the headmaster at Stramongate had, no doubt, given more credence to the newspaper’s attack that Kendal was an unhealthy town. It was a painful death, and people had good reason to be concerned. In 1884, it was nothing but good luck that two-year-old Arthur, his sister, and their mother hadn’t also died in that house.7
While Arthur Stanley Eddington had inherited his father’s intelligence, he nonetheless grew up without a father’s guidance. Sarah Eddington was now facing the difficulties of raising Arthur and Winifred on meager finances. She moved them to her mother-in-law’s house, in Somerset. Arthur was schooled at home for the next three years before attending preparatory school. A curious child, he tried to count the stars when he was four years old. When he was nine, he borrowed a three-inch telescope and discovered a lifelong passion for astronomy. Two months short of turning sixteen, he was awarded a scholarship by Somerset County at sixty pounds a year for three years and was accepted at Owens College, in Manchester. He was an excellent student with an aptitude for mathematics and literature. With many more scholarships and honors behind him, he was eventually accepted at Trinity College, becoming the first second-year student in history to be named senior wrangler, an amazing accomplishment.
In January 1906, he was offered the position of chief assistant at the Royal Observatory. He would replace Dyson, who had gone to Edinburgh as astronomer royal for Scotland. “My work will be mainly in the daytime,” Eddington wrote to his mother, “but especially during my first year I shall have to observe at nights a good deal in order to understand the instruments thoroughly.” He did indeed come to know the astronomical instruments well. At Greenwich, he also met colleagues who would figure prominently in his future: comet expert Andrew Crommelin and a skilled computer named Charles Davidson.
More importantly, when Dyson returned from Scotland in 1910 to become astronomer royal, he would immediately recognize the mathematical brilliance in the young man named Eddington who had replaced him. These two would spend the next three years working side by side and forging a solid and mutually respectful friendship.8 In early 1913, Eddington was walking the Cornish coast in a drenching rain with his close friend, C. J. A. Trimble, when good news reached him. He had been promoted to Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, replacing Sir George Darwin who had died suddenly a few months earlier. A year later, Eddington’s first book, Stellar Movements and the Structure of the Universe, was published, cementing his reputation as a leader in the field of astrophysics.
Eddington was an enigma to some colleagues, especially as the years passed. He loved classical literature. But he was also a fan of The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, Kipling’s Just So Stories, and the works of Lewis Carroll. Like H. H. Turner, he often wrote his own nonsensical verses. He was a voracious reader. In 1909, on his way to Malta with the task of redetermining the longitude of a geodetic station, he spent time walking the deck of the ship while reading Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote and at the same time preparing for an important lecture. He was familiar enough with other languages that he read original texts by Dante, Molière, and Goethe. Contrary to his Quaker upbringing, he became a pipe smoker, loved the theater, and appreciated the occasional glass of wine when aboard. Unlike many physicists and mathematicians, he had no interest in music until Trimble introduced him to the opera Faust in their post-university years.
Trimble, a mathematician and teacher at Christ’s Hospital school, also never married. He and Eddington had met as students at Trinity College, having in common their working-class backgrounds. Trimble graduated fourth in the class; Eddington first. Nature lovers, they cycled and hiked together on many holiday vacations. Heavy rains, sleet, or blinding snow failed to deter them, even when they went coatless. The nature of their true friendship will most likely remain a secret. Being openly homosexual would not have boded well at Cambridge or any other English institution in those days. Less than a decade before the two men met, Oscar Wilde had gone to prison for his love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. Eddington was a private man, and his privacy remained unreservedly guarded during his lifetime.9
As Plumian Professor, he was also made the observatory’s director upon the death of Sir Robert Ball. Eddington’s mother and sister moved to Cambridge to become his housekeepers and companions. Outside the French windows in his office, he could see the wide green lawns where his sister would keep bees and raise a few chickens. His beloved Aberdeen terrier often sat near his chair, getting its ears scratched as Eddington met with students, a sleeping cat curled on the sofa. Eddington had come a long way from that unsanitary headmaster’s house in Kendal.
Discussions of a British expedition that could take up Einstein’s challenge of photographing starlight during an eclipse began in February 1917. First, they needed a total solar eclipse that would have accessibility and a feasible length of totality. The one coming to the United States in the summer of 1918 would not give the British enough time to prepare, even if the war were over and German U-boats weren’t dotting the Atlantic Ocean. Adding to the already complicated state of world affairs, the United States would enter the fray in April 1917 by declaring war on Germany. But another eclipse, predicted in May 1919, would provide a brilliant spread of stars near the sun, as well as a viewing time of almost seven minutes.
The usual questions arose. Was the Greenwich instrumentation up to standards? Frank Dyson and Charles Davidson had tested the equipment during the 1905 expedition to Tunisia. Eddington and Dyson reexamined those 1905 plates and concluded that the astrographic telescope could do the job. Yet back in 1913, Dyson had replied to Freundlich’s request that the English test for light deflection: “It would be an extremely delicate research to undertake at an eclipse, if not quite beyond present possibilities.” And Eddington had agreed. Now, it seems, British attitudes had changed. But then so had Einstein’s calculations, from 0.87 arc seconds to 1.7, twice the deflection. Eddington pointed out that if the weather conditions were as good as those in Tunisia in 1905—and they had not been perfect—then twelve stars would be brightly visible in the Hyades star cluster. But where would be the best place for an observation?
The May 1919 eclipse would touch South America first at Peru, cross over Bolivia and Chile to reach northern Brazil at sunrise. From there it would sweep across the vast and empty miles of Atlantic Ocean, skirt the west coast of Africa in southern Liberia, and then arc down over Príncipe, a tiny island 120 miles off the coast of Gambia. Cutting across Africa, it would pass over Lake Tanganyika and end near sunset in the Indian Ocean. Arthur Hinks, an English astronomer and geographer best known for the astronomical unit—the unit is the distance between the earth and the sun, approximately ninety-three million miles—was consulted for weather conditions and possible sites to set up stations.10
In a twist that only academia can know well, Hinks had resigned from the Cambridge Observatory in 1914 when young Eddington was offered the directorship after Ball’s death. Hinks thought that the position should have gone to him. But he was competing with a senior wrangler with a degree in mathematics from Cambridge, the top rung in the ladder. He resigned rather than be Eddington’s chief assistant. “They must have been mad to imagine that a man who had had the ambition to do what I had been able to do would be content with an inferior position and no fun all his life,” he wrote to George Hale.11 Hinks soon abandoned astronomy to become secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, where past and present luminaries who hung in portraits from the walls had names like Livingstone, Burton, Scott, and Shackleton. Now, as a geographer and skilled cartographer, and with an impressive background in astronomy, Hinks was called on to assist in planning the expeditions.
On February 23, 1917, Hinks wrote a letter on behalf of the astronomer royal to the secretary-general of the Geographical Society of Lisbon, inquiring about the tiny island of Príncipe, an outpost in the Portuguese Empire. Having pored over whatever library books he could find that mentioned the island, Hinks now needed information from the source. He wanted to know about clouds, writing that, on tropical islands, they tended to form on a central mountain and that one side of the island is usually the clearer:
Speaking generally, it is necessarily desirable to get to the highest point. If one could find a place that was high enough to be above low-lying fogs and at the same time offered facilities for living and supplies, it would be very convenient. Supposing for example that some planter were willing to allow the small expedition to camp near one of his factories, to use an existing building as stores, and to obtain the use of his means of transport and the facilities of a plantation. That would be much more desirable than trying to establish a camp out in the wild where so much time would be occupied merely in the investigation and provision of facilities.
Expeditionary astronomers asked, politely, for a lot. And countries around the world were usually accommodating.
Over the next two months, letters went back and forth between London and Lisbon, with meteorological charts being sent, as well as two simple maps of Príncipe. The secretary-general told Hinks, “I have the pleasure to assure you and to the expedition all facilities from the largest society of planters the Sociedade de Agriculture Colonial.” Attention should be given to the portion of Príncipe that was “marked down in pink on the map,” he added. But no mention was made of those mountains on the island. Hinks wrote a second time, asking the same question: “It happens very frequently in mountainous islands that the central peak condenses moisture which flows away in the direction of the prevailing wind, so that one end of the island will be cloudy and the other clear.”
There was obviously a language problem, with Hinks always writing in English, and the secretary-general replying in Portuguese, except for two short letters that arrived from Lisbon in English. “I know personally the islands of S. Thome and Príncipe and I suppose the S. E. part the most convenient for the instalment of the observers,” wrote the secretary-general. Determined to get his answer, Hinks remained concerned about mountains. He asked a third time: “When there is a central peak it not infrequently happens that to windward is clear and to leeward is cloudy. Further information at this point would be useful.” It would seem likely that in all of London, Hinks could track down a speaker of Portuguese. Or that the secretary-general would know someone who could read and write English. But after a flurry of polite letters, they managed to understand each other. Eddington was fortunate that the man who resigned from Cambridge rather than serve under him cared this much about his expedition. Newall and Perrine could have put Arthur Hinks to good use in Crimea, where they rose each morning to watch clouds gather on the mountaintop at Staryi Krym.12
There would be two annulars and four partials until June 1918, when the next total eclipse would occur and thereby provide an opportunity to test for light deflection. With the war in Europe still crippling funding, not to mention the dangers of crossing an ocean on one of the rare civilian steamers that might be found, all European astronomers were out of the running, and so was the unfunded Charles Perrine in Córdoba. William Campbell, however, peering down from the top of Mount Hamilton in California, would have this eclipse all to himself when it came to light deflection. It was an incredible stroke of luck that the path would cross just north of him. If he could only get his instruments back from Russia, there was a spot along the path of totality that was less than seven hundred miles away, in the state of Washington. Maybe Campbell’s time had finally come for what he called “the Einstein problem.” But now he had another problem, one much closer to his heart, those flesh-and-blood boys who were born and raised on Mount Hamilton.
The war was personal and on everyone’s doorstep. Campbell would become a fervent patriot, soon to decry most things German. “The views of the Observatory community as to the unpardonable starting of an inexcusable war by two irresponsible governments,” Campbell wrote in a report, “and as to the methods, purposes and consequences of Prussian militarism may safely be inferred from the following statements: Every male graduate of the little grammar school on Mount Hamilton who is old enough for war service volunteered for war work in that capacity which seemed best in his sight. Not one waited to be drafted.” The list of volunteers included his three sons as well as the son of the instrument maker, the son of the custodian, sons of astronomers, and astronomers themselves, who, like Curtis, took part as instructors of various departments to train military recruits.
Several of the youngest Mount Hamilton boys had spent the summer of 1917 on farms in Connecticut and California, assisting in the planting and harvest that would add to the food supply, before taking an active part in the war. At Mount Hamilton, all plans for construction—this included a new building to house a central heating plant and shops for instrument-making, carpentry, plumbing, and other needs—were shut down so that the materials and labor could be used toward “the winning of the war.” The women on Mount Hamilton did their share, as women were doing in homes all across the country. They saved food, joined the Red Cross, knitted, and sewed. The universe, filled with its mysterious stars and comets, had to take a back seat.13
Campbell accused President Wilson of “lacking a backbone” for not jumping into the fight sooner. As for William and Elizabeth Campbell’s own three sons, he was proud that they had met the call. Their youngest son, Kenneth, who had hoped to see a German U-boat on the frantic sail across the North Sea in 1914, became an ambulance driver in Italy. He would be awarded for his actions during one battle. The oldest son, Wallace, having graduated from Harvard a year earlier, became a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers and went to the fighting lines in France as a noncombatant. Their middle son, Douglas, and his good friend Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest child of former president Teddy, had a year still to go at Harvard when they immediately dropped out to enter aviation school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As Campbell was writing to Russia, pleading for the return of his instruments in time for the next eclipse, Douglas was the first all-American trained aviator, now an ace flying over France with the likes of Eddie Rickenbacker. The boy who had once killed rattlesnakes on Mount Hamilton was now shooting German airplanes out of the skies over France. Meanwhile, his father was planning an eclipse expedition.
On March 2, 1917, Dyson submitted a two-page article to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He referred to the rich star field that would be observable during the future eclipse of May 29, 1919: “This should serve for an ample verification, or the contrary, of Einstein’s theory.” He noted the need for “observing at as many stations as possible.” Astronomers had long realized this logic in playing it safe. “Unfortunately, the track of the eclipse is across the Atlantic and near the Equator,” Dyson wrote. “Mr. Hinks has kindly undertaken to obtain for the Society information of the stations which may be occupied.” When Dyson received a circular from Henrique Morize that suggested Sobral, in northern Brazil, as a possible viewing station, that town was also considered. Morize was the astronomer-director from the observatory in Rio who had accompanied and assisted Eddington and Davidson for the 1912 eclipse. His letter included meteorological and other pertinent information that the Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee could study.
When the committee met that November 1917, it agreed to send teams to both Brazil and Príncipe. Planning one single expedition during wartime was ambitious enough. Funds would need to be raised, a daunting thought, given that rationing would go into effect in two months and that young men were continuing to die by the thousands. The British either banked on sheer optimism that the war would end before the expeditions set off, or they believed in divine miracles. Application for funding was made to the Government Grant Committee. Would it see fit to allot one hundred pounds for the needed instruments and modifications, as well as a thousand pounds to finance the two expeditions’ travel expenses?14
As chairman of the Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee, Dyson appointed a subcommittee consisting of himself, Eddington, Alfred Fowler—it was Fowler’s 1914 expedition to Kiev that had been scuttled when war broke out—and Edwin Turner Cottingham, an expert clock and instrument maker. The subcommittee met in May and June 1918. The members decided that Eddington and Cottingham would go to a cocoa plantation on the tiny island of Príncipe. Davidson would go to northern Brazil with Father Aloysius Cortie, the Jesuit astronomer who had been barred from Russia in 1914. Davidson and Cortie would set up their viewing station at a jockey club’s racetrack. From those two locations on the globe, over three thousand miles apart, the expeditions would photograph the positions of stars in the Hyades as their light waves passed through the sun’s gravitational field. They would do this if the weather was agreeable.
Praying that his equipment confiscated in Russia would arrive home to California in time for the June eclipse, Campbell had delayed purchasing replacements. Mount Hamilton was under the financial and physical pressures of wartime as it was. With Americans now also dying, it wasn’t the best time for any observatory to buy new equipment. Therefore, he had not yet made the prerequisite comparison plates. But he could take these photographs even after the eclipse, in early winter, when the same stars appeared in the sky away from the sun. Beginning in early 1917, he had written to Russia, asking about the status of shipping his instruments. He was having no luck. Oskar Backlund, his trusted contact in Russia, had died a year earlier. The whole world was a mess. Finally, Campbell learned that the telescopes and other paraphernalia had left the Pulkovo National Observatory, near Petrograd, on August 15, 1917, almost three years after being held hostage. Perhaps now he could breathe more easily. The expensive instruments so vital to the 1918 eclipse observance were on their way.15
Since the shipment was headed to California, it would first need to cross Russia, a distance of some six thousand miles, to Vladivostok, on the Sea of Japan. It’s amazing that it left Petrograd at all. Russia was in greater turmoil. Strikes, demonstrations, and uprisings as part of the Bolshevik Revolution were frequent and often violent. Rasputin had been killed and Czar Nicholas II was warned that he would not have the support of his army in a revolution. He and his family, who had so enjoyed their lavish palace on the Russian Riviera, the one Perrine had admired, would have several months left to live before being assassinated. It was in the midst of this chaos that Campbell’s astronomical cargo reached Vladivostok in mid-December, where a business boycott then prevented it from leaving Russia. With the Lick’s equipment was aviator-scientist David Todd’s instruments, which, thankfully, didn’t include an airplane, since Todd had planned to rent one in Kiev.
The next word Campbell received was on March 22, 1918. The boycott had been lifted, and his telescopes and other devices would leave within a week, bound for Japan on a steamer belonging to the Russian government. One can only imagine his state of mind. If any small thing went wrong from here on out, the shipment would never arrive in time. He began rounding up instruments that were still at the Lick Observatory. Other apparatuses—a break-circuit chronometer, a chronograph, a sextant, a theodolite, a telescope driving clock, spectrograph slits, and prisms—he borrowed from the observatories of local universities. Unfortunately, the lenses he was able to borrow could not photograph a large field of stars in sharp focus, unlike his own equipment.
On May 15, Campbell learned that the cargo so precious to any eclipse scientist would leave Kobe, Japan, “in a few days.” If all went well, it would cross the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. With the eclipse coming on June 8, he packed up his assembled equipment, mostly substandard for such a precise task at hand. He had studied weather reports and found a viewing spot where he would set up camp. Since the eclipse’s path of totality would clip the lower part of Washington State, his team would travel to Goldendale, near the Columbia River Gorge. He had already scouted it out. Even without his instruments, Campbell was a total eclipse ahead of the British.
Feeding a nation of citizens in wartime was an immense undertaking for most countries in Europe. Many people were hungry, and many were starving to death. The laborers and horses to work the farms had mostly disappeared. Yet, men on the lines of battle had to be fed. So did war horses. With German submarines patrolling the waters around England, shipments of grain could not make it into ports. England began to feel the crunch that other countries in Europe had been feeling for months while the war dragged on. As a way to avoid a crisis, food rationing had gone into effect for London only, in early 1918, and then for all of the country by summertime. Topping the list was sugar, followed by “butcher’s meat.” Also scarce were military personnel to continue the fight. Desperate for men at the beginning of the year, when it seemed the war might be reaching its culmination, the Appeal Tribunal for Cambridge came back around in June to revisit Eddington. He had been given three extra months exemption, which would end August 1. Now the war effort needed him.
By this time, Eddington had published his second book, Report on the Relativity Theory of Gravitation. This accomplishment didn’t seem to impress the tribunal chairman, who noted that Arthur’s abilities could be better used in the active prosecution of the war, although the official didn’t see him engaged as an ordinary soldier. To this comment, the astronomer boldly replied, “I am a conscientious objector.” This status didn’t count, since his occupation, and not his conscience, had been the grounds for his exemption in the first place. After months of planning the expeditions, would he now be called into some kind of service for the war effort? The first day of August was still a month and a half away. He and Dyson would have time to call for another hearing, this time on grounds of Eddington’s religious beliefs. Dyson himself served on an Appeal Tribunal for Greenwich. He knew the ropes. Both he and Eddington would prepare a carefully written statement. Dyson was highly patriotic, but having his brilliant astronomer-mathematician peel potatoes rather than test for light deflection on a dot off the coast of Africa was not in his plans. He had a deal to offer the tribunal on Eddington’s behalf.
Two weeks later, Eddington was again before the tribunal. Dyson’s written statement expressing his support had been delivered. Eddington made it clear he was willing to take part in the Friends Ambulance Unit or the Red Cross or even work as a harvest laborer.16 But not in combat. “My objection to war is based on religious grounds. I cannot believe that God is calling me to go out to slaughter men, many of whom are animated by the same motives of patriotism and supposed religious duty that have sent my countrymen into the field.” Eddington spoke his heart that day. “To assert that it is our religious duty to cast off the moral progress of centuries and take part in the passions and barbarity of war is to contradict my whole conception of what the Christian religion means.” And he spoke his thoughts boldly, given the patriotic temperaments of such colleagues as Sir Oliver Lodge and H. H. Turner.
Dyson’s statement focused on the science, on the brilliant strides Eddington had made, which included having penned a first book on astronomy that helped explain the stellar universe to readers in all countries. He tossed a jab at the Germans by writing that Eddington’s exceptional work contradicted the current notion that the most important scientific researches of the day were being carried out in Germany. Perhaps the three men on the tribunal were silently reminded of the great loss of Henry Moseley a year earlier. Then Dyson’s statement got down to business: “The Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee, of which I am Chairman, has received a grant of £1000 for the observation of a total eclipse of the sun in May of next year, on account of its exceptional importance. Under present conditions the eclipse will be viewed by very few people. Professor Eddington is peculiarly qualified to make these observations and I hope the Tribunal will give him permission to undertake this task.”
Eddington then answered questions about the theory from the committee. Light deflection was one test of Einstein’s theory. The stars in the Hyades during this eclipse would be brilliant and thus offer a good opportunity for success. He would make his observation in the path of totality. But if they felt he was better suited in a noncombative job in the military, he would gladly do that, too. The astronomer royal’s petition for his cause would not be taken lightly by the tribunal. In that capacity, Dyson had close connections to the Admiralty. The tribunal voted to grant Eddington another year’s exemption, provided that he maintain his astronomical work. But in particular, he must head an expedition to photograph the stars during the 1919 solar eclipse.
The astronomers went back to work. As the losses of World War I were still mounting, preparations for the British expeditions went full speed ahead.
A solar eclipse expedition was not for slackers. Every member worked hard, regardless of the heat, storms, snakes, ants, mosquitoes, or illness. Elizabeth Campbell once wrote in her diary of her husband’s stamina, commenting on how the local volunteers were amazed at his strength as they watched him rope off the instruments and set up the forty-foot telescope. It was 1898, and they had just traveled over fifteen thousand miles from San Francisco to Bombay, India. They would spend Christmas there before returning home four months later to their boys, ages two and three. The last leg of the outbound journey was a seventeen-day sail from Hong Kong on a ship “headed for the scrap pile,” with the team members seasick from watching their luggage slide about the cabins. Arriving in India, they were turned away from their chosen viewing site because of an outbreak of bubonic plague. Still recovering from the “rotten chow” that had been served aboard the last ship and had made him ill, Campbell went to work at the new site. “He is working from before dawn until after the sun has left the sky,” Elizabeth wrote. “Stones that four men cannot move he lifts with ease. And he is never tired!”
This was the Ohio farm boy who had worked young in the fields to help his mother support a fatherless family. Earlier in 1918, he had quarantined Mount Hamilton to keep his mountaintop community safe from the Spanish flu. Now Campbell was in the state of Washington for the 1918 eclipse. As usual, Elizabeth went with him. He had been only thirty-six years old for the Indian expedition, his and Elizabeth’s first. He was now two decades older and saddled with the business of directing an observatory. He had been chasing light deflection and the general theory since Erwin Freundlich had contacted him in early 1912. He needed this eclipse to be brilliant.
Its path was certainly ambitious after it reached the United States. The tail began in the East China Sea, south of Japan, where American whaling ships had hunted right whales for blubber in the last half of the nineteenth century. From there the path curved up and crossed the North Pacific waters to hit the United States, perfectly positioned between Tacoma, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. It then ran diagonally southeast across Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. It would die out in the British Bahamas, about a hundred miles north of where Christopher Columbus is believed to have made landfall.
Many other observatories in North America had chosen a station along this track, but none would test for light deflection. The trail was lengthy enough that Campbell could take his pick of good spots. He had chosen Goldendale, Washington, a town of twelve hundred souls just north of the Oregon border. It was snuggled between the Cascades to its west and the more distance Rocky Mountains to the east. Campbell had studied weather reports supplied to him by the US Weather Bureau. The Cascades would prevent any coastal fogs from drifting in. But June was not a good month in the Northwest when it came to forest fires. Even if distant, their smoke could drift for many miles. Still, he believed that the Washington location was a good choice.
He worried, however, that the same problem they had in Russia would appear again, no matter where he set up camp. The eclipse was scheduled to arrive at 4:00 p.m., Pacific Time. Were the reports he’d been given for observations taken in the mornings and evenings or at the actual arrival time of the eclipse? If not at eclipse time, it was anyone’s guess what the weather would be during totality. He had considered viewing places in Wyoming and Idaho, both of which would probably be even better atmospherically. But another important factor had held him back, one that was built on sheer optimism. He wanted to stay closer to the Pacific coast because of his en route instruments. What if they arrived at some port close enough that he could still get them to Goldendale on time? Goldendale had railway service, unlike many other towns along the path.
The team members arrived three weeks before the eclipse to begin preparations. The first person Campbell had met in Goldendale, back when he was scouting out the town, was the wife of a wealthy mill owner. Mr. and Mrs. E. R. Morgan and family had moved out of their well-furnished home, a mile to the west of town, so that the Lick expedition could rent it. The house had a cellar with double doors, thick walls, and plenty of shelves to use. It would work well as a darkroom in which to develop the plates. The best gift was that the residence was wired for electric lights from the plant in Goldendale and also had running water from the village. “Here were all the elements for an eclipse experience de luxe,” Campbell would write, stoically, not mentioning that his best instruments were likely to be somewhere in the North Pacific, if they had left Japan at all.
The large group of assistants and volunteers, many with impeccable credentials, set up the instruments on the sprawling lawn. Curtis from the Lick Observatory, having had an early interest in Einstein’s theory, was indispensable on this expedition. Perrine had sent a young assistant, Estelle Glancy, from the Argentine National Observatory. An American and future visionary in the field of optics, she arrived on June 4. At least Perrine was there in spirit. Three days before the eclipse, the team began the drills. The excitement was building to the countdown. The residents of Goldendale treated the astronomers as the celebrities they were, offering every gesture to help, even if it meant staying out of their way. “Contrary to the opinion of the public in general that astronomers seek mountain tops and high points to make eclipse observations,” said the Goldendale Sentinel, “the Lick Observatory is located on a level piece of ground sheltered from the wind by bluffs on the Little Klickitat River.”17
On the eve of the eclipse, that is, on the day before all eyes would be on the heavens, a car’s headlights came up the road to the rented Morgan house. Perhaps someone was coming to tell Campbell that his equipment had just pulled into the Goldendale station on a miracle train from San Francisco. No matter, since there would be no time now to set it up. No doubt, Campbell worried that the driver had come to deliver a different kind of message. He had. Captain Douglas Campbell, the middle son, the flying ace who had shot down his fifth enemy plane shortly after his parents arrived in Goldendale, had just scored his sixth hit. The aerial battle had taken place two days earlier, on June 5. This time, however, in a dogfight three miles high in the skies over France, he had been shot through the back by a machine-gun bullet. He had nevertheless managed to land the plane, but was their son still alive? Had he died from his wounds after the cable was sent? The Campbells didn’t know.18
It would be a long and restless night. As an astronomer, Campbell believed in good habits that would help a body function during the stress of an eclipse. In the tropics, he advised his team to keep regular hours, to boil all water themselves and not trust the locals to do it, to keep the hot sun off one’s neck by wearing a hat, and to buy and wear white linen suits to stay cool. One suggestion he gave would have worked well in Washington that night before the eclipse, when his heart was heavy. “Lastly,” he had told his team, “every day, keep your circulation good by drinking some good whiskey—whiskey and soda—with your evening meals, if the nights are cold, take some whiskey when you turn in. It will help you to sleep as the night comes on. Don’t neglect it on any account.”
On the evening that Campbell received the news about his son, clouds began rolling in early. In other parts of the country and world, a supernova would be discovered that same night: Nova Aquilae. At Harvard, Edward Pickering was getting nonstop phone calls and cables announcing the discovery. By midnight, the clouds over Goldendale were hiding all the stars in the sky.
As morning broke over the wheat fields, Goldendale began to buzz with activity. Keeping with the usual hoopla that preceded eclipses, the streets were teeming with excited folk carrying pieces of smoked glass. The Goldendale Sentinel announced that the largest crowd in the history of the town would be soon arriving and that the village was a “mecca for automobile tourists” driving in from around Washington and Oregon. Cars were now hurrying to eclipses wherever roads made the drive possible. There would be standing room only on the summit of the Twin Buttes outside town. The paper had noted earlier in the week that Campbell was “a courteous man who would gladly give the public any information that would enlighten them on the scientific aims of the expedition.” A jeweler had ordered dozens of protective eyeglasses and taken out a newspaper ad informing potential buyers. As a courtesy, he would send boys out onto the streets to sell them for a dime a pair. Hoping to boost sales, no doubt, he reminded the reader that “at every eclipse many persons are blinded or partially blinded.”
Any worries that William and Elizabeth Campbell had about their son, far away in France, had to be put aside for a few hours. Campbell and his Lick team got ready, including the sketch artist he had enlisted from Stanford. This was a botany professor named, amazingly, Douglas Campbell. The clouds that had sifted over Goldendale at midnight had been replaced with new ones by the next morning. They, too, eventually dispersed, but more clouds floated in by afternoon. The eclipse was due at 4:00 p.m., and totality would last only 1 minute and 57 seconds. As the anxious team members waited, ready to perform their rehearsed duties, the chance of success appeared bleak. But at 3:59, less than a minute away from the wonder of wonders, a rift opened in the clouds and the sun could be seen. As the seconds ticked down and totality began, William Campbell shouted, “Go!” A volunteer began counting, “One, two, three.” The tiny patch of sky where the sun had peeked through stayed clear until the photographs were taken. A few seconds after totality finished, that area of the sky was again obscured by clouds. The total eclipse of 1918 was the darkest Campbell had ever experienced. On June 10, he told the New York Times that “the chickens retired as if for the night. They were heard to give the morning cock crows before emerging a few minutes later. It was probably the shortest night in all their lives.”19
Even after returning to Mount Hamilton, the team members couldn’t know what the photographs would reveal regarding Einstein’s theory. They would have no comparison plates until the next January, when nighttime photographs of stars could be taken in the same region of sky as during the eclipse. Curtis could do only a cursory examination of the plates back at Lick before he had to return to his war service job at Berkeley. Campbell would write that Curtis “reports that stars fainter than the eighth magnitude are recorded, but that the clouds to the east and west of the clear sky immediately over and surrounding the Sun interfered somewhat with the recording of the fainter stars in the extreme east and west areas. No further statement as to these plates can be made at the present time, but it is hoped that the definitive results may appear in print without undue delay.”
Douglas Campbell had performed heroically on June 5, continuing to fight while wounded and bringing the enemy plane down to the ground, where it was destroyed by artillery. He received the Distinguished Service Cross and the Oak Leaf Cluster for his bravery. He came home to the United States to recover and would not get the chance to return to combat as he had hoped. Unfortunately, his good friend Quentin Roosevelt would die a month after the eclipse, also in a dogfight over France, on Bastille Day. Brilliant, popular with his fellow pilots, and known to be daring in the skies, the young Roosevelt had been the well-known little boy who grew up in the White House and had entertained the public with reports of his antics. Once, when a reporter tried to enlist the child to gossip about his father, Quentin had famously said, “I see him occasionally, but I know nothing of his family life.”
On June 20, Campbell received a wire announcing that the Lick instruments were leaving Japan for a Canadian port. Campbell wrote, “Whether, upon arrival there, the instruments will be nearer home than they were in Kobe, is not a subject for expression of definite opinion.” The Lick instruments, impounded in Russia, would not reach Mount Hamilton until August 21, 1918, exactly four years to the day of the 1914 eclipse. There was minor damage done to the chronometer, and the packing crates were “on the way to the state of kindling, but fortunately their strong bindings of strap iron and wire held them together.”
Negotiations had been under way between the Allies and the Central Powers, and hope was now on the horizon that the war would soon end. Even though most of the Cambridge Observatory staff had gone off to fight—of the 13,878 members of the university who had served in the war, 2,470 were killed—Eddington requested a leave from his post. In October 1918, he sent a letter to the university’s general board, asking to be let go during the Lent and Easter terms, from January to June. If he were granted this leave, he could lead a solar eclipse expedition to Africa and test Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Permission was granted.
Father Aloysius Cortie, however, found it impossible to leave his work at the Stonyhurst Magnetic Observatory, in Lancashire, which was managed and operated by Jesuit priests who also ran Stonyhurst College. The director of the observatory had fallen ill, and it was apparent that his end was near. Since Cortie would replace him, this was not a good time to leave England on a months-long expedition. Known for his benevolent mannerisms and even his fine singing at RAS dinners, the priest would have made a most suitable traveling companion for Charles Davidson. But Cortie’s replacement was quickly decided on. It would be the eclipse-experienced Andrew Crommelin, recognized for his knowledge of comets and another of Dyson’s assistants.20
During a November 8, 1918, meeting of the Joint Committee, the members decided to collect all the instruments at the Royal Observatory. The sixteen-inch lens from the astrographic telescope at Oxford, loaned to them by Turner, would go to Príncipe. The sixteen-inch lens from the Greenwich telescope would go to Brazil. Huts covered in waterproof canvas and later assembled at the observation camps had to be constructed in England. They were necessary to enclose the valuable telescopes and clocks in Sobral and Príncipe. But the observatory’s carpenter had been conscripted to serve in the military. Only an engineer was left behind, and he had no carpentry skills. A request went out to a civil engineer at the nearby Royal Naval College, and he undertook the task of building the huts, a woodworking joiner helping with the frames.
Eddington had insisted that each team take along a micrometer, an instrument used to obtain precise measurements. This way, measures of check plates and eclipse plates could be conducted at each camp, rather than much later, after the long journeys back to England. Anything could happen along the way to alter or destroy the plates. It wasn’t that the results needed to be rushed for professional purposes, but Campbell and the Lick Observatory had still not released their findings for the June 1918 eclipse.
One would think travel at this time would concern these men, given that a pandemic influenza had begun sweeping the world early in 1918. Nicknamed the Spanish flu, it was killing tens of millions of people even in remote areas of the globe. Perhaps privately, the team members did discuss the possible danger. In letters, they appear to focus on the problems of travel during wartime. On November 11, 1918, three days after the meeting, the long and costly war finally ended. At least, the fighting did. Still under way were negotiations on the release of prisoners, reparations, and all the other untidiness that follows war until the final armistice would be signed and go into effect. But the Allied Powers could claim a victory. Although people would suffer the horrid aftermath for many years afterward, science was given some relief. Travel restrictions were lifted. While the price of war had strained financial resources, the two expeditions could now concentrate fully on their missions.
On Armistice Day, Eddington wrote to Cesar Augusto de Campos Rodrigues, the director of the Lisbon Astronomical Observatory. He referred to Arthur Hinks’s letters the year before and asked for assistance in finding a home for him and Cottingham, transportation to the island, and general support for their mission. “We find that all sailings of boats to Lisbon have been cancelled for the present,” Eddington wrote. “I suppose owing to the revolution. I trust that you and the observatory are unharmed.” Times were dangerous in Portugal. Less than a month after Eddington wrote this letter, Sidónio Pais, the president of the Fourth Portuguese Republic, was assassinated in the Lisbon train station. The country, which had become a Republican state in the 1910 revolution, had been undergoing a political, financial, and economic crisis with the rise of Pais’s dictatorial government.
Over the next weeks, letters went back and forth, with the assistant director, Frederico Oom, also replying. He mentioned a plantation owner on Príncipe willing to support the British for their “every need.” It was coming together nicely. Eddington and his British colleagues would sail away from England that coming March. Academia may have discovered Albert Einstein. But it would take the moon passing between the earth and the sun, and a handful of determined astronomers, before the world would know his name. Which astronomers would remain to be seen.