Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest
IN THE TWENTIETH century, the earth was witness to sixty-two total solar eclipses, one of which made Albert Einstein famous for his law of gravity, and another that proved it. Eclipses will continue to fascinate humans for as long as this planet is inhabited. The longest one that will ever occur in earth’s history is scheduled for July 16, 2186, with a maximum time over northern Guyana of seven minutes and four seconds. There will never be one longer, because there is bad news for future eclipse chasers: The orbit of the moon around the earth will become more distant each year. The span between the two bodies will eventually increase by fifteen thousand miles, decreasing the apparent diameter of the moon. Thus, as viewed from earth, the moon will no longer be able to completely cover the face of the sun during a total eclipse. There is no need for immediate concern, but in 620 million years, the last solar eclipse will go the way of the dinosaur.
In the hundred years that have passed since the 1919 eclipse, astounding progress has been made in astronomy and physics. Human beings have gone into space and have walked on the moon. Spacecraft have touched down on Mars. Over a thousand active artificial satellites circle the planet, feeding back information on stars and asteroids, comets, black holes, dark matter, gamma ray bursts, supernovae explosions, and far-off galaxies. Scientists have never stopped mapping the cosmos or seeking to understand the vastness of the universe. The thousands of committed thinkers spread out along the road that begins in folk astronomy and runs through antiquity up to Isaac Newton would not recognize the modern scientific world. The dedicated astronomers who were born in the Victorian era and whose lives are the core of this book would be lost in today’s astronomy. It’s a very different world now, and yet they all helped shape it.
When William Wallace Campbell arrived back in San Francisco from the 1922 eclipse expedition, it was the month of December. His steamer sailed into the Port of San Francisco, where an unlikely delegation was waiting on the dock. The welcomers were the University of California regents, who insisted that Campbell accept the presidency of the university. They needed a man with vision, with executive and administrative skills, and, as one of the deputation put it, “a man with backbone.” Campbell had been offered the prestigious position before and had turned it down. He liked his life on Mount Hamilton and his work studying the stars. He was now a world-renowned astronomer with all the impressive medals that could possibly be awarded, along with many honorary degrees.
Campbell had already served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. For three more years, he would be president of the International Astronomical Union and the American Astronomical Society. As director of Lick, he couldn’t have been any busier. But the regents reminded him that they had always met his past requests for the mountaintop community and observatory. Perhaps now it was time for him to help the university. They persuaded him by consenting to his requests, the primary one being that he would retain the directorship at the observatory. And second, the regents would not interfere in the university’s internal matters. The Campbells could retain tenancy of the house on Mount Hamilton, where they had raised their sons—it would now be expanded and remodeled—and where they might occasionally find solitude or entertain friends. Planning on a short term of service, President Campbell began his new role the next July, at the age of sixty.
He took leave of his duties in September so that he and Elizabeth could travel south of the border to Ensenada, Mexico, to successfully observe the 1923 total eclipse. For the next eight years, the university prospered and grew under his guidance. Generous private donations arrived from the likes of the Hearsts, the Rockefellers, and others. The campuses expanded. Even his detractors, who believed he ran too rigid a ship, would concede years later that his had been the best presidency during their time. With nature blessing him yet again with another total eclipse in California, he and his wife accompanied the Lick team to Comptonville in late April 1930. The phenomenon would never cease to amaze him. Nor would the cosmos itself. He once said that college graduates know all about the electrical lights in their houses, but nothing of the lights in the sky.
A few days after returning to the university, at the commencement service on the Berkeley campus, he gave his farewell address: “I belong on a mountain top, away from the world—and yet near enough to enjoy occasionally its centers of population.” Feeling ill and fearing he would collapse, Campbell was assisted from the platform and first aid was administered backstage. His retirement would not be what he had anticipated. The rigors of running such a large enterprise, combined with the stress of academic infighting, had taken its toll. Two years later, he would lose vision in one eye. His youngest son, Kenneth, the boy who had wanted to see a German U-boat on the family’s mad dash across the North Sea in 1914, would later comment on his father’s health: “The presidency, so late in life, was very hard on him, and finally killed him.”
Recovering his strength, Campbell might have retreated to the dome on Mount Hamilton. He and Elizabeth were still allowed to occupy the house there, even though he was no longer director. Prodigious developments in astronomy and spectroscopy had occurred in his absence, those eight years that he was involved in administrative duties. This was the same feeling that Hinks had experienced when he wrote to Campbell in 1919. The field of astronomy had moved too far ahead while Hinks was concerned with wartime tasks. Campbell felt it now more than ever. One day at the small post office on the mountaintop, he opened a letter from the National Academy of Sciences, asking that he become its president. After some deliberation, he accepted. In the summer of 1931, he and the loyal Elizabeth left the mountaintop once again to settle into a new home in Washington, DC. While Campbell would steer the august body of the academy through four financially critical years, his health was now rapidly failing.
In 1935, his term with the academy finished, he and Elizabeth returned to California. Campbell was now seventy-three years old. He had likely suffered a stroke for he was diagnosed with aphasia, a condition caused by damage to those parts of the brain that deal with language and communication. After a short visit to Mount Hamilton, perhaps to say goodbye, the Campbells moved into a charming apartment in San Francisco. Its windows looked out on the blue waters of the Golden Gate strait, to the Marin Headlands and Mount Tamalpais beyond. The famous bridge had been under construction for two years before the Campbells returned to California. It would be finished and opened for traffic two years later, in May 1937. While visitors to their home found the couple in good spirits, the famous astronomer’s health was now declining rapidly as aphasia took its toll. Once so eloquent, Campbell struggled to find the proper words. Even reading and writing had become laborious. The eyesight in his remaining eye was also failing. The astronomical study that had been his passion for so many years, in that heavenly classroom filled with stars, was lost to him.
On June 14, 1938, while Elizabeth slept, he rose before dawn to carry out the plan he had conceived. Apologizing for his poor handwriting—his scribbled words were incoherent in places—the man known as “Wallace” to family and friends wrote five heartfelt notes, the last at four in the morning. He praised his wife and sons—his greatest pride—and thanked his friends. His foremost worry was not wanting to be a burden to his wife. “Goodbye, dearest Elizabeth. Be of great courage,” was perhaps his most difficult note to write. “It is better that I go away now with my powers nearly all gone, than I stay and become an incompetent person.” He worried that he might not be able to walk unaided by the next day. He put the notes on a table in the hall of their apartment and placed his wristwatch next to them. Pulling on trousers over his pajamas, and then his coat, he leaped, barefoot, from the fourth floor of their apartment building. He was seventy-six years old.
A boy delivering newspapers early the next morning discovered the crumpled body lying on the stones of the courtyard. By the time an ambulance arrived, it was apparent that Campbell had been dead for some time. His middle son, Wallace, who told the press that his father had been in a cheerful mood the evening before, identified the body. The day after his death, the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned the “pitiful notes” as it covered his tragic suicide. “All of his life William Wallace Campbell did difficult things with high courage. There can be no doubt that the most difficult thing he ever did, and the one which required the highest courage, was to end his own life.” Pallbearers included the governor of California, the president and officials from the University of California, and directors of the Mount Hamilton and Mount Wilson Observatories.
For the RAS obituary, Sir Frank Dyson, who had watched Campbell kill a rattlesnake on Mount Hamilton nearly four decades earlier, mentioned the late astronomer’s illustrious career and numerous eclipse experiences. “At the eclipse of 1918, he attempted unsuccessfully to verify Einstein’s prediction of the deflection of light by the Sun’s gravitational field.” Dyson then noted the success of the 1922 expedition to Australia. “From very accordant results they found a value of 1.72 for the displacement near the sun’s limb as against the 1.75 predicted by Einstein, confirming the results and conclusions of British observers in 1919.”
Elizabeth, who knew him best, was more poetic. “He loved flowers if someone else would raise them,” she once wrote of him. She always suspected that the hard job he had as a child hoeing his mother’s vegetable garden had ruined the hobby for him. But this work on the farm—he was barely four when his father died, leaving behind six children—shaped young Campbell for the tough work that lay ahead during his expeditions. “Stones that four men cannot move he lifts with ease,” Elizabeth had written of their 1898 first expedition to India. William Campbell made numerous decisions throughout his life: where to best observe an eclipse, which weather records were accurate; to remember white linen suits for hot climates; and to boil all water. And to take a shot of whiskey at bedtime to encourage good circulation. But perhaps the best decision he ever made was asking a college girl named Elizabeth Ballard Thompson to be his wife. She died in 1961, at the age of ninety-three.
Years later, in his seventies himself, Kenneth Campbell had a special memory of his father. The family had taken a trip to Europe in 1911, one not attached to an expedition. Vacation over, they boarded a smaller steamer than had been planned, to return to the United States. Kenny Campbell counted the number of lifeboats during a particularly bad storm while at sea. With no way of knowing that the Titanic would sink just months later, its lack of lifeboats costing hundreds of lives, he asked his father if their steamer had enough of them. “No, Kenneth,” Campbell answered truthfully, “I think probably there are not enough.” The boy then said, “I suppose if we founder in this storm, you’d grab Mother and me and we’d all three climb into a lifeboat.” To this Campbell replied, “Well, Kenneth, I’d put Mother and you in a lifeboat, but you know, I don’t think I would join you. I think I’d stay around.”
Just before dawn on that last day, and again thinking of his family first, William Wallace Campbell decided it was time to leave.
In the summer of 1925, Sir Frank Dyson would see his good friend William Campbell at the meeting of the International Astronomical Union, of which Campbell was then president. It was held at Cambridge and coincided with the 250th anniversary of the Royal Observatory. Astronomers from around the world were welcomed with concerts and garden parties once the work was done. Arthur Eddington and his sister, Winifred, hosted a reception at the observatory. Dyson was proud to show Cambridge to the visitors in midsummer. It was the place where Sir Isaac Newton had studied as a young man and had later taught. “There is no place in England which we are more pleased to show them,” he wrote, “and no place in which we take a greater pride.” Addressing the audience of over two hundred, Campbell stressed that the union’s objective should be the care of international astronomy. Dyson also hinted that it was time to welcome the Germans back into the family of scientists.
In June 1927, Dyson traveled to Giggleswick, in Yorkshire, for what he called his “first eclipse.” He would observe “unofficially” while Charles Rundle Davidson did the work. The British newspapers were on fire with news of this total eclipse. It would be the first to cross English mainland soil in 203 years. Reporters were ringing the entry gate bell at the observatory and his telephone rang constantly with requests for interviews. Passing through England’s backyard as it would, this eclipse was garnering far more attention than the one in 1919 did. When the Daily Mail offered a twin-engine, fourteen-seater airplane to carry astronomers above the clouds for a more successful chance at observation, Dyson accepted. As astronomer royal, he would send others to fly above the ground. What was also rare about this eclipse is that Lady Carrie Dyson would accompany her husband for the first time on an expedition. Fourteen-year-old Ruth would also go. She was the baby whose photograph Dyson had carried in his pocket in Australia, after World War I broke out. It would have been a fine time for Dyson’s good friend J. J. Atkinson to get out his two-seater and take another car trip, as they had done in 1912. But “Atky” had passed away two years earlier.
The following year, on his sixtieth birthday and according to the terms of his appointment as astronomer royal, Dyson was to retire. Now, he felt he still had much to offer the observatory. The Lords of the Admiralty, who hired him in 1910, agreed. Dyson would continue in his job for another five years. The family could remain at Flamsteed House, which had been their home for nearly two decades. All the Dyson children had grown up in the house, and the scribbled graffiti on the walls was a testament. They knew their father as a disciplinarian. Yet he would sometimes turn up in the kitchen late at night if he heard them whispering and giggling, to join them in his pajamas. Once, he warned his young son about the dangers of climbing up buildings and into trees. “If you must climb, climb that!” the astronomer joked, pointing at the observatory dome. One of his favorite stories was of the day his telephone rang and a voice asked, “Do you know there’s a boy on the great dome?”
Carrie Dyson began to travel extensively with her husband, including a trip across Canada by train with him giving lectures along the way so that he could pay for her passage. This was 1932, and another total eclipse was coming on August 24. The Greenwich team would again be headed by Davidson, along with the Scottish astronomer John Jackson. The Dysons and the two astronomers left England in July. They sailed past whales spouting in the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and the steamer continued on through the gray fog until it reached Quebec City. Davidson and Jackson said their goodbyes and rode a train 250 miles north, to tiny Parent, Quebec. The Dysons crossed the Canadian prairies by train and then continued over the Rocky Mountains to Victoria. They would return to New England in time for the eclipse, which they would view in southern Maine.
By August, the couple was touring New England in a motorcar with American friends. Carrie Dyson, who had stayed behind for so many years to raise their large family, was now seeing the world. They checked into a hotel in South Portland, Maine, which sat in the path of totality. They would drive down to Harvard the next day for the first IAU meeting held in America, where they would meet up with Arthur Eddington and other colleagues. On the day of the eclipse, Sir Frank Dyson sat in the sun on the lawn of his “luxury hotel,” waiting. Again the Dyson luck was with him, and the afternoon was cloud-free. Sitting less than a hundred miles from where Samuel Williams first saw Baily’s beads in 1780, this would be Dyson’s last eclipse.
In 1933, Frank and Carrie Dyson said goodbye to Flamsteed House and moved back to the top of the same steep hill where they had started their married life. While his days would be filled with meetings and writing, he felt the loss of the stars that had marked the years of his life, all those times he had trudged home at dawn to fall into bed, exhausted. When a friend consoled him by saying he was only giving up the observatory, not astronomy, Dyson replied curtly, “You can’t have astronomy without telescopes.” Like Campbell, he knew that his profession was changing, expanding beyond the knowledge of astronomers who had learned their craft during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The observatory itself was feeling the weight of urban pollution, the optics of its telescopes affected by grime and smog. Street lights were growing more numerous, and the rattling of trains added to the disturbances.
He kept busy with more world travel. He had already written a book on astronomy in which he encouraged readers to learn about the stars and the heaven filled with wonders. He hoped that people would one day know the brightest stars in the sky as they might the most common flowers. He began a second book. In 1935, when Carrie returned from Malta, where she had traveled for the birth of Ruth’s first child, the couple escaped to the seaside town of St. Ives, in Cornwall, for a month of quiet vacation. As Dyson was chatting with a friend at his garden gate, an automobile careened around the corner at a great speed. The car collided with both men, who had no time to move to safety. They weren’t fatally injured, but both were badly bruised and suffering from shock. Dyson was now sixty-seven years old. He would never entirely recover from the accident and would walk with a cane for months.
Carrie’s health began failing that same summer, because of a heart condition. Their children encouraged the older couple to take life easy in those days of retirement. They should hire taxis instead of catching trains or walking. They had noticed that their father had difficulty climbing the hill to home. Once, he had even taken the wrong train, much to the amusement of the observatory staff. He boarded at London Bridge, was carried past Greenwich, and ended up in Gravesend. When the astronomer royal explained to the ticket collector what had happened, the man replied, “The fact is you oughten be allowed out by yourself.” No one would have known the story if Dyson hadn’t told it on himself. But the truth was that he and his wife preferred the simpler life to speeding taxicabs.
Carrie had a heart attack and died in March 1937, just past her seventieth birthday. Sir Frank was devastated. “I have been a very happy and fortunate man,” he wrote to a friend, “to be blessed with her companionship for 43 years.” Slowly, he returned to the social life he had always enjoyed, but he saw signs of another war encroaching when the digging of trenches began in London parks. “Hitler should be in seventh hell,” he wrote to his children. “One hates to see the dictators get their way, but the sacrifice of millions of lives is too big a price to stop them.” He remembered the emptied observatories during the past war and the endless lists of the dead in the daily papers. A heavy smoker for years, he now had a perpetual cough, and his own heart was not strong. Yet he made plans to visit his son in South Africa and his daughter in Australia, as he had done shortly after Carrie’s death. His family would not learn until later that he’d had a slight stroke or that his doctor had advised him not to undertake a long voyage.
Dyson sailed from Liverpool in late January 1939, his sister Aggie accompanying him. He had just published the obituary he had written for his friend William Campbell. It would be the last document Dyson would write. While he was at sea, he received word that his colleague Andrew Crommelin had been struck by a motorcyclist while walking to church and was hospitalized with severe injuries. He would pay his colleague a visit on his return to England. Yet, by the time the ship reached South Africa, Dyson was described as “an invalid.” The ship’s doctor advised that he check into a nursing home for rehabilitation once he reached Australia. And he must return immediately to England when his visit was over. His daughter met him at the port in Sydney and was shocked at his appearance. Having lost the use of his left hand, her father had not been able to shave and now sported a white beard.
In early May, he was taken aboard the Ascanius for his trip back to England, the same steamer he and Eddington had taken to Australia in 1914. A steward named Wheeler, assigned to look after him, moved into the cabin next door. Instead of his usual cigars, the ship’s doctor recommended no more than five cigarettes a day. Dyson remained cheerful even though he needed to be dressed and bathed. He could walk a little, and so made friends with his fellow passengers. Wheeler was an amateur astronomer who owned a small telescope. At night, as the ship sailed over dark waters, the steward pointed out Southern Hemisphere stars to the famous astronomer. When the ship hit swells and large waves in the Indian Ocean, Dyson’s health became worse and he was confined to his bed.
On May 25, he appeared to know the end was near. He told his sister how proud he was of his children. Then he called for the chef and thanked him for preparing special meals. When he asked to hear Big Ben again, Wheeler struggled in vain to get the famous clock’s bells on the wireless. Eventually, Dyson told him not to bother; it didn’t matter. He seemed in no pain, and Wheeler thought at first he was asleep. When the doctor was summoned and arrived, he announced that Dyson had passed away. The astronomer had held a lifelong dread of London’s graveyards and often spoke of a wish to be buried at sea. The astronomer’s body was wrapped in the Union Jack. On deck, his grieving sister, the ship’s company, and nearly all the passengers lined up for the service. The ship’s captain later scribbled in his log:
4:30 p.m. 25/5/1939. 29 deg., 55 S, 67 deg. O5 E. To certify that the body of Sir F. W. Dyson was buried at sea.
The coordinates put the burial spot about a thousand miles southeast of Madagascar.
When the sad news reached England, memorial services, accolades, and tributes were planned. Eddington wrote his friend’s obituary. He remembered the IAU meeting at Harvard in 1932, when the secretary of the US Navy had described astronomy in his welcome address as though its job was solely to assist in naval warfare. “As you have said,” Dyson had replied, speaking as president of the union, “some of us are from observatories which supply data for navigation. But in addition, Sir, may I ask you, if astronomers had not discovered that the earth was round, where on Earth would the United States of America be?”
The RAS Club members debated whether to cancel their monthly dinner. Dyson had become president of the club three years earlier. Knowing how much he loved these events and rarely missed one, the members went ahead with the plans. Stories were told, such as the time the astronomer royal rang up a Greenwich clergyman and told him there was a crack in his church’s tower. The clergyman looked carefully, then returned to the phone. “I can’t see anything wrong,” he said. “No, I daresay not,” Dyson had answered, “but my big telescope can.” The RAS Club members hung a plaque in his memory. Praeses et Amicus. President and friend.
By the time autumn came to Greenwich Park in 1939, the man known as an expert on comets, Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin, succumbed to the injuries he had suffered in the accident several months earlier. For over forty years, he had lived a short stroll from the park, on the same road where his parents and many assistants at the famous observatory had once resided. Like his colleagues, Crommelin had been a member, or secretary, or president of a good many societies and groups, as well as director of the comet section of the British Astronomical Association, where he had also been president. He had been awarded the Lindemann Prize and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University for the work he and Philip Cowell had done in predicting the return of Halley’s Comet.
When Letitia Noble Crommelin passed away in 1921, Andrew never remarried. In 1927, he retired from the observatory where he had spent his entire career. The astronomy books he would write had titles befitting poems, The Story of the Stars, Diamonds in the Sky, and The Star World. For years, the Observatory magazine and the BAA’s journal had published his well-researched reports on comets and minor planets.
Charles Davidson mentioned the 1919 eclipse in the obituary he wrote for his friend, without referring to himself as having been Crommelin’s companion to Sobral. “He observed with a 4-inch lens with a 19 feet focus and obtained seven excellent photographs, the results from which proved the predicted deflection beyond question.” Crommelin’s knowledge was encyclopedic. Davidson took his description a step further when he referred to the man who had traveled a thousand miles up the Amazon with him as “careless of appearance but always courteous.” The obituary that appeared in the Observatory referred to him in terms that Crommelin would have liked: “a born astronomer; a student immersed in his work.”
Crommelin’s last expedition was in 1927, when the eclipse visited the mainland of England. With Dyson and Davidson in Yorkshire, he had gone privately to Colwyn Bay, on the north coast of Wales. While Dyson and Davidson enjoyed sunshine on that day in June, Crommelin would comment that his rainy experience in Wales was “the most hopeless eclipse I have ever taken part in.” Nature’s unbiased indifference continued. He should have settled into a happily retired life filled with RAS Club dinners, lectures, and spending time with his four children. But in 1933, an incident would change those plans forever.
Crommelin’s younger son, Peter, had become a Catholic priest, and the older son, Claude, an electrical engineer. His older daughter, Andrina, was working as a computer at the Royal Observatory, which must have pleased her father. And his younger daughter, Philomena, was a teacher at a Catholic college in Edinburgh, Scotland. Philomena, an avid rock climber, convinced Claude to join her for a climb in Ennerdale Valley, in northwest England. They would ascend Pillar Rock, on the rugged north face of Pillar Mountain. To reach the summit had long been the goal of the earliest hikers, mostly young middle-class and upper-middle-class professionals for whom climbing was an exciting hobby. On July 1, a Saturday, brother and sister left their automobile at Wasdale Head Inn, famous among climbers. They set up camp near Burnthwaite Farm, where they came for their evening meal. They visited the farm again for the Sunday and Monday suppers.
When the Crommelins didn’t show up Tuesday evening as expected, the innkeeper called the local police. Search parties were organized and sent out on Wednesday morning. A constable and a farmer found the two bodies, roped together, lying in the gully where they had fallen six hundred feet to their deaths. It took almost a dozen local shepherds three hours to carry the stretchers down the hazardous path, reaching the farm at midnight. A driver’s license identified Claude Crommelin. A phone call was quickly placed to London police so that the famous astronomer could be notified. “I knew nothing of their death until a policeman came and told me in the middle of the night,” Crommelin was quoted as saying to the press. “They had set out to ascend the Pillar Rock in the Ennerdale Valley, a well-known and difficult climb. My daughter was a greatly experienced rock climber. My son was also a climber, but not as experienced as his sister. I did not want them to go. But she had a strong influence on him and persuaded him to go to Lakeland.”
The sadness of this loss would engulf Andrew Crommelin, the man who took the famous photograph showing light deflection in the skies over Brazil, for his remaining years.
Through his natural intelligence and a philosophy of hard work, Edwin Cottingham had earned the respect of men like Dyson and Eddington. After his well-known expedition to Príncipe, he continued working on clocks and repairing instruments at his shop. For thirty years, he had cleaned, repaired, and adapted the clocks at Cambridge University. He took great pride in cleaning the clock of Trinity College Chapel.1 Clocks were his passion, but he had also nurtured a keen interest in machines, radios, and other electrical inventions.
In May 1910, the Eiffel Tower had begun broadcasting wireless signals to military installations and ships at sea, and the transmissions were being picked up as far away as North America. Cottingham became the second man in his county to be granted a wireless license. Now he could receive the daily time signals from Paris. When all domestic radio sets in the country were confiscated in World War I for security purposes, he built himself a crystal set, what Allied soldiers called a “foxhole radio.” Not depending on an outside power source, these simple radios were not subject to enemy detection. The radio kept him connected to the world he was no longer exploring, unlike his famous astronomer friends, who seemed to be in a different country each time a conference was announced.
In 1928, Cottingham closed his shop and retired from official business. He could now tinker about his workshop as he pleased. When the clockmaker passed away on March 20, 1940, the world was again becoming a battleground. Hilter’s army had invaded Poland six months earlier, and the Battle of Britain lay just ahead. Cottingham would have turned seventy-one the next month. It’s unlikely a birthday ever arrived without his remembering the day he turned fifty, in sunny Madeira, as he and Eddington were boarding their steamer to a tiny island off the coast of Africa. His passing was noted in the Times of London. “He had a wide reputation for scientifically built instruments with special pendulum compensations and airtight temperature-controlled cases. One such clock, which was used as standard timekeeper at the Royal Observatory, had a guaranteed mean daily variation of not more than one-hundredth of a second.”
Eddington penned an obituary for the journal of the RAS. He noted Cottingham’s long history with various important clocks, and that the two had gone to the Gulf of Guinea together to view the 1919 total eclipse. He mentioned the clock that had ignited Cottingham’s passion as a young man, the one he had built for the village church. As St. James Church was hidden from the main street, an external clock face would not be seen by the public. Thus, a wall-mounted clock was built for inside. “The first clock which he made was the Thrapston church clock, including the whole chiming mechanism. It was his favourite ‘child,’ and his last exertion, though ill at the time, was to put it forward for Summer Time in 1940.”
In the days before he died, Cottingham had, indeed, been climbing the circular stone staircase that wound up to the bell tower of the Thrapston church, where he could work on the clock’s chiming mechanism. It would be a difficult climb for a younger man, and Edwin was already in poor health. Perhaps, because the end was near, it was his way of saying good-bye to the clock he was building in 1900, when the first eclipse of that new century had swept across the globe, catching some of the world’s finest astronomers in its shadow. It was a clock that marked the beginning of Cottingham’s career, and now, still keeping excellent time, it would also mark the end. The schoolboy who had once been apprenticed to a village tailor had done well for himself.2
Sir Arthur Eddington soon realized a new career in lecturing to packed audiences about the general theory of relativity. He wrote more books. Since his first eclipse expedition to Brazil in 1912, with Davidson, he would visit all the continents but Antarctica. He was now famous as the driving force behind Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory. In 1923, he collected many of these lectures and published them in a book titled Mathematical Theory of Relativity. Einstein noted that it was “the finest presentation of the subject in any language.” Eddington’s mother, who died in 1924, did not live to see her son knighted several years later. He was more proud of the Order of Merit, which was presented to him in 1930. As the founder of astrophysics, he was the most famous scientist in that field the world over. He may not have been as famous as Einstein, but he was held in awe by other scientists and laypeople alike.
Sister Winifred remained with him at the observatory. Students and colleagues often found him standing at the French windows in his office, gazing into the garden, deep in thought. It was his custom to eat more than one apple during these sessions, consuming even the seeds and stems. His biographer and former student, Allie Vibert Douglas, writes of the time that Edward A. Milne, the astrophysicist and mathematician and then a professor at Manchester, asked Eddington to look at a piece of theoretical work he had just carried out. While a colleague waited in the library, Milne continued on to Eddington’s office. When Milne returned, quite amazed, he muttered to his friend that he wondered if the man he had just spoken to were human. Once he had told Eddington his problem, the astronomer rose from his desk and went to the window. Hands clasped behind his back, he gazed out into the garden where Winifred kept her bees and chickens. Several silent minutes passed as Milne waited. Finally, Eddington turned around and told Milne what he expected the answer should be. It was the same result Milne had arrived at earlier.
Students often commented on the untidiness of Eddington’s office, the table and desk smothered in documents, books and reprints towering on the sofa and chairs, the floor carpeted with sheets of paper. Of the bookshelves that lined the walls, one was devoted entirely to P. D. Wodehouse and detective stories. Douglas remembered waiting there for her professor to arrive. “In a few seconds there would come the sound of scuffing and of footsteps, and then the door would open and in came the terrier, followed by his master—all three of us would then sit down on the settee and Eddington would proceed to look over the results. I can see him now, intently studying the pages which he supported against one knee with his left hand, while his right hand fondled the ears of the dog between us.” Sometimes, on chilly autumn days, he would come in from a brisk cycling ride of twenty or thirty miles, rubbing his hands at the fireplace to warm them before settling down to work.
World War II brought food rationing back to England. At nearly fifty-seven years old, Eddington now had no worries of being conscripted. But he felt out of tune with a Cambridge at wartime. In 1940, the Luftwaffe began its savage nonstop bombing of English cities. A rumor circulated later that the Germans and British had an agreement not to bomb cities like Oxford, Heidelberg, and Cambridge. This wasn’t true. The first bombs that fell over Cambridge hit the sugar beet fields on the outskirts of the city, causing only crop damage. But in 1941, several other bombs did inflict damage on a few of the buildings. A loner to begin with, Eddington grew more isolated. He would write to colleagues how much Cambridge had changed in the years of the war. The Observatory Club was no longer meeting, and the campus itself seemed void of graduate students. “We get on pretty well here,” he wrote to Douglas. “What I miss most is the stimulus of research students.” He would have liked to attend a baseball or football game now and then and enjoy the Christmas letters that American astronomers would send but which were now undeliverable.3
For the last few years of his life, he was obsessed with a book that would harmonize quantum physics and relativity, a “theory of everything.” In the summer of 1944, as he filled dozens of pages with his ideas, he began to feel unwell with stomach pains. He told no one, not his sister and not even C. J. A. Trimble, who visited him in October. Trimble noticed only that Eddington was consumed with work on his book, turning out draft after draft in his small and immaculate handwriting, as if he expected each version to be the last. World War II was filling English hospitals with a multitude of casualties that demanded immediate medical attention. Doctors were overextended. When Eddington finally let it be known that he was in considerable pain and needed to see a physician, there were no openings for him. He waited several weeks for just an X-ray. A large cancerous tumor was discovered, critically advanced. This meant an emergency operation. He went home to prepare for the surgery the next morning. Douglas described that day: “All summer and autumn he had been working long hours to complete the sixth draft of his book. But two chapters and perhaps other sections remained incomplete when he had to lay down his pen on the night of 6 November.”4
The next morning, Eddington left the observatory home he had known for over thirty years. He was driven to the hospital at Evelyn Nursing Home, in Cambridge. The operation was difficult, his condition now so serious that only Winifred was allowed into his room. He would linger for two more weeks, and in the facility’s unsatisfactory conditions. Winifred wrote to a friend that her brother’s care was not good enough, the nursing home being subject to wartime constraints. “My hands are so cold so do excuse the writing—we have to save fuel!” This need to ration resources was unfortunate, given that her brother would leave behind forty-seven thousand pounds, a considerable sum in those days. He would not live to see the end of this war, as he had the previous one. The founder of astrophysics died on November 22, 1944, at the age of sixty-two. His body was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium.
A memorial service was held five days later in the Trinity College Chapel. Along with the most prestigious representatives of Cambridge and other universities, in attendance were sister Winifred, a cousin John Eddington, and the loyal friend for so many years, Trimble. “Eddington had the true mystic insight to feel a deep significance behind everything in nature,” Douglas would write of him. “He was moved by a harebell waving in the breeze and by the mighty rush of water over Niagara.” Eddington’s ashes were then buried in his mother’s grave, on the hillside behind the observatory and near a row of cypress trees. He would be in good company. Since 1869, the earth there had taken in hordes of dignitaries, famous scholars and philosophers, poets and politicians. Sister Winifred would join her mother and brother a decade later, her own ashes sifted into the same grave. The Eddington family’s journey, which had begun in the headmaster’s house in northern England—a house declared unfit because of the typhoid fever that took their father away—was now over.
William Campbell had recommended that Santa Clara University award Charles Dillon Perrine an honorary doctorate, qualifying him for the directorship of the Argentine National Observatory. Thus, Perrine became the forerunner in bringing astrophysics to that country. The great telescope he wanted built, the one he had hoped James Mulvey would live to enjoy, was still not completed when Perrine and his family visited California in 1923. His children at this time spoke limited English, having all been born and raised in Argentina. But Bell Perrine had never adapted to the different culture. In fourteen years of living with her husband at the observatory, she had learned only a few words in Spanish. The climate in the Southern Hemisphere was also not favorable for Bell’s health. Charles, on the other hand, had learned to speak Spanish. He could read and write the language proficiently. After this visit to California, Charles returned to Córdoba without his family. Given what lay ahead, Bell was wise to remain where she was.5
Perrine wanted to see the great telescope built before he retired. As happened with the 1914 eclipse expedition, world events again held power over personal ambitions. Despite his contributions to astronomy, Perrine had nationalist enemies who wanted him gone. Argentina had been in the throes of political and financial agitation for some time. By 1930, the world was suffering its worst years of the Great Depression. The country would begin what is known as “the Infamous Decade,” when a pro-Fascist military regime succeeded in a coup against the current president. Bombs exploded in the streets, and gunfire erupted. One evening, as Perrine sat at his office desk, a sniper fired a bullet through the window. Luckily, it missed the astronomer and hit the brick wall behind him. This was 1931, and Perrine had already been verbally attacked by members of the Argentine Congress. As he wrote to George Hale, he had become “the English Gringo,” at least to the Fascists and despite his enormous accomplishments that were lauded by astronomers around the world. Two years later, the congress finally passed legislation that demoted him from director to senior officer. Now subject to political control, he clung tenaciously to his post, still struggling to find funding that would finish the great telescope.
Had Perrine been determined to retreat to California and leave the chaos behind, there remained the eternal curse of money. The Argentine government would honor his pension only if he stayed in the country. The government, in perpetual upheaval, wanted no currency to leave its borders. When the astronomer’s daughter, Mary Perrine, graduated from the University of California in 1935, she returned to Córdoba to act as her father’s secretary. Despite his asthma attacks and failing health, Perrine continued to publish numerous papers and books. In 1936, the stress heaped on him became too much, and he retired. He was already sixty-nine years old, his right hand now crippled from arthritis. He purchased a house north of Córdoba, in Villa del Totoral. A nurse came to live there and take care of him.
Perrine would witness the installation of the great telescope, finished in 1942, the largest in South America. Over the next few years, he remained prolific, writing papers on the solar system, comets, eclipses, and even earthquakes.6 Early in 1951, six months before he passed away, he sent a letter to Harold Spencer Jones, the astronomer royal since Dyson’s retirement. Perrine expressed his displeasure that the royal observatory had been moved from Greenwich to Sussex a few years earlier. As was the case with Campbell, Dyson, and Eddington, the world he knew was changing too rapidly with technology advancing daily. The time finally came to discuss with daughter Mary where he wanted his personal items to go, a gold watch to one son, a sextant to another, the silver objects to his wife and daughters. Some of these were souvenirs that had been given him as he traveled the world to observe total eclipses. As a final request, his loyal nurse should be allowed to live on in the house. At her death, it would go to his five children.
Charles Dillon Perrine, the man who liked to say that ham paid for his education, died of a heart attack on June 21, 1951. Since he had given his plot in the Cemetery of Dissidents to bury James Mulvey, his nurse made plans for Perrine to be laid to rest with her family. He had no friends among the Protestant clergy, but had kept a steady friendship with the Catholic priests. Since they were not allowed in the Protestant Cemetery, they had come to his bedroom the night before to give him last rites. The local papers took note of the famed astronomer’s death with captions like “Dr. Carlos Dillon Perrine, North American in Origin, Who Lived for 42 Years in His New Country,” and “Report of the Death of an American Citizen.” These were the same newspapers whose editorials had attacked him years earlier. His pallbearers were the aging astronomers he had known in his career and the director who had replaced him. “Then the coffin was lowered into the grave,” daughter Mary wrote, “and Papa was at last resting as he hadn’t done in his whole busy life.” Jones would write an obituary for the RAS. The man who had given up the stars over Mount Hamilton for the “untouched southern sky” was now at peace.
Einstein and his first believer, Erwin Finley-Freundlich, continued a strained relationship, with money often being the cause. Later, Freundlich would insist that Einstein had given him the original draft of the general theory of relativity. Einstein, and especially the enterprising Elsa, demanded it back. After much squabbling, the papers ended up at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1925, Einstein being one of the founders. But Freundlich was still not done with his mentor’s theory. He had been unsuccessful at observing the 1914 eclipse, thanks to the war, although clouds would have done him in if Russia hadn’t. In 1922, along with the Greenwich expedition, he had spent ten days aboard a ship being tossed about in a storm off Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. That venture was also unsuccessful. In 1926, in Sumatra, he managed to make his first observation but ended up photographing through haze. He returned to Sumatra for the 1929 eclipse in January and this time determined that the deflection was 2.2 arc seconds, even greater than what Einstein had calculated. A later measurement showed that the weighting system Freundlich used had been defective.
In 1933, with Hitler in power and anti-Semitism on the rise in Nazi Germany, Freundlich saw the danger in remaining in his homeland. Käte, his wife, was Jewish. They now had a family to worry about. When Käte’s sister died that same year, they had adopted her young son and daughter. Freundlich was forced to leave the post he had worked so hard to achieve at Potsdam, where he had designed the solar telescope for the Einstein Tower. Einstein was in the same predicament in Germany. That autumn, he left Berlin with Elsa and would eventually accept a position at the Institute of Advanced Study, at Princeton, New Jersey.
Freundlich and his family went first to the observatory at Istanbul, where he was soon involved in modernizing the equipment. In 1937, they moved to Prague, where he accepted a position at Charles University. By 1939, Prague had also become unsafe under the Nazi occupation, so Freundlich moved again, this time to Holland, which soon suffered the same fate. With a recommendation from Eddington, the German astronomer found a stable home at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, where he was to oversee the building of a modern observatory. He was later appointed its first Napier Professor of Astronomy.
While at St. Andrews, Freundlich shared some Einstein stories with colleagues. Walter Ledermann had been born in Berlin in 1911, the same year Freundlich and Einstein sent their first letters back and forth. Ledermann was a young mathematics teacher at St. Andrews when he came to know and respect Freundlich. The older man told him about the day that Einstein was expounding on his general relativity theory. “He suggested that geometrical relations in space would not follow the Euclidean pattern and that, for example, the shortest distance between two points would not be the straight line joining them but a certain curve.” Freundlich responded to this assertion: “Professor Einstein, what you have described is known to mathematicians as Riemannian geometry. It was discovered more than fifty years ago by Bernhard Riemann and developed by him.” At this comeback, Einstein was so astonished that he called Freundlich a liar. To end the matter, Freundlich went to the library and signed out a copy of Riemann’s original paper.7
In those early days, Freundlich had seen himself as more of a blackboard that Einstein used to simplify his mathematics than he saw himself a collaborator. Einstein had said that if a pupil of Felix Klein’s couldn’t understand his equations, then who could?
Ledermann grew close to the older man, who was in his midfifties when he arrived in Scotland. When the two men walked from the observatory into town, locals would see the tall and impressive Freundlich lumbering next to the shorter Ledermann and joke, “Here comes the sun and the moon.” Freundlich’s students knew him as “Herr Professor,” and his colleagues considered him kind and generous with his time and knowledge. An able cellist, he enjoyed playing chamber music with Ledermann and others. Käte, on the other hand, was more fastidious and never fit into the less formal Scottish life. She was happy to return to Germany when they left Scotland in 1959. Freundlich was appointed honorary professor at the University of Mainz. Over half a century after he sent a letter to Perrine, mentioning a “Prof. Einstein,” and signing his name with a confident and stylish E. Finlay Freundlich, he died at his home in Wiesbaden. It was 1964, and Freundlich was seventy-nine years old. His adopted daughter brought his cremated ashes back to Glasgow and scattered them in the Jewish cemetery.
Charles Rundle Davidson had barely turned fifteen when he applied for a position at the Royal Observatory. William Christie was then the astronomer royal. The teenager learned the instrumentation so well that by 1896, he was an established computer. When Frank Dyson became astronomer royal in 1910, he soon relied on Davidson as an expert on the design and care of the instruments, and as the man who would have a match when his pipe went out. Davidson could have no way of knowing that he would outlive his good friend and colleague by over three decades. Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1931, he would be the last man standing in the group of dedicated astronomers who accepted Einstein’s challenge to photograph the stars.
Davidson had gone on eight solar eclipse expeditions in his forty-year career at the Royal Observatory: Portugal in 1900; Tunisia in 1904; Brazil in 1912; Russia in 1914; Brazil in 1919; Sumatra in 1926; England in 1927; and, finally, Canada in 1932, his last. As was the case with all the other astronomers, his life had been part hard work and part exciting adventure. In his later years at the observatory, he developed an interest in stellar color photometry, a subject on which he would publish and copublish many papers. He retired in August 1937, after a career that lasted nearly fifty years. In a tribute to his loyal service, Harold Spencer Jones, who had stood next to him in the villa’s garden north of Minsk in 1914, wrote a tribute. Jones reminded readers how the design and care of the instruments used in eclipse expeditions had often been placed under Davidson’s supervision. “It is not possible to understand how much the Observatory has owed to Mr. Davidson,” Jones added.
Davidson and his family moved out of London during World War II to a little English village called Ridlington, in the county of Rutland. When the children were older, Davidson’s wife, Eliza, went back to school to become an elementary teacher. For years, the Davidsons had escaped during summer holidays to the seacoast with their four children, often to Cliftonville, on the North Sea. With money saved from teaching, Eliza bought the family a home there, where they could spend the entire summer. Eliza died in 1944 and was buried in the churchyard at Ridlington.
After Eliza’s death, Charles kept busy writing and publishing papers. He later lost vision in his right eye and had a cataract removed from the left. He went to live with an unmarried daughter, a schoolteacher. But he wanted to return to Cliftonville where he had so many happy family memories. His daughter Stella had married by then, with three daughters of her own. She was living not far from the house that Eliza had bought. Charles would spend the last years of the 1960s with Stella and her family.
He knew the area well. He walked the beach daily for exercise and helped his granddaughters build sandcastles. He treated them from a tin of sweets he kept by his living room chair. He often visited the local shops and, unlike Campbell, loved gardening. “We were fascinated with his eyeglasses,” his granddaughter recalled. “Because he had only one eye, they had two different lenses, one for close up and one for distance. They were hinged on both sides so that he appeared to turn them upside down and inside out to change between lenses.” Charles spoke very little of his life as an astronomer. Still, the girls plied him for stories. They had heard from their mother of the exotic parrots and miniature monkeys that had come from far-off Brazil. “I was paid to enjoy my hobby” was all he would tell them.
He kept track of time by the bells he had grown used to as a schoolboy, especially for teatime. “Is it time for our seven-beller?” he would ask Stella. Bells on ship were rung every half hour, so this meant his 3:30 cup of tea. Approaching ninety years old in the mid-1960s, he had begun to grow deaf, and now the world of sound was also slipping away. But it was a world far different from the one that had seen him to manhood. Davidson remembered the floor-length Victorian dresses worn by his mother and the women of his teenage years. No wonder he was shocked to see miniskirts on the streets of London. “Do you think they forgot to put on their skirts?” he would ask a smiling granddaughter. He had gone from horse and carriage to man on the moon. Perhaps this was why, when his family gathered around a grainy television set in the summer of 1969, he doubted what they were telling him. The American astronaut Neil Armstrong had just stepped upon the surface of the moon. “It’s not real,” Davidson declared, when he read the story the next day in the Daily Telegraph. They couldn’t persuade him otherwise.
Davidson was the man who had developed the famous photograph of the eclipsed sun in Brazil, taken by the four-inch telescope Cortie had been wise enough to send as a backup. When he slipped and fell in the street one day in 1970, having just turned ninety-five, he was taken to the local hospital. Muddled and unable to remember what had happened, he had difficulty expressing himself. He no longer recognized his family, those granddaughters with whom he had played cards, and checkers and chess. When he died, the granddaughters dressed in bright colors for his funeral. “We wanted to celebrate his extraordinary life. It was so long since he retired, no one was there from the astronomical world.” Everyone who knew him in those early days of expeditionary travel were long gone, none left to write his official obituary. It was undertaken instead by then astronomer royal, Sir Richard Woolley, who had been chief assistant at the observatory for four years before Davidson left. “Although Davidson retired from the Royal Observatory staff more than thirty years ago,” Woolley wrote, “there are still some Greenwich men who remember him well, not only because of his extreme skills with instruments but because he held strong principles yet was sensible enough to compromise.”
The day of Charles Rundle Davidson’s funeral marked the end of the Victorian-born astronomers who had once boarded fancy steamers and traveled around the world.8
When Allie V. Douglas, was working on her biography of Eddington after his death, she mailed a letter to Einstein, asking if he might contribute by offering his opinion on Eddington’s contribution to the general theory. Two weeks later she had a reply, giving her permission to quote it:
Eddington’s main achievement, in my opinion, is his theory of the stars. His creative achievement in the field of relativity and the theory of matter did not carry conviction for me. But this may be my fault. The German physicist and philosopher Lichtenberg once said: “If a head and a book collide and it sounds hollow—this is not necessarily caused by the book!”
Yours sincerely, A. Einstein
After fleeing Nazi Germany, Albert Einstein would remain at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1933 until his death in 1955, a prominent symbol of the scientists who were compelled to leave under Hitler’s regime. Unlike the astronomers who had traveled far and wide when a total eclipse beckoned them to test for light deflection, he did not slip between the pages of history. From the start of his fame, launched in 1919 by the meeting at Burlington House, until the day he died, celebrity pursued him. Hundreds of books have been written about him. Films and documentaries have struggled to define his genius. His detractors would continue to disparage his work, but unsuccessfully. When a book was published in 1931, in Germany, that listed one hundred “professors” speaking out against Einstein, it could have rattled him, except that it was a last sigh from the old guard, most of them too unqualified to speak in the first place. Einstein kept to his famous sense of humor instead. As he told the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who was struggling to create a bust of the physicist through a thick cloud of pipe smoke, “If I were wrong, one professor would have been quite enough.”9
Einstein. To this day, his last name standing alone denotes genius.
In 2015, a century after the theory of general relativity was conceived, scientists announced that they had detected and recorded an unusual sound coming from the vastness of space. The fabric of space-time that Einstein had predicted was now rippling as two black holes collided a billion light-years away. It was the language of the universe, as if someone had held a giant seashell to the cosmos. The German physicist had been right. Time and space were interwoven, warped, able to stretch and shrink. Einstein would have been pleased, but not surprised. Those Victorian-born astronomers whose daring expeditions had challenged the universe of their era—Campbell, Perrine, Freundlich, Dyson, Eddington, Crommelin, and Davidson—would be gratified to learn that another great door to the mystery had been kicked wide open.