CHAPTER 1: A PATH MADE OF MAGIC
1. James Fenimore Cooper might have missed the eclipse described in the epigraph had Yale not expelled him a year earlier for youthful mischief. He either brought a donkey to class or set off an explosion that blew the door off a fellow student’s room. Whatever he did, Yale called it “misconduct” and sent young Cooper packing. The 1806 eclipse entered North America from the southwest, which was then Spanish controlled, and moved northeast toward New England. Fenimore’s hometown, the Village of Otsego, New York, lay in the path of totality. His short story, “The Eclipse,” beautifully evokes the reactions of the animals, as well as the townsfolk, and ranks among the most literary descriptions of a total eclipse.
2. Littmann, Espenak, and Willcox, Totality: Eclipses of the Sun.
3. In 1720, Edmond Halley succeeded John Flamsteed as Britain’s second astronomer royal. It’s believed that he was the first to draw the path of an eclipse as seen from above, looking down on the earth’s surface. The eclipse of 1715—totality lasted for three minutes and thirty-three seconds—became known as Halley’s Eclipse. But he is most famous for the comet named for him and for having predicted its return in 1759, which he did not live to see.
4. The incipient country’s first expedition, and the first for Samuel Williams, was not for a solar eclipse. In 1716, Edmond Halley published a paper challenging scientists around the world to view the very rare transit of Venus, which would occur in 1761, some two decades after his death. With Benjamin Franklin’s help, plans were made to send John Winthrop to Canada. Winthrop was teaching at Harvard then and took with him two students. Samuel Williams and Isaac Rand, chosen because of their mathematical skills, would miss their graduation because of the expedition. With the French and Indian War two years from its conclusion, they traveled under a flag of truce, with permission from France. The province of Massachusetts equipped Winthrop with a sloop that would carry them from Boston to “the savage coast of Labrador,” a journey of thirteen days. They pitched their tents on what is today Kenmount Hill and were soon faced with a problem they hadn’t foreseen, “the infinite swarms of insects, that were in possession of the hill.” Despite this torment by the blackfly, from the family Simuliidae, Winthrop and his students had a front row seat for the transit on June 6.
5. Authors’ note: An occasional reference is cited in an endnote to emphasize a specific source. But to avoid overwhelming the reader with excessive notation, unless otherwise noted, sources for the observations and quotations are listed in the Bibliography.
6. For a more complete story of this 1780 expedition by Samuel Williams, see Rothschild, Two Brides for Apollo.
7. The apparent eastward motion is because the speed of the moon’s revolution toward the east is about twice the rate of the rotation of the earth from west to east. Because of the spherical shape of the earth, the umbra is slowest in the middle of its path.
8. The Reverend Bacon met up with his friend, the “kinematographer” John Nevil Maskelyne, another colorful BAA member famous for inventing the pay toilet, which required a penny to open the locked door. “Spend a penny” had thus become the euphemism of the day in Great Britain for needing a trip to the bathroom. Maskelyne was even more famous for co-inventing a card-playing automaton named “Psycho,” which had gained fame with its hundreds of performances at London’s Egyptian Hall. A magician, illusionist, and “cardsharp” who exposed cheaters and fake mediums, Maskelyne had come to Wadesboro hoping to be the first person to film a solar eclipse.
9. Walter Maunder, though a member of the Royal Astronomical Society for many years, had been a driving force behind the British Astronomical Association’s goal to provide membership to amateur astronomers, regardless of class, education, or gender. After his wife’s death five years earlier, he had married Annie Russell. Because married women were not allowed to hold public positions, Russell was obliged to quit her job as a “lady computer” at the Royal Observatory when she married Maunder. But her marital status would hardly end her career as an astronomer. She was so skilled at chronology that Arthur Eddington, years later, would ask Annie to “date the Nativity.”
10. Maunder, The Total Solar Eclipse 1900.
CHAPTER 2: EINSTEIN’S VISIONARY YEARS
1. Einstein’s biographer and colleague, the theoretical physicist Abraham Pais, who wrote Subtle Is the Lord, withheld the 1994 publication of his second book, Einstein Lived Here, while the editorial staff traveled to Yugoslavia and Hungary in an unsuccessful search for answers.
2. Granddaughter Evelyn Einstein—her father was the first son, Hans Albert—found the packet of letters in 1986. When Mileva died in 1948, the letters went to her son’s first wife, Frieda Einstein, who brought them to the United States and put them on a shelf of her husband’s closet. After Frieda’s death, Evelyn was sorting through her mother’s things when she found the letters her grandparents had written (Zackheim, Einstein’s Daughter). When one considers the state of Mileva’s emotional and financial situation during her final years, it’s quite remarkable that she didn’t sell them.
3. No researcher has spent more years and travel while seeking an answer to Lieserl’s disappearance than Michele Zackheim. Visiting Serbia several times, twice during the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, Zackheim interviewed over a hundred people related to Marić’s life. She believes she has deciphered the death of the unfortunate Lieserl. “And finally, by understanding the procedures of the postal system between Switzerland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I was able to determine the day that Lieserl died—September 21, 1903, the day of a solar eclipse, the day when the sun disappeared from the sky” (Zackheim, Einstein’s Daughter).
4. This paper on photoelectricity earned Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921. That photons carry discrete packets of energy had been anticipated by physicist Max Planck, who described them as “quanta.” Planck’s work was the beginning of the quantum theory. It’s thus ironic that Einstein’s Nobel Prize was awarded for work that was one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics, an idea he would never accept in his lifetime.
5. The concept of an atom, and the word itself, was first discussed by fifth-century Greek philosophers. Isaac Newton left behind in various publications his thoughts that matter constituted particles in motion through a vacuum. In 1827, botanist Robert Brown studied pollen grains through a microscope and noticed that they wiggled about erratically, in what became known as the Brownian motion. Not until 1905 did Einstein prove the existence of the molecules responsible for this action when he observed the motion of particles smaller than pollen grains floating in the air. He could then connect the motion of the particles to the actual size of atoms.
6. By connecting energy and matter, E = mc2 also led us to a true understanding of the energy source of the stars. Though this equation and its fullest application is rightly attributed to Einstein, he was not the first to write it. Several physicists, including Oliver Heaviside, Wilhelm Wien, and Max Abraham, wrote incorrect versions previously. The first physicist to write it correctly was Henri Poincaré, but he did not realize that it applied to real masses, not just to electricity and magnetism. The world would more fully understand this abstract idea when two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, ending World War II.
7. Arc minutes and seconds have been used in astronomy since antiquity to measure positions and orbits of objects in the solar system. There are sixty arc minutes in one degree. Each arc minute is divided into sixty arc seconds. The size of an arc second would be comparable to the size of a dime at a distance of 1.3 miles.
8. Johann Georg von Soldner (1766–1833) remained better known for those works named for him, such as the Ramanujan-Soldner constant and the Soldner coordinate system. In an unpublished manuscript written around 1784—it was inspired by John Michell’s paper on the escape of light from a massive body, published in 1783—Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) appears to have come to basically the same result that Soldner had.
CHAPTER 3: THE TWO ECLIPSES OF 1912
1. Leo Wenzel Pollak was then at the Institute for Cosmological Physics. On August 24, 1911, he wrote to the Berlin Observatory on Einstein’s behalf. In a letter written on September 21, 1911, Einstein assured Freundlich: “You can keep the reprint, of course.”
2. When atoms of different elements are in a high-temperature environment, each atom produces a rainbow-like array of colors, its spectrum. Hence a spectroscopist is a scientist expert in the study of this phenomenon.
3. This ambitious astronomical project was conceived and launched in 1887 by the Paris Observatory and the Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. The objective was to “map the sky” by photographing and cataloging the positions of millions of stars, some as faint as eleventh and twelfth magnitude. Eighteen more observatories from around the globe, including the one at Córdoba, signed on. It would be Dyson’s first project when he joined the Royal Observatory. Although the project was never finished, given the vastness of its reach and the enormous expense, international committees met over the upcoming decades to discuss the progress and confront problems.
4. Guglielmo Marconi had been offered free passage on the Titanic but, three days earlier, had chosen the Lusitania because he had work to do and preferred the public stenographer on that ship. Thanks to a transatlantic radiotelegraph service that had been put in place between Ireland and Glace Bay, Canada, in 1907, Marconi’s invention was instrumental in rescuing the Titanic survivors.
5. The Southern Hemisphere has a continuing role in astronomy to this very day. The center of the Milky Way galaxy is visible from there. Therefore, if one wants to study the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the best way would be to travel south of the equator; Chile plays a particularly prominent role.
6. The RMS Arlanza was one of the luxury passenger ships built by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. The company had become so famous that a decade earlier, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, which ranked among Arthur Eddington’s favorite “light literature,” sang their praises in a popular poem of the day: “I’ve never sailed the Amazon, / I’ve never reached Brazil; / But the Don and Magdalena, / They can go there when they will! / Yes, weekly from Southampton, / Great steamers, white and gold, / Go rolling down to Rio… And I’d like to roll to Rio / Some day before I’m old!” These steamers were the largest machines on earth.
7. Argentina’s second team would go even farther inland than the others, to Alfenas. With Morize going to Passa Quatro, the second Brazilian team would go to Cruzeiro, just a few miles to the south. Milan Rastislav Štefánik, as the only member of the French team, would stay at Passa Quatro with Morize and Eddington.
8. The president of Brazil was not interested in just the eclipse. He had been keen on using this natural event and a visit to Minas Gerais to let it be known that he hoped Pinheiro Machado would succeed him as president. Three years later almost to the day, Machado would be stabbed to death in the lobby of the Hotel dos Estrangeiros in Rio, where the English expedition had been lodged.
9. Astronomers the world over relied on this telegraph system, adapted and overseen by Pickering. Acting as a kind of communications center since 1898—its European counterpart was in Kiel, Germany, and included fifty observatories—the Harvard College Observatory Bulletins received information about the discovery and follow-up of astronomical phenomena and circulated it to astronomer members in the Western Hemisphere.
CHAPTER 4: EINSTEIN’S ENTREATY
1. János Bolyai (1802–1860); Carl Frederick Gauss (1777–1855); Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792–1856); and Bernard Riemann (1826–1866).
2. The International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research, formed by George Ellery Hale to broaden stellar research, met from July 30 to August 5, 1913. After a few days of sightseeing and having dinner on the Rhine, the eighty or so members got down to meetings and lectures. But mostly, what was written about and commented on were the personal friendships and camaraderie that existed in the scientific community. The union’s publication later made this statement: “It is quite evident that if war and peace depended upon the feelings of those who partake in international conferences the era of peace would not be far away.” After the outbreak of war, the union was discontinued. Its successor, the International Astronomical Union, formed after the war in 1919, had as two of its first vice presidents William Campbell and Frank Dyson.
3. As his earlier correspondence between them noted, Campbell would be happy to send on to Freundlich any successful photographic plates he might obtain during the eclipse. However, there were terms to this agreement: “Any results obtained by you might be announced by you in a preliminary way in the Nachrichten, or otherwise, and your full paper on the subject be published as a Lick Observatory Bulletin” (Crelinsten, Einstein’s Jury, 76).
4. The Swiss Years: Correspondence, 1902–1914.
5. Mabel Loomis Todd wrote Total Eclipses of the Sun, which was widely read. She had carried on a long affair with Emily Dickinson’s older brother, Austin, and became the poet’s first editor, albeit posthumously. Percival Lowell had sent the Todds to South America to observe Mars and possibly identify the Martian canals that he believed were evidence of intelligent life. They were with him in Tripoli for the May 28, 1900, eclipse when he received a cable sent by his assistant, A. E. Douglas, back in tiny Washington, Georgia. “The race to beat the eclipse” was a current idea that a telegram would travel east faster than the eclipse, thanks to promotion by James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald. If the 1900 eclipse could achieve it, it would mean that astronomers who saw a comet, or other phenomena, could develop their photographs quickly and cable the info ahead to astronomers in the east to be on the lookout when the eclipse reached them. The attempt failed in 1900, as it had in previous eclipses. The New York Times referred to David Todd’s plan to fly after the eclipse in Russia as “chasing the sun” (see Bill Kramer, “Solar Eclipses Books,” Eclipse Chasers website, September 15, 2017, www.eclipse-chasers.com/html/books.shtml).
6. The first director, Edward Holden, convinced wealthy San Francisco banker William H. Crocker to fund the Lick expeditions, which were then referred to as the Crocker expeditions.” For clarity in this book, they will be referred to as the Lick expeditions. James Lick was a young carpenter and piano maker. When his sweetheart became pregnant, Lick asked her father for her hand in marriage. “Do you have a penny in your purse?” her father asked. Angry and insulted, Lick ended up in Argentina, where his pianos were in great demand. Wealthy two years later, he returned in victory to find his sweetheart happily married to another man. (Information on Lick is from Michael L. Strauss, Fredericksburg Pennsylvania History website: www.fredpah.com.)
7. The Pic Du Midi Observatory, in the French Pyrenees, was the first mountaintop observatory but was not staffed year-round, because of snowfall, until long after the completion of Lick. When forest fires occasionally broke out, the Lick Observatory staff became firefighters. See Holden, “Forest Fires on Mount Hamilton, July 29 to August 3, 1894”; and Holden, “Forest Fires at Mount Hamilton, July, 1891.”
8. In the summer of 1894, Campbell had concluded that spectroscopes of the day were incapable of detecting water vapor or oxygen in the atmosphere on Mars. Therefore, he boldly sided with Maunder and rejected the assertion of the wealthy and influential Percival Lowell that life existed on that planet, an idea upheld by many famous astronomers and a favorite topic of conversation with the public. In his review of Lowell’s book Mars (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1895), Campbell expounded on Lowell’s assertion that the world would not be ready to accept a different new life: “Here Mr. Lowell is certainly wrong. In my opinion he has taken the popular side of the most popular scientific question afloat. The world at large is anxious for the discovery of intelligent life on Mars, and every advocate gets an instant and large audience” (Campbell, “Mars, by Percival Lowell”).
9. By “aberrations,” Campbell is referring to a lens defect that prevents light rays from being sharply focused on a point, thereby causing any image formed to be distorted and blurred.
10. Frank Bequette Rodolph (1843–1923) was born in Wisconsin and traveled overland to California with his family in 1850. He was a successful commercial photographer in the Oakland area during the 1870s and 1880s. His impressive collection of work, which touches deeply on the familiar lives of the local people, is archived at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
11. Bertha’s grandfather Alfred Krupp and other family members were known for their anti-Semitism. Alfred Krupp hoped that someone would “come and start a counter-revolution against Jews, socialists and liberals” and considered appointing himself for the job. During World War I, which was just around the corner, the Krupp company would manufacture the German army’s heavy siege guns, including the ninety-four-ton howitzer Big Bertha, named for Bertha Krupp. Early in the war, their engineers went quickly to the drawing board to improve Krupp’s long-range artillery.
12. The flash spectrum is observable for a few seconds as a total eclipse begins and just before it ends, when layers of the sun’s atmosphere “flash” into prominence, producing bright lines caused by the hot, luminous gas. Charles Augustus Young (1834–1908), one of America’s foremost solar spectroscopists, was first to observe it during the eclipse of 1870. Young viewed the 1900 eclipse in North Carolina with the English members of the BAA, Bacon, his daughter, and Maskelyne.
13. In 1773, Catherine the Great, as a patron of learning, welcomed to Russia all Jesuits expelled from other countries in Europe. Twenty-five years after her death in 1796 and under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church, Tsar Alexander I exiled the Jesuits from Russia. In 1887, Father S. J. Perry, also of Stonyhurst, had been refused and then given a permit for an eclipse expedition. Cortie hoped the same would happen for him. The Stonyhurst Magazine speculated that the selection of Kiev might have been the problem, given that the city was then the highest governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church. See “Stonyhurst Astronomers at Hernösand.”
14. Crelinsten, Einstein’s Jury, 28.
15. The BAAS attendees were mostly from the British Isles but also included a Canadian, ten Americans, three South Africans, a Russian, a Pole, two Italians, a Swede, five Danes, and three scientists from India. There were also seven Germans and a few women. This was not Eddington’s first BAAS meeting. He had been in Canada, in 1909, arriving in Quebec province. He then visited Niagara Falls before taking a train across the Canadian prairies to Winnipeg, where the meeting was held.
16. Gustav and Bertha Krupp bought Archduke Ferdinand’s villa after his assassination.
17. Charles Francis Brush Jr. was the son of Charles Brush, a pioneer in electricity and the inventor of the arc lamp. The younger Brush would enlist in the US Army in 1917 and serve as a first lieutenant. He died in 1927, at age thirty-three, of complications during a blood transfusion for his seven-year-old daughter, Jane, who had died a few days earlier.
18. Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe.
CHAPTER 5: THE 1914 ECLIPSE
1. To this day, astronomy research has been assisted by amateurs the world over. But the involvement of skilled amateurs has now grown to include science generally. In the 1990s, the term citizen science was coined independently by the American ornithologist Rick Bonney and the British sociologist Alan Irwin. In opening up science to the public, Irwin saw the relationship as twofold: science must be responsive to the needs of citizens, who in turn can produce dependable scientific knowledge. Bonney was unaware of Irwin’s writing when he also defined the term to cover the contributions of nonscientists (such as amateur birdwatchers) to the overall body of scientific research. The Oxford English Dictionary now carries the terms citizen science and citizen scientists as of June 2014.
2. Lywood, “Our Riviera, Coast of Health.”
3. Livadia Palace was a lavish retreat for Nicholas II and his doomed family. Yalta was also where Anton Chekhov, suffering from tuberculosis, had built a home a few years before his death in 1904. In 1945, during the Yalta Conference, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and members of the American delegation were housed at the palace. The Russian delegation was lodged at Yusupov Palace, nearby in the town of Koreiz. The British took up residence in Vorontsov Palace, at the foot of the Crimean Mountains some five miles away. Livadia Palace is home to a museum today but is still used occasionally for international summits.
4. The English expedition from the Imperial College London, headed by Alfred Fowler, would be the most short-lived of the 1914 expeditions. Traveling through the Kiel Canal, the three members arrived in Riga on August 1, hours before Germany declared war on Russia. Their equipment had not been sent on to Kiev as planned since the military had taken over the railroad. The city was in an uproar. They decided to join Cortie, their banned team member, in Sweden. After waiting days for a steamer to Stockholm, they boarded the ship only to disembark when their permits did not arrive. On August 6, when England entered the war against Germany, the British embassy in Saint Petersburg recalled astronomer and soldier Major Edmond H. Grove-Hills, back to England for active duty. Fowler knew then that the expedition was hopeless. The team booked passage on a steamer to Copenhagen and was back in England by mid-August.
5. In this group with Penck was the Austrian anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. His is the most astonishing story. When Malinowski was detained in Australia, the government gave him permission to carry on his work and even provided funding. He chose the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of New Guinea and spent several years there. He published Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which was based on his work there and which established his career.
6. The RMS Arlanza was the same steamer that Eddington, Davidson, and Atkinson had taken from Southampton to Rio for the eclipse of 1912. The ship was off the coast of Brazil on August 16, 1914, returning to Southampton with over one thousand passengers, when it was intercepted by the cruiser Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, which issued an order to stop or the cruiser would open fire. The Arlanza’s captain was ordered to dismantle the radio aerials and throw them overboard. When asked how many women and children were aboard, the captain replied that there were 335 women and 97 children. At this, the German cruiser ordered the Arlanza to proceed. Thus, the rumor that Perrine read was just that, a rumor. A few months later, the Arlanza was requisitioned as an armed merchant cruiser. It would go back into civilian service again in 1920, and Perrine would take the Arlanza again to Southampton in 1922. The vessel was sold for scrap in 1938 after a cheering crowd in Bueno Aires bade her farewell as the ship sailed back to Southampton for the last time.
7. Peter the Great founded the city and named it Sankt-Peterburg, to reflect his appreciation of all things Dutch. With the outbreak of war, the imperial government changed it to Petrograd on September 1, 1914, replacing the German burg with grad. The city later became Leningrad in 1924 and was changed back to Saint Petersburg in 1991.
8. The folks at Amherst, and their friends, were worried. But David Todd and wife Mabel had skedaddled home through Scandinavia, as had most of the astronomers, despite newspapers declaring that the “Amherst savant” was “lost in Russia” and urging William Jennings Bryant to help find him (Julie Dobrow, “The Star-Crossed Astronomer,” Amherst Magazine, July 28, 2017).
9. Boney, “The Summer of 1914,” describes a personal diary written by F. O. Bower, a botanist at the University of Glasgow. With insight and humor, Bower details his journey to and from Australia for the 84th meeting of the BAAS, as well as events there. His departing ship was the Orvieto, which left from Tillbury, near the mouth of the Thames River. Also on the ship was Sir Oliver Lodge, the previous BAAS president; his family; physicist Henry Moseley; and Moseley’s mother. While the trip south was pleasant, Bower reflects on some of his fellow passengers with splendid comic remarks. As the ship came through the Great Australian Bight, passengers had been warned that it would be a stormy passage. When things went smoothly, Bower remarked that “the Bight is not as bad as the Bark,” a comment later stolen by Lodge and used as his own in a speech he gave the same night. Bower also records the quick demise of the “scientific brotherhood” expected in Adelaide. Bower, Lodge, and many others cut their visit short with the outbreak of war. From Brisbane, they caught two trains south, to Sydney. There, they booked passage on the SS Morea, “a noisy and creaky ship.” Two of the German scientists, Albrecht Penck and Otto Maas, had been sent back from Australia also on the Morea, much to Lodge’s disapproval. First, Lodge accused Penck of having “spy” documents. (These were the notes and drawings that Penck, as a geographer, had made of the coast near Sydney.) Lodge wanted Penck confined to his cabin and taken to England as a prisoner. He believed that the two Germans scientists were sending secret codes to enemy boats. Lodge also reported a woman for smoking on deck at night. A crack of thunder was once thought to be a torpedo and caused havoc aboard. A “Russian geologist” who kept two life belts strapped around his waist heard a loud bang on deck and bolted in terror from the smoking room. Suffering from what Bower called “war hysteria,” Lodge worked to get Penck and Maas taken off the ship at Malta. Determined, he wrote a letter to the governor in the pretense that it came from all the BAAS members. Bower referred to Lodge as “a man over his head and ears in conceit.” In trying to obtain a full copy of Bower’s diary (these notes refer to the very detailed fifteen pages written by Boney), we learned that it had burned in the 1990s in a fire at the archives.
CHAPTER 6: A MAGIC CARPET MADE OF SPACE-TIME
1. In 1675, King Charles II commissioned Christopher Wren to build an observatory and living quarters for England’s first astronomer royal, John Flamsteed (1646–1719). A study of the moon by Flamsteed and other astronomers would assist sailors with navigation at sea and possibly prevent shipwrecks, which were costly in lives and cargo. Since funding was a problem, Wren used the brick and stone remnants from an old Tudor fort to build the Octagon Room and Flamsteed’s living quarters just below it. When Dyson arrived in Greenwich, six of his eight children had already been born. Additional rooms were built in the basement to accommodate the family. The observatory is today a museum, with graffiti scrawled by some of Dyson’s children still visible on the walls.
2. With its roots dating back to the seventeenth century, the Royal Arsenal munitions factory, in Woolwich, covered thirteen hundred acres and employed a labor force of eighty thousand. In 1915, the government built nearly thirteen hundred homes to accommodate the more senior and skilled employees. By 1994, it was no longer a military organization.
3. The concept of a time ball is now outdated, and time balls are used today mostly for historical reference or as tourist attractions. But the time ball was once an important mechanism around the world for keeping time. It was a large ball, usually wooden or metal, that would drop at a scheduled time to let people know the time (for many decades, only the rich could afford clocks and reliable timepieces). More importantly, it was meant to aid offshore ships in verifying the settings of their chronometers and maintaining accurate longitude. The time ball at Greenwich, installed in 1833, was red and built atop the observatory, where it was easily seen by ships in the Thames River. It dropped each day at 1:00 p.m., as it still does for tourists, although its use has long been replaced by electronic time signals.
4. The onion dome at the Royal Observatory was built to house the Great Equatorial Telescope, the twenty-eight-inch refracting telescope that is seventh-largest in the world. The onion dome was built specifically to house it, as were other observatory domes with large telescopes. Since aluminum was still too expensive to be practical, Christie decided to use the same paper-and-wood framing used in boat building. Thus, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many observatories had papier maché panels over a wood or, sometimes, an iron framework. Being lightweight, the domes could rotate more easily so that astronomers could position telescope openings in any direction of the sky. The onion dome at Greenwich was damaged by an air raid during World War II. A fiberglass replica replaced the original dome in 1971.
5. Dyson told a humorous story about his Scottish chief assistant, John Jackson. “I found only one man who really enjoyed air raids,” Dyson told the RAS Club one night at a dinner. “He was an old night watchman who calmly lighted his pipe and watched the show as if it had been a display of fireworks. The most amusing incident I remember on these occasions is that I said to Jackson one night in the front court: “Let’s get out of this and go under cover,” to which he replied indignantly in his native tongue, ‘the Obsairvatory was built to obsairve the Moon, and I am going to obsairve the Moon”’ (Wilson, Ninth Astronomer Royal).
6. Eddington is known for “the Eddington number,” which, in astrophysics, is the number of protons in the universe that can be observed from earth. However, the Eddington number in cycling was a system he devised for tracking a cyclist’s long-distance rides and thus his lifetime progress. Eddington’s own Eddington number was 84. Not long before he died, he was still cycling an occasional 80 miles in a day. His longest ride during his lifetime was from Doncaster to Cambridge, a distance of 122 miles.
7. Along the lines of fighting in Northern France, the shooting stopped on Christmas Eve. Both German and British soldiers climbed out of the trenches to sing carols, exchange small presents, and even engage in a game of soccer. Graham Williams, Fifth London Rifle Brigade, recalled the scene: “First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words Adeste Fideles. And I thought, well, this is really a most extraordinary thing—two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war” (Williams, quoted in Vinciguerra, “The Truce of Christmas, 1914”). This would be the only truce to occur during World War I after Allied commanders gave orders to shoot any soldiers who violated the no-fraternization rule.
8. In 1909, Perrine was offered a yearly salary of 12,000 pesos by the Argentine government, or $5,400 in gold (about $150,000 today). Campbell’s salary at Lick Observatory in 1909, as director, was $4,000. The drawback to this offer, which promised Perrine an increase in equipment over time, was that his salary would not be increased at all from 1909 until his retirement, twenty-seven years later. The last letter Perrine wrote, asking to be reimbursed for the money spent in Russia, was written in 1934, two full decades after the expedition. There is no indication that he was ever reimbursed. (Santiago Paolantonio, Engineer and Master of Education, Museum Astronomical Observatory, National University of Cordoba, Argentine, email correspondence with authors, July–August 2018; and Bob Kelly-Thomas, grandson of Charles Perrine, email correspondence with authors, August–September 2018.)
9. Fritz Haber would win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1918; Otto Hahn, who also took part in the hopeful Christmas truce of 1914, would win it for chemistry in 1944; James Franck would win for physics in 1925; and Gustav Hertz for physics in 1925.
10. Clara Immerwahr Haber (1870–1915) was the first woman in Germany to earn a PhD in chemistry. Like her friend Mileva Marić, she, too, felt oppressed as a woman scientist by the demands of an imperfect marriage and household duties. The story arose that Fritz had attended a celebration party for the successful chlorine gas attack and that Clara killed herself the same night in opposition to her husband’s work. The suicide notes she left behind did not survive. She died hours later in the arms of their only child, thirteen-year-old Hermann. After his wife’s death, Fritz Haber returned immediately to the front to oversee the second gas release.
11. Charles Perrine, letter to George Hale, May 31, 1915. Museo Astronómico, Córdoba.
12. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, An Autobiographical Poem (London: Edward Moxon, 1850). While a student, Wordsworth (1770–1850) could see Newton’s statue from his room at nearby St. John’s College.
13. Richard Feynman, one of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, would say this of Maxwell’s achievement: “From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade” (Feynman, Leighton, and Sands, Feynman Lectures on Physics).
14. Albert Einstein to Hans Albert Einstein, November 4, 1915, Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 8, doc. 134.
15. Einstein letter to Mileva, February 6, 1916. See also Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe.
16. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, physicists were searching for a mysterious medium through which light waves passed, what came to be called ether. In 1887, in the basement of a dormitory, physicist Albert Michelson (1852–1931), of Case School of Applied Science, and chemist Edward Morley (1838–1923), of Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), conducted what is known as the Michelson-Morley experiment. In an attempt to detect the relative motion of matter through the stationary luminiferous ether, it compared the speed of light in perpendicular directions. They found no substantial difference between the speed of light in the direction of movement through the presumed ether and the speed at right angles. This negative result is considered the first evidence against the prevailing ether theory so strongly embraced by Lodge and most scientists of the day. While twenty-one-year-old Einstein once had his professor at the Swizz Polytechnic Institute reject his proposal to do an experiment that would measure how fast the earth moved through ether for having been done too many times before, his 1905 special theory would invalidate its existence. Einstein later wrote of the famous 1887 experiment, “If the Michelson-Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption.” Lodge, however, believing deeply in “the theory of spiritual evolution,” would continue to reject this repudiation of ether by insisting that both the universe and the afterworld were filled with it. On September 8, 1913, the New York Times published a dispatch from Birmingham, England, about an upcoming BAAS meeting in which “Sir Oliver Lodge, in Presidential Address, Will Combat the ‘Theory of Relativity.’” The dispatch mentioned “Prof. Einstein of the University of Zurich” and stated that his theory argued against ether. This was the first time Einstein’s name appeared in the New York Times.
17. See Bruton, “Sacrifice of a Genius”; and British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Eighty-Fourth.
18. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Ernest Rutherford, later known as the “father of nuclear physics,” had been Moseley’s supervisor at the University of Manchester. Rutherford was so distraught over this loss that he lobbied the British government until a policy was introduced that would no longer allow promising and prominent scientists to volunteer for combat duty. The American physicist and Nobel Prize winner Robert Millikan wrote eloquently of Moseley’s death: “In a research which is destined to rank as one of the dozen most brilliant in conception, skillful in execution, and illuminating in results in the history of science, a young man twenty-six years old threw open the windows through which we can glimpse the sub-atomic world with a definiteness and certainty never dreamed of before. Had the European War had no other result than the snuffing out of this young life, that alone would make it one of the most hideous and most irreparable crimes in history” (Millikan, “Radiation and Atomic Structure,” 195). Isaac Asimov would write years later, “In view of what he might still have accomplished, his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally” (Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 921).
19. Erwin Planck, a politician and resistance fighter, would be executed by the Gestapo in January 1945 for participating in a failed attempt on Adolph Hitler’s life several months earlier. Sadly, both of Planck’s daughters also died young, during childbirth. Many years later, a letter was discovered in which Max Planck, at eighty-seven years old, begged Hitler for his son’s life: “As the gratitude of the German people for my life’s work, which has become an everlasting intellectual wealth of Germany, I am pleading for my son’s life.” The plea fell on deaf ears. Planck died two years later. (Max Planck, letter to Adolph Hitler, October 25, 1944, from the personal collection of Graham Farmelo.)
20. In 1923, the Marić family received a letter from Milos that he was not only alive, but on his way home to Serbia. The family’s joy—Mileva rushed to Vojvodina to meet her brother—soon turned to disappointment since Milos changed his mind. He sent his wife a postcard that she should consider herself a free woman. He was staying in Russia, and he did so, becoming a well-respected professor of histology. His wife never saw him again; nor did Mileva ever see her brother.
CHAPTER 7: UNRIDDLING THE UNIVERSE
1. What is more amazing is that Schwarzschild’s 1900 paper also preceded by over two decades the work by the Belgian mathematician Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), a Roman Catholic priest; the Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann (1888–1925), who died young of typhoid fever contracted in Crimea; and the American mathematician and physicist Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961), who taught at both the California Institute of Technology and Princeton. Schwarzschild’s paper may have been the first modern work on the large-scale structure of space-time, what we now call cosmology.
2. This was the first time conscription went into place for England, Scotland, and Wales. With Irish republicans launching a rebellion against British rule that resulted in the Easter Rising in April of that year, the Irish were exempt from conscription, although many nonetheless volunteered to fight.
3. Eddington told one biographer that he added this postscript about peeling potatoes to the letter (Chandrasekhar, Eddington: The Most Distinguished Astrophysicist of His Time). Luminaries at Cambridge then included such names as Newall, their first professor of astrophysics who had stood beside Perrine in the Crimean vineyard for the 1914 eclipse. There was also Sir Joseph Larmor, the Lucasian Professor, who seemed to perfectly represent the gap between the classical physics of Newton and the new physics of quantum theory and relativity. Larmor also adopted a conservative view on many nonscientific topics, perhaps in keeping up his persona. In 1920, he spoke out in opposition to installing baths at Cambridge. “We’ve done without them for four hundred years,” he was quoted as saying. “Why begin now?” He soon became a devoted visitor to the baths, however, turning up each morning in a mackintosh and cap, which he had never worn before.
4. The celebrated senior wrangler was considered the most prestigious intellectual achievement in Great Britain, awarded to the top mathematics undergraduate among the other “wranglers.” Many senior wranglers, such as Arthur Eddington, would go on to direct observatories. Others would achieve fame in various fields beyond physics and mathematics.
5. Sir Gilbert Thomas Walker (1868–1958) was a British mathematician and meteorologist. As director general of observatories in the Indian Meteorological Service, he focused on the importance of the monsoon and conducted extensive statistical studies of worldwide correlations.
6. Braithwaite, “Friends’ School in Kendal.”
7. Biographies of Eddington mention only his father’s death by typhoid fever. It seems unlikely that even Eddington himself knew about the Leeds Mercury newspaper account in 1885, or the Quaker magazine’s follow-up. His early memories of Kendal, as he revealed to his biographer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, contain a somewhat ironic note: “The traditions of Kendal have been woven into my earliest memories as the home of the brief married life of my parents… Kendal has an earlier association with science, that great chemist, perhaps the greatest of all chemists, who was headmaster of Stramongate school, the same school of which a century later my father became headmaster and where I was born. From John Dalton we had the atom. And now I have become an atom chaser myself. John Dalton must have left some germ behind him which lingered in the walls of Stramongate” (Chandrasekhar, Eddington). Dalton was headmaster at Stramongate from 1781 to 1793.
8. Wilson, Ninth Astronomer Royal, writes that her father was one of the first to recognize Eddington’s “mathematical genius.” Dyson’s relationship with his assistants and computers appeared to be congenial and professional. Wilson recalled the major difference between life in Edinburgh for the astronomer royal and life in Greenwich. In Greenwich, only the astronomer royal lived within the observatory grounds. “Dyson fell into the habit of bringing first one assistant and then another in to the mid-day meal. He would greet his wife with:—‘Here’s Chapman, Carrie,’ or ‘Can you find some dinner for Eddington?’ and Mrs. Dyson, smiling hospitably on the visitor, would wonder anxiously whether there was enough food to go around. These meals must have been rather an ordeal for the shy bachelor assistants, surrounded by school-girls in gym tunics.” (Dyson’s mention of “Chapman” is to Sydney Chapman [1888–1970], a mathematician and geophysicist who died in Boulder, Colorado, where he was involved at the High Altitude Observatory.)
9. Eddington’s biographer, Allie Vibert Douglas (his postdoctoral student at Cambridge in 1921 and the first Canadian woman to become an astrophysicist), described him as a loner: “His need for relaxation after long periods of intensive mental concentration found its outlet only rarely in social intercourse and then to a limited extent. He never married nor did he ever wish to marry. Apart from his mother and sister who were the homemakers, his interest in women was simply and solely as acquaintances or, in the case of the very few women astronomers in various countries, as friendly colleagues.” Douglas, a devoted former student, wrote the biography at the request of Eddington’s sister, Winifred, after his death. There is only one name mentioned in the dedication: “To Arthur Stanley Eddington’s friend C. J. A. Trimble,” the man with whom Eddington maintained a close forty-year friendship. A modern British documentary, Einstein and Eddington, directed by Philip Martin, written by Peter Moffat (BBC Two, 2008), depicts Eddington in love with a young man who died at Ypres during the war. This romantic presentation is fiction. Trimble was to write Eddington’s biography, but he had suffered over the years from mental health problems. Eventually, Douglas became the author.
10. Although many scientists, from ancient Greece onward, had estimated the distance over the centuries and although Halley believed observing those rare transits of Venus would reveal an answer, it was Arthur Hinks, a British astronomer, geographer, and cartographer who determined the astronomical unit. For this accomplishment, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the RAS and elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
11. Crelinsten, Einstein’s Jury, 22. The letter is dated March 8, 1914.
12. Original copies of Hinks’s and the secretary-general’s correspondence are in Sociedade De Geografia De Lisboa, Comemoracoes do 90° Aniversario.
13. See Campbell, “The Lick Observatory Community in War Service.”
14. A hundred pounds needed for the instruments in 1917 would be equivalent to $8,462 in 2017. The thousand pounds needed for travel would be ten times greater.
15. In the summer of 1917, A. G. Freeman, a California businessman, traveled to Petrograd on business. Campbell and the University of California had given Freeman permission and the credentials to represent them to the Imperial Academy of Science on behalf of the instruments. Freeman secured the deal, and the shipment left Pulkovo on August 15, 1917. It arrived in Vladivostok in mid-December. Freeman cabled Vladivostok, urging the port to promptly ship the cargo.
16. The Friends Ambulance Unit was formed within days of the outbreak of the war by a group of young Quakers. They were convinced that current ambulance services as they were would be inadequate and that, by offering such services themselves, they could save lives. The Friends Ambulance Unit would also allow those conscientious objectors to make a nonviolent contribution to the war effort. With conscription still not in place in 1914, this consideration wasn’t necessary on their part. It was a commendable effort.
17. “All Ready for Solar Eclipse at Stations,” Glendale (WA) Sentinel, June 6, 1918, http://gld.stparchive.com/Archive/GLD/GLD06061918p01.php.
18. These details come from Campbell, Life on Mount Hamilton, in which author Kenneth Campbell recalls the details in a conversation with C. Donald Shane. Shane was one of the Mount Hamilton boys who had gone to the war effort. Kenneth Campbell recalls the night before the eclipse when word came that his brother Douglas had been shot down. Campbell says that his parents didn’t know if Doug was alive or dead. Shane is not listed on the official report of volunteers, but since he was stationed at Tacoma, he had come to Goldendale to be present and take part unofficially. In 1945, Shane became Lick’s director.
19. Campbell’s dispatch was the third time Einstein’s name was mentioned in the New York Times. The first had been in 1913, in a dispatch from Birmingham, England, announcing that Lodge would argue for ether and that the theory by “Prof. Einstein of the University of Zurich” argued against ether. Einstein was mentioned the second time on November 30, 1917, in a discussion of Georg Friedrich Nicolai’s book The Biology of War. Nicolai was one the three signers of “A Manifesto to Europeans,” a call for unity, not war, and a response to “Manifesto to the Civilized World,” which had been signed by ninety-three German intellectuals. The article listed the two pacifist signers as “professors Albert Einstein and Wilhelm Forster.” By the time Nicolai’s book was released in the United States, the book’s translator added this update to the preface: “Berne, Switzerland, June 1918, Postscript—Since writing the above the world outside Germany has been gratified to learn that Professor Nicolai has escaped from Germany in a German aeroplane and has reached Denmark” (Nicolai, The Biology of War, iii).
20. It was wise that Cortie did not go to Brazil. His ailing predecessor, Father Walter Sidgreaves (1837–1919), had been director of the observatory since 1889. Sidgreaves died on June 12, 1919, over two months before Crommelin and Davidson returned to England. His own predecessor had been another priest-astronomer, Father Stephen Perry, who died while on an eclipse expedition to French Guiana in December 1889 and was buried at sea.
CHAPTER 8: THE RMS ANSELM SETS SAIL
1. Quotation from Wilson, Ninth Astronomer Royal. Wilson was Frank Dyson’s second-oldest daughter and was still living at Flamsteed House in 1919; she remembered the visit by Eddington and Cottingham on those two nights. The “suicide” reference that she used is not repeated in other books that describe this scene. For example, Douglas, The Life of Arthur Stanley Eddington, has Dyson saying, “Eddington will go mad and you will have to come home alone.” Chandrasekhar, Eddington, also writes this milder version, being told it by Eddington. We prefer Wilson’s version and have used it here. It’s possible the reference to suicide was deliberately left out by Eddington and others over the years for being too off-color to tell in polite gatherings and public lectures. Wilson notes that it was her father and Cottingham who first told the story at an RAS dinner later that year.
2. The idea of a grand tour for young upper-class elites arose from Richard Lassels, Voyage or a Complete Journey through Italy (Paris, 1670). Lassels (c. 1603–1668) was a priest and travel writer who tutored members of the English nobility. After having traveled to Italy five times in the employ of aristocrats, he wrote the book, in which he implored “young lords,” armed with letters of introduction, to experience the world for themselves. “Indeed, the coral-tree is neither hard nor red, till taken out of the Sea, its native home.” Without travel to France and Italy, he feared, “the country lord” would think “the Lands-End to be the World’s-end.” His introduction asserted that the benefits of this tour would be “intellectual,” “social,” “political,” and “ethical.” With the book’s popularity among the upper classes, many young wealthy elites, both men and women, toured the European continent with tutors, sometimes gone for several years. A tourist industry soon grew up in the wake of the book’s publication, with tour guides and maps.
3. The city called Pará is actually Belém, which is Portuguese for “Bethlehem.” The original name was “City of Saint Mary of Belém of the Great State of Pará.” So it’s easy to see why non-Brazilians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries referred to it on maps, postcards, and in conversation as simply Pará. The city’s name was later changed to Belém, the capital of Pará, a state in northern Brazil.
4. See Einstein, “Elementary Theory of Water Waves and of Flight.”
5. “It is correct that I committed adultery. I have been living together with my cousin, the widow Elsa Einstein, divorced Löwenthal, for about 4½ years and have been continuing these intimate relations since then. My wife, the Plaintiff, has known since the (spring) summer of 1914 that intimate relations exist between me and my cousin. She has made her displeasure known to me” (Albert Einstein’s Deposition in Divorce, December 23, 1918, Collected Papers of Albert Einstein). The later decree (Divorce Decree, Feb. 14, 1919, Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, 9:6) came with the provision that Einstein would not remarry for a period of two years.
6. British Summer Time had first been proposed in 1895 by George Hudson, a New Zealander born in London. Hudson was an astronomer and explorer, but also an entomologist who wanted more daylight time to collect insects. His proposal was unbeknownst to Willet, a builder who in 1905 had taken an early ride through London before his breakfast and was not pleased to realize that Londoners were asleep during daylight hours. (An avid outdoorsman and sportsman, he found that the standard time, as it then stood, also shortened Willet’s golf game.) Thus, in 1907, he published a pamphlet titled The Waste of Daylight, which proposed advancing the clock during summer months. It was not a popular concept. In 1912, Willet visited Dyson at the Royal Observatory on a campaign to enlist supporters. “Astronomers, however, do not take kindly to any juggling with time, and when Willet referred to his scheme, the response was unenthusiastic. He was vindicated, however, when the war of 1914 broke out” (Wilson, Ninth Astronomer Royal). In early 1916, in an effort to conserve coal, Germany and Austria-Hungary adopted the daylight-saving plan, calling it Sommerzeit. England adopted the plan a few weeks later. Russia and other countries followed suit in 1917, and the United States in 1918.
7. Manuel Peres (1888–1968), who was then director of the Portuguese observatory on Mozambique, had hoped to join Eddington’s expedition to Príncipe. He wrote to Director Oom in November 1918, asking about the possibility, and again in March 1919. He noted the problems with funding and securing passage on a steamer (Mota, Crawford, and Simões, “Einstein in Portugal”). It would appear that Peres didn’t find the same help and hospitality that had been shown to the British.
8. Wilson, Ninth Astronomer Royal.
9. Wilson, Ninth Astronomer Royal.
10. In September, the funicular would blow up, killing several passengers. On his way to Brazil in 1912, Eddington had ridden the toboggan 3,300-feet down the mountain to Funchal.
11. The French gunboat Surprise lost thirty-four crew members in this attack. A second vessel was the elderly Dacia, a British cable-laying ship. The third was the SS Kanguroo, a French ship built to transport submarines before the war. Max Valentiner (1883–1949) had been branded a war criminal in 1915 for sinking the British passenger ship Persia off the coast of Crete while its passengers were enjoying lunch. In an act strictly against the rules of war, Valentiner gave the liner no warning that a torpedo was headed its way. The ship sank in a few minutes, killing 343 of the 519 people on board.
12. Alexandra Canha, director of Biblioteca Municipal do Funchal found the newspaper article that Eddington mentions in a letter home. The two Madeira papers in 1919 were the Diário de Noticias and the Diário da Madeira. In the Diário de Noticias, appearing April 8, a day after Eddington met the editor, Cyriaco de Brito Nóbrega, was a short description of the expeditions. On April 9, the Diário de Noticias informed readers that the total eclipse would not be visible in Funchal, only the partial, and times to watch. The governor of São Tomé and Príncipe at this time was João Gregório Duarte Ferreira, who would leave office in June, a month before the Englishmen left Principe. The Bella Vista Hotel where they stayed is now a religious school.
13. British historian Robin Furneaux perhaps best summarized the intense gaudiness in the jungle: “No extravagance, however absurd, deterred them… If one rubber baron bought a vast yacht, another would install a tame lion in his villa, and a third would water his horse on champagne” (Furneaux, The Amazon: The Story of a Great River).
14. Henry Wickham (1846–1928) was a British explorer now considered a biopirate, although there was no law against smuggling seeds from Brazil in 1876. (He might have misrepresented what his cargo contained.) The transport of the material was no easy task, considering that seventy thousand para tree seeds, each seed three-quarters of an inch long, would weigh about a half ton. It took more than thirty years for the trees to grow on plantations in Asia, even though they were planted much closer together than in the wild, thus facilitating production. Wickham was much praised for his contribution to the rubber industry, but he paid a great price. He and several of his family members became seriously ill during the rigorous trips to the jungle, and several family members died there in 1872. For further reading on Wickham and the rubber boom, see Jackson, Thief at the End of the World.
15. See Grandin, Fordlandia.
16. The railway taken several times by all the astronomers during their time in northern Brazil, between Camocim and Sobral, was the Estrada de Ferro Viação Cearense.
17. Crispino and Lima, “Expediçâo norte-americana”; Mattos, “A Febre Amarella no Norte.”
CHAPTER 9: PRÍNCIPE AND SOBRAL
1. Ludwig Boltzmann hanged himself on September 5, 1906, in his hotel room near Trieste (then Austria) while his wife and daughter were swimming. He was sixty-two years old. While some scholars attribute his futile attempts to prove his theories as the cause of his suicide—two of his biggest opponents were Ernst Mach and Wilhelm Ostwald—others point out that Boltzmann suffered from asthma attacks and severe depression all his life. His physical health and eyesight were also in decline, although the academic refutations certainly did not help. He did not leave behind a suicide note.
2. During his fourth visit to the New World (1502–1504), Christopher Columbus saw his first cocoa beans in what would be Nicaragua today. By this time, local peoples such as the Olmecs and Mayans had been using the cocoa bean as a monetary unit, and to make a favorited drink, for over a thousand years. The story goes that the bean’s use as a drink dates back to when the Olmecs got the idea from watching rats devour the beans with a ravenous gusto. Later, the Mayans built what can be considered the first cocoa plantations, around 600 AD. Of the indigenous peoples he encountered on this journey, Columbus would write of their regard for the beans: “They seemed to hold these almonds at a great price, for when they were brought on board ship together with their goods, I observed that when any of these almonds fell, they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.”
3. The journalist Henry Woodd Nevinson would later write in his book, A Modern Slavery, that the two islands were “the islands where slaves die.” Referring to the repatriation fund, whereby three-fifths of a laborer’s monthly wages went to insure free passage back to the person’s homeland after five years of labor, Nevinson wrote, “A more ingenious trick for reducing the price of labor has never been invented, but, for very shame the Repatriation Fund has ceased to exist, if it ever existed. Ask any honest man who knows the country well. Ask any Scottish engineer upon the Portuguese steamers that convey the ‘servicaes’ to the islands, and he will tell you they never return. The islands are their graves.”
4. John, Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson, 1.
5. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery, 179, writes of a heartrending scene as they boarded the ship. First-class passengers were watching from the upper deck as a young slave mother struggled to board the ship from below, her newborn in her arms as the waves knocked against her. “At last she reached the top, bruised and bleeding, soaked with water, her blanket lost, most of her gaudy clothing torn off or hanging in strips. On her back the little baby, still crumpled and almost pink from the womb, squeaked feebly like a blind kitten. But swinging it round to her breast, the woman walked modestly and without complaint to her place in the row with the others. I have heard many terrible sounds, but never anything so hellish as the outbursts of laughter with which the ladies and gentlemen of the first class watched that slave woman’s struggle up to the deck. A few days later, a slave leaped overboard. A boat quickly captured him, and when he was returned to the ship, beaten and bruised, the passengers yelled, “Flog him! Flog him! A good flogging!” If a slave died during passage to the islands, they were thrown overboard while the passengers were having a first-class breakfast, ‘so that the feelings of the passengers might not be harrowed.’”
6. See Swan, Slavery of To-Day.
7. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery, 24.
8. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery, 188.
9. Since automobiles were owned only by the wealthy in those days, and since the majority of the population could not drive anyway, it was common for the vehicles to be rented with a driver. Or, for the wealthier, the cars were purchased and stored in private garages around the city of Rio, with chauffeurs as part of the household staff. It’s not clear whether this driver, whose name was Antonio Rodrigues de Carvalho, was employed by Studebaker or if he was a chauffeur for hire in the city.
10. See Marengo, Torres, and Alves, “Drought in Northeast Brazil.”
11. Here is an excerpt from the Davidson and Crommelin article: “The theory is of too mathematical a nature, to make it possible to attempt to explain it in popular language. It will suffice to say that it is a four dimensional system, adding time as a fourth dimension to the familiar length, breadth and height; it includes some speculations as to a possible curvature of space and its re-entry into itself, so that if one travelled far enough one would return to the starting point” (Mourão, Einstein: de Sobral para o mundo).
12. Brito, “Repercussões. Novidades Scientificas.”
13. Eddington and others refer to the cacao trees on Príncipe as “cocoa trees”; thus the references in this book. The flowers of the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) are not pollinated by bees, but are pollinated by tiny flies (Forcipomyia), which are biting midges. The trees begin to bear fruit when they are approximately four years old. Each tree bears twenty to thirty pods, even though it may have over six thousand flowers. Each pod weighs about a pound, is six to eight inches long, and holds twenty to forty seeds, which are allowed to ferment in heaps and then are raked out and dried to become the cocoa bean. The pods on Príncipe were harvested in June and December. The workers sliced the low-hanging pods with a sharp blade to cut the stalk. For high-growing pods, the cutting tool would be placed on the end of a long pole. It requires the yearly crop of a single tree to yield one pound of chocolate.
14. The chemical process of coating glass with a reflective substance is called silvering. When glass mirrors first came into great demand in Europe during the sixteenth century, most had been silvered with a mixture of mercury and tin. By the 1800s, mirrors were generally made through a process by which silver is coated onto a glass surface.
15. Just as Wickham took the rubber tree seeds to Asia, José Ferreira Gomes brought the cacao tree to Príncipe. And the seeds of the cashew tree were taken by the Portuguese to India in around 1560 (Jostock, “Cashew Industry”).
16. Details of the first car ride, May 10, 1919, are from the journal of Daniel M. Wise, of the Carnegie Institution, courtesy of his grandson Christian Wise. The other experiences with the car are from Morize’s diary of the 1919 eclipse, in Mourão, Einstein: de Sobral para o mundo.
17. Sometimes, historic leavings, written and published quickly or with a motive in mind, can leave an ambiguous or downright inaccurate picture for posterity. A write-up under “Notes,” Observatory 42, no. 541 (July 1919): 294–295, contained some interesting social information from the expedition on Príncipe. Apparently, a letter dated May 9 had arrived from Edwin Cottingham. It described the beauty of Príncipe, “a delightful tropical island,” that was filled with many trees and “plumaged birds and gorgeous butterflies.” According to excerpts of his letter, their unventilated hut was too hot for developing plates, so he and Eddington “use our bedroom.” In uncorking a small bottle of developer, a piece of glass broke from the bottom and “trickled down my new thin pyjamas.” The letter goes on to say that “they looked poor things in the morning, but I managed to get a good deal of the stain out by fixing them in the hypo. Eddington says they were exposed, developed and fixed, but after final washing there was no image.” Cottingham added that the sleeping sickness was nearly over, and there were few mosquitos, so very little malaria. He drank to the health of those who would be attending the RAS meeting (where the letter was likely read) with “Eno’s Fruit Salt,” the only effervescent liquid available. Eno’s Fruit Salt had been invented in Newcastle a half century earlier and was popular with sailors for their health on long sea voyages. Its cures listed everything from “Biliousness” to “Constipation,” from “Giddiness” to “Gouty Poison.” It would cleanse and invigorate the entire digestive tract by driving out disease germs and clearing the intestines. If Cottingham’s intestine needed “clearing” in Príncipe, circa 1919, a bottle would have had to come from England with him. But what is more interesting about the letter is that the wording sounds typically Eddington, and as will be shown later in chapter 12, Dyson had been careful to keep news of the expeditions before the public. It would have been unlikely that Eddington intended to develop inside an outdoor hut when he had Roca Sundy at his disposal and a controlled environment. May 9 is ten days earlier than when Eddington wrote that they developed the check plates. And that they shared a bedroom at the accommodating Roca Sundy is also questionable. Also in this issue is a report that Father Cortie was in Brazil to conduct an “examination of the Aurora Borealis” during the eclipse and had telegrammed (from Stonyhurst) that it would be a “very anxious five minutes.” Of course, Father Cortie remained at Stonyhurst given that his predecessor was expected to pass away, and Crommelin went in his place. As a matter of fact, Walter Sidgreaves’s obituary is printed four pages earlier in the same issue.
CHAPTER 10: “THROUGH CLOUD, HOPEFUL”
1. Morize, “O Eclipse de 29 de Maio de 1919.” It is logical that Crommelin and Davidson were sent to Brazil, as had been planned for Father Cortie, because of their shared Catholicism with the majority of the residents.
2. See Basso, “Observatório Nacional reúne as Placas Fotográficas”; and Morize’s journal in Mourão, Einstein: de Sobral para o mundo.
3. The part of French West Africa touched by the shadow now belongs to the Ivory Coast. The British Gold Coast is now Ghana.
4. Sobral and Príncipe times used in this chapter are local times. However, Eddington, in his letter home and his paper, says the eclipse would be at 2:15 Universal Time.
5. Sodium sulfite (Na2SO3) is more commonly known as sodium thiosulfate. It’s a white powered or crystalline compound used in developing photographs and silvering mirrors. It is also used in the making of dyes and to preserve certain foods. Formalin (formaldehyde) is still used in low concentrations for some photographic developing needs. Rodrigues, “Entre Telescópios e Potes de Barro,” criticizes the British for transporting formalin in their baggage. Formalin can be a severe skin and eye irritant and is a suspected human carcinogen.
6. Dyson, Eddington, and Davidson, “A Determination of the Deflection of Light,” cites nineteen plates. Thomson, “Joint Eclipse Meeting,” cites eighteen plates. Often overlooked today, astronomers like Eddington, Crommelin, Davidson, Campbell, and Perrine also had to know photography and darkroom skills. Amateur astronomers, for the most part, introduced astrophotography as a scientific tool in the mid-1800s. The brands of glass plates Eddington had ordered for the two expeditions were Ilford Special Rapid and Ilford Empress, and Imperial Sovereign and Imperial Special Sensitive. The wet collodion process used to develop early plates was replaced by gelatin dry plates in the late nineteenth century. These glass plates began to lose favor in the consumer market in the early years of the 1900s as less fragile films replaced them. In the late 1800s, a business grew up when junk collectors would buy the old, unwanted glass plates from photographers and observatories. They would then scrape away the emulsion and resell the glass to dry-plate manufacturers and even to greenhouse manufacturers. Glass was superior to film because the plates were stable and the imaging less likely to distort or bend. Thus, astronomers continued to use glass plates as late as the 1990s.
7. Wilson, Ninth Astronomer Royal, says that the telegram came to her father on June 3, 1919. Eddington says he developed the twelve plates for “six nights.” If he began on the night of May 29, he would have finished on the night of June 3. It’s likely that Carneiro or Gragera sent the cablegram for him from Santo Antonio. During the planning meeting, it had been decided to use a code in conveying news back to Dyson by telegram. “Splendid,” which Crommelin had wired from Brazil, meant success. Eddington, not yet certain, had chosen “Hopeful.” Our research did not find what the code for “failure” would have been.
8. William Campbell letters, June 2, 1919, Mary Lea Shane Archives, University of California, Lick Observatory.
9. For a detailed account of how Curtis did his measurements, see Crelinsten, Einstein’s Jury, 131–140.
10. The IAU, formed on July 28, 1919, would have as two of its first four vice presidents Campbell and Dyson. This organization would carry on the work of the Carte du Ciel committee; the International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research (formed by George Ellery Hale), which had been discontinued with the outbreak of war in 1914; and other organizations (Fowler, “International Astronomical Union, Formed”).
11. For records of the speeches given at this meeting, see Observatory 26, no. 542 (August 1919). In order of speaking, the American astronomers were: L. A. Bauer (1865–1932) of the Carnegie Institution, also a geophysicist and magnetician, and whose colleagues Wise and Thomson had just left Sobral (Bauer was on his way home from Liberia, where he had observed the total eclipse minutes before it reached Príncipe); Walter Sydney Adams (1876–1956) of the Mount Wilson Observatory; Benjamin Boss (1880–1970) of the Dudley Observatory; Frank Schlesinger (1871–1943) of the Allegheny Observatory; Samuel A. Mitchell (1874–1960) of the Leander McCormick Observatory; Frederick H. Seares (1873–1964) of the Mount Wilson Observatory; Charles E. St. John (1857–1935) of the Mount Wilson Observatory; and Joel Stebbins (1878–1966) of the University of Illinois Observatory. When the November 6, 1919, results were read (Dyson, Eddington, and Davidson, “A Determination of the Deflection of Light”), L. A. Bauer was referenced: “A station at Cape Palmas did not seem desirable from the meteorological reports, though, as the event proved, the eclipse was observed in a cloudless sky by Prof. Bauer, who was there on an expedition to observe magnetic effects.”
12. Turner was referring to the fourth conference of the International Union for Co-operation on Solar Research, which was held August 29 to September 3, 1910, at the Mount Wilson Observatory. The union was Hale’s brainchild. He, Turner, and Arthur Schuster put the idea together when they met at an international congress held during the St. Louis World’s Fair, in 1904. When planning began for this 1910 conference, the union was urged to expand its scope beyond solar research to include all of spectroscopic astrophysics. Hale knew that bringing Pickering aboard was essential. Not only was Pickering the most influential astronomer of the day, but his years of work in developing systems of spectral classification and stellar magnitudes was unparalleled. The members of the union would meet again at Bonn, in 1913, after which Campbell traveled on to Berlin to visit Freundlich. The union was disbanded at the outbreak of World War I, thus canceling proposed meetings in Rome in 1916 and Cambridge in 1919. The newly formed IAU, formed at the Brussels meeting in July 1919, took up its work anew.
13. Wise had left by train on June 11 for Novas Russas, “New Russia,” to the south of Sobral, for more observations. Thomson, Morize, and the Rio entourage had taken the special train back north to Camocim, where Wise joined them on the afternoon of June 14. After a flurry of telegrams to people representing the Yellow Fever Prophylaxis Commission, asking where to store the automobile, Morize was finally instructed to drop it off at a company in Camocim. In his diary, Morize is grateful for electric fans and fewer mosquitos than he encountered in the warmer climate of Sobral. On June 25, his team left Camocim on the steamer Prudente de Morais, named for a Brazilian president. In strong sea winds, the entire team quickly suffered from seasickness. Thomson and Wise eventually sailed home from Pará. They would be back at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., on August 25.
14. Personal details are from Rosemary Cecily Hannibal and Catherine Stella Court (granddaughters of Charles Rundle Davidson), correspondence with authors, September 2018 to May 2019. They knew their grandfather well before his death in 1970. He lived with their family in his last years. “We were told one of the parrots lived to old age,” Hannibal wrote. Crommelin, “The Expedition to Sobral,” described the return trip to England. He is obviously mistaken in writing that they went first to Pará (now Belém) and then back to Maranhao (now São Luís), where they caught the Polycarp. This itinerary would mean backtracking hundreds of miles. Plus, the Polycarp’s route was Pará to Liverpool. They had already visited Pará in the beginning, and they would be eager to get home with the important plates. Crommelin probably mixed up the order of the cities when he came to write the report. A corrected version of the route is also in Mourao, Einstein: De Sobral Para O Mundo.
15. Erwin Freundlich, Die Grundlagen der Einsteinschen Gravitationstheorie, was the first book on general relativity written by anyone other than Einstein. In the foreword, Einstein singled Freundlich out as being “the first among fellow-scientists who has taken pains to put the theory [of general relativity] to the test.” Freundlich’s editor was Arnold Berliner (1862–1942), a German physicist who had obtained a degree in physics from the University of Breslau. He was the founder and first editor of a new scientific magazine, Naturwissenschaften (Natural sciences), which debuted in 1913 and published many of Einstein’s papers and articles. Einstein published “Max Planck ala Forscher” (Max Planck as Scientist) in its first issue. The magazine was also published by Springer Books. Berliner was editor from 1913 to 1935, before he was removed by the Nazi government for being non-Aryan. Berliner took his own life on March 22, 1942, one day before being deported to an extermination camp by an “evacuation order.”
16. The telegram Einstein received from Lorentz is dated September 22, 1919. The letter Einstein sent to his mother, citing “Some good news today!” is dated September 27, 1919.
CHAPTER 11: GREEK DRAMA
1. In 1664, a wealthy lawyer, architect, and poet name Sir John Denham built the house as his private mansion. Four years later, he sold it to Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Burlington, for whom the building is named. Famous guests down the years included Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Composer George Frideric Handel lived at Burlington House from 1714 to 1717 at the invitation of Boyle. Since 1854, when it was sold to the British government and expanded, it has housed the Royal Academy of Arts and five prestigious societies: the Royal Astronomical Society, the Geological Society of London, the Linnean Society of London, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Founded in 1660, the Royal Society was at Burlington House from 1873 until its move to Carlton House Terrace, in 1967. According to Wootton, “Brief History of Facts,” from its inception, the Royal Society was “dedicated to experimental knowledge and declared that it would concern itself with ‘facts not explanations.’ ‘Facts’ became part of a modern vocabulary for discussing knowledge—also including theories, hypotheses, evidence and experiments—which emerged in the 17th century. All these words existed before, but with different meanings: ‘experiment,’ for example, simply meant ‘experience.’” For the November 6, 1919, meeting discussions referred to in this chapter, see Thomson, “Joint Eclipse Meeting of the Royal Society.”
2. The four-inch telescope at Sobral had found a 1.98 arc seconds displacement, and the larger, problematic astrograph measured 0.9. At Príncipe, Eddington had measured 1.61 arc seconds. An averaging of these three amounts would reveal a displacement of 1.64. Because of the malfunction of the Greenwich astrograph (measuring 0.9), the researchers decided to throw out the suspect measurement and average the two remaining amounts. The result gave Einstein’s full deflection of 1.75 arc seconds. The month before, Eddington had written to Dyson: “Dear Dyson, I was very glad to have your letter & measures. I am glad the Cortie plates gave the full deflection not only because of theory, but because I had been worrying over the Principe plates and could not see any possible way of reconciling them with the half deflection. I thought perhaps I had been rash in adopting my scale from few measures” (A. S. Eddington, letter to Sir Frank Dyson, October 1919. Royal Observatory/Cambridge University Library).
3. A. S. Eddington, letter to Walter Sydney Adams, January 1918. Adams (1876–1956) was an American astronomer whose field of study was stellar spectra and solar spectroscopy. Adams became the second director of the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1921, following its founder, George Ellery Hale.
4. Newton never wrote the equations in the form they were presented on the blackboard. These forms could have only come from the work of two other men, either Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), an Italian mathematician and astronomer, or Sir William Hamilton (1805–1865), an Irish mathematician.
5. David Hilbert (1862–1943), a brilliant German mathematician, had published his paper “The Foundations of Physics” at almost the same time that Einstein’s final paper on general relativity was published. Hilbert credited Einstein as the theory’s originator, and the two men were never in dispute personally about this issue. For a more complete understanding of this interaction with Einstein and Hilbert, see Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, 212–222.
6. For months after the special meeting, astrophysicist Newall would continue to put forth his speculation of a refracted atmosphere around the sun, the properties of which could explain the deflection of starlight. At the November 6 meeting, after Newall spoke, Frederick Lindemann stood to address Newall’s conjecture by stating that if this were the case, comets would slow down as they passed near the sun. “Have we not evidence from the motion of comets passing near the Sun that matter outside the Sun is distinctly diffuse? The comets suffer no noticeable check in their paths.” It was Lindemann’s tests that had made Freundlich believe early on that photographing stars during the daytime might be possible.
7. As late as 1936, Ludwik Silberstein, in “Two-Centers Solution of the Gravitational Field Equations, and the Need for a Reformed Theory of Matter,” Physical Review 49, no. 5 (February 1, 1936), was claiming that Einstein’s theory was flawed and needed revising. This assertion compelled Einstein and Nathan Rosen to respond to the editor (Einstein and Rosen “Two-Body Problem in General Relativity Theory,” Physical Review 49, no. 5 [March 1, 1936]). Silberstein, who had been invited to lecture at the University of Toronto, then engaged the popular press by going public. On March 7, 1936, he published “Fatal Blow to Relativity Issued Here,” in the Toronto Evening Telegram. He would, of course, be proven wrong. For more on Silberstein’s refute of the general relativity theory, see Crelinsten, Einstein’s Jury, 232–235. A story that has been written many times and is most likely apocryphal—despite Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s stating that Eddington told it to him personally—is that Silberstein had once approached Eddington to discuss the general theory. The still-skeptical Silberstein noted that “only three men in the world could understand it,” and he had been told Eddington was one of them. When Eddington didn’t respond, Silberstein said, “Don’t be modest, Eddington!” to which Eddington replied, “On the contrary, I’m just wondering who the third might be.” Whether truth or fiction, Silberstein earned his place as the butt of the joke. The story has been told in various versions, often with a journalist taking the place of Silberstein.
8. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, described the philosopher’s interpretation of the events at the meeting he attended, in a chapter in which he discussed the effects of Greek dramatic literature. Like many other authors who write about Einstein, Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, mentions this paragraph by Whitehead.
9. The RAS Club has continued as a social group that still meets for dinner and talk after organized scientific meetings. According to Wilson, Ninth Astronomer Royal, these lively dinners were, in her father’s day, filled with songs and libations. Her father missed very few monthly meetings. When he was appointed astronomer royal for Scotland, he was celebrated at a dinner on December 8, 1905, with haggis and champagne on the menu and a piper for entertainment: “According to the records of the club he began his appointment as a Scotchman by plying the piper with so much neat whisky that he nearly killed him! The RAS Club was always on the lookout for occasions to celebrate.” The club came up with bestowing on members the title of “Centurion” for those who had eaten one hundred dinners at the club. By 1920, Dyson had become a Centurion. Even during his stay in Scotland, as his daughter writes, he still attended 25 percent of the club’s monthly dinners, and close to 100 percent when he lived in Greenwich. He was elected president of the RAS Club in 1936. Wilson recalls the toasts given that night, the Cottingham story, and Turner’s full song, as written in this chapter. She quotes her father as saying, “Einstein wanted 1.74, but Cottingham wanted to double this amount.”
10. According to Douglas, The Life of Arthur Stanley Eddington, 45, the published paper was Arthur Eddington, “On a Formula for Correcting Statistics for the Effects of a Known Probable Error of Observation,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 73, no. 5 (March 14, 1913): 359–360.
11. In this play of words, Turner’s uses Einstein, since stein is “stone” or “rock” in German: “Nor left Einstein unturned, Sir.” The full song was first published in the Observatory following the joint meeting. It can be found in H. H. Turner, “From an Oxford Note-book,” Observatory no. 546 (1919): 25; and Wilson, Ninth Astronomer Royal.
CHAPTER 12: THE SEARCH FOR ACCURACY
1. In a remarkable sleuthing job, Sponsel, “Constructing a Revolution in Science,” writes that it was noted zoologist Peter Chalmers Mitchell (1864–1945), a Royal Society Fellow since 1906 and then secretary of the Zoological Society of London, who sent the Times of London his report on the meeting. Why a zoologist? “This much is clear,” Sponsel writes of Mitchell, “he had a strong connection to the proprietor of The Times; as a Fellow of the Royal Society he had a right to attend the joint meeting; and he was a dedicated internationalist, so he had reason to share Eddington’s desire to publicize and celebrate the British confirmation of a German theory.” Working in conjunction with Nicholas Mays, then deputy archivist for News International, Sponsel has pieced together an amazing estimation of how news about the eclipse expeditions found its way to the press over the months preceding the special meeting.
2. Sponsel, “Constructing a Revolution in Science,” reviews Marshall Missner’s analysis of Einstein’s fame: “The link between newspaper reporting and Einstein’s fame is well established in the secondary literature. Focusing on Einstein’s renown in the USA, Marshall Missner has argued that ‘the American press was the instrument that made Einstein into a celebrity’” (See Missner, “Why Einstein Became Famous in America”). “Missner’s analysis of the role of newspapers in the spread of Einstein’s fame is drawn largely from comparative readings of the journals themselves. Missner does not mention that there are two secondary accounts of how the New York Times got hold of the joint-meeting story from London” (See Hillier Krieghbaum, “American Newspaper Reporting of Science News,” Kansas State College Bulletin 25 [August 15, 1941], 1–73; and Berger, Story of the New York Times).
3. Van Anda still maintained the hours he had kept as a night editor at the New York Sun, from 10:00 p.m. to dawn. He was at his desk at 1:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, when the rope attached to the wooden box that carried bulletins down from the wire room to the news floor below began to rattle. An Associated Press bulletin had arrived from Cape Race, Newfoundland. A Morse code distress signal, a CQD, was received from the Titanic. The ship had hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and needed assistance. Van Anda acted immediately. While other editors at competing papers were reluctant to write that the “unsinkable” ship had sunk, Van Anda thought differently. He ordered that the lead story for that day be torn out to make room for the bulletin and a brief history of the Titanic’s maiden journey. The headline would read TITANIC SINKING IN MID-OCEAN; HIT GREAT ICEBERG. Relying on information from the Times correspondent in Halifax—the rewrite desk reporters also contacted any White Star Line officials they could reach at that hour—Van Anda learned that a half hour after the first cable, the Titanic had sent an SOS that the ship was going down. Then, nothing. He was now certain. When dawn broke and newspapers flew across the city, he had beaten the world’s press to one of the greatest disaster stories of the times. By learning hieroglyphics, he would later make the 1923 opening of King Tut’s tomb into a news story that would grip the public’s imaginations for months and influence fashion and architecture. See Berger, Story of the New York Times.
4. For this first New York Times article on November 9, Crommelin also noted (as had Charles Davidson the day before in the Times of London) that two of the tests, the perihelion of Mercury and light deflection, “might now be looked on as established, at least with great probability.” Crommelin was also careful to mention the third essential test, “a shift of the lines in the spectrum toward the red in a strong gravitational field.” He stated that the idea of revising Newton was so “fundamentally important that consideration was already being given to the next total eclipse in September, 1922, visible in the Maldive Islands and Australia.”
5. There are mistakes in Meyer Berger’s account of Henry Charles Crouch and his cabled article on the meeting. Berger writes that the meeting was November 8 and that the Times of London ran it first on November 9. But he was two days off the facts in both cases. He also writes that between the meeting and when the story was printed, “the astronomers had by then examined photographs of stars” taken during the eclipse. He has Crouch telephoning Eddington, the most famous of the expeditionary foursome, to get a full report. It’s more likely Crouch phoned Crommelin at the Royal Observatory, since Crommelin is directly quoted and Eddington’s name is not even mentioned. Berger holds Van Anda in high esteem because Van Anda caught a mistake made by the brilliant L. P. Eisenhart, of Princeton, who had meant to give the diameter of the universe, but gave the radius instead. Van Anda apparently insisted that the translated Einstein lectures done for the paper by a local professor had an incorrect equation. When the professor insisted, “No, that is what Einstein said,” the paper demurred, given Van Anda’s brilliance in the subject matter. Einstein, also at Princeton by then, was telephoned. According to Berger, Einstein scanned his notes. “Yes, Mr. Van Anda is right. I made a mistake in transcribing an equation on the blackboard.” See Berger, The Story of the New York Times.
6. The “12 wise men” notion would have longevity, even to today. When Albert and Elsa Einstein made their first visit to America, in March 1921, Albert was confronted with the notion. According to Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, “by the time Einstein reached Chicago, where he gave three lectures and played violin at a dinner party, he had become more adept at answering irksome questions, particularly the most frequent one, which was sparked by the fanciful New York Times headline after the 1919 eclipse that only twelve people could understand his theory. ‘Is it true only twelve great minds can understand your theory?’ the reporter from the Chicago Herald and Examiner asked. ‘No, no,’ Einstein replied with a smile. ‘I think the majority of scientific men who have studied it can understand it.’”
7. It’s amusing that these two major newspapers of the world had Einstein age five years in two days, with the Times of London putting his age at forty-five and the New York Times, at fifty. His physics concepts from the relativity theory point to a possibility for how this fast aging could actually happen. Einstein could remain on the planet earth while all other inhabitants would take a round-trip journey on a spaceship. This vehicle needed to leave earth, traveling near the speed of light, and then return. The so-called time dilation effect could have implied that Einstein had aged five years in what would have only been experienced as two days for all those on the spaceship. In truth, he was actually only forty years old. But unfortunately, not even his theories of relativity allow for travel backward in time.
8. In a 1921 letter, Campbell wrote: “The fact is that we should not have attempted any observations on that subject with the imperfect and untested lenses which we borrowed only one month before the date of the 1918 eclipse.” In a lecture delivered in San Francisco on January 19, 1923, and later reprinted that same year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Campbell gave his opinion on the British results: “Professor Eddington was inclined to assign considerable weight to the African determination, but, as the few images on his small number of astrographic plates were not so good as those on the astrographic plates secured in Brazil, and the results from the latter were given almost negligible weight, the logic of the situation does not seem entirely clear.” The British observers were the first to say that, in view of the fundamental importance of the general subject, confirmation should be sought at the eclipse of September 21, 1922.
9. In 1904, Paul Ehrenfest married Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanasyeva. Of their four children, one daughter became a mathematician, and the other an illustrator and author of books for children. The older son became a physicist. Wassik, the one Einstein called “little Crawlikins,” had been born with Down syndrome in 1918, when Tatyana was forty-two years old. Paul Ehrenfest’s career took an unfortunate spiral in the following decade, during which he began an affair with a young artist. He also suffered bouts of depression. Einstein wrote to the University of Leiden’s board, asking that his friend’s workload be reduced. On September 25, 1933, after writing farewell letters, Ehrenfest traveled to the Amsterdam institute where fifteen-year-old Wassik, known as a cheerful boy, was being kept. Ehrenfest was carrying a pistol hidden in his jacket pocket. In the waiting room, he shot Wassik first and then himself, dying immediately. Wassik lived for a few hours. Paul Ehrenfest wrote that he did not want to kill himself and leave his other children responsible for Wassik’s care.
10. A. S. Eddington to Albert Einstein, December 1, 1919; Albert Einstein to A. S. Eddington, December 15, 1919; Erwin Freundlich to Albert Einstein, December 6, 1919, Einstein, Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 9, The Berlin Years: Correspondence, January 1919–April 1920.
11. In the paper they submitted a week before the November 6 meeting (and also during the meeting), both Dyson and Eddington pointed out that the gravitational redshift, the third test that Einstein said was necessary to prove his theory, did not affect his law of gravity. In the autumn of 1923, John Evershed, who had been unsuccessful at the eclipse in Australia a year earlier because of technical problems, would make a startling announcement. Having once disagreed with Einstein’s prediction of the gravitational redshift, and after years of work on the problem, Evershed changed his mind. From a modern perspective, we know he was wrong. It was not until 1971 that the sought-after effect was observed, and not by looking at light from the sun. Instead, it was light from the star Sirius B, together with a completely correct mathematical understanding pioneered by Robert Marshak and Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, that finally allowed observation of Einstein’s redshift in starlight as his theory predicted. This is why the work of Karl Popper (1902–1994), inspired in part by the results of the theory of general relativity, is so important. Science has built into its formal structure and practice a very interesting self-protection mechanism for how it deals with accuracy, errors, and mistakes. A scientific theory is never proven correct, precisely because a later observation using more advanced technology that yields increased accuracy might show its mathematical predictions are no longer supported. For this observation, Popper continues to be recognized as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the twentieth century.
12. Campbell had disagreed about location with Arthur Hinks, the Englishman who had been so diligent in steering Eddington away from clouds on Príncipe. Hinks thought that Eighty Mile Beach on the west coast of Australia was inaccessible, with its twenty-six-foot surf and no land transportation to speak of. Campbell believed this spot was nothing compared with his expedition to Flint Island in 1907–1908. He had originally planned to take just Trumpler as his team member. In Fremantle, they would board a schooner that would be loaded with supplies for the sheep ranches near Wallal. The schooner would return with tons of wool from the sheared sheep. When the Australian government offered to put a naval vessel at his disposal, his team members grew. Campbell credited the Australian government with showing him and his team the most generous hospitality of his career. In his 1922 published paper, he referred to the coastal area where his team came ashore as Ninety Mile Beach, which it was then called. In 1946, the name was changed to Eighty Mile Beach to avoid confusion with the Ninety Mile Beach in the state of Victoria, on the southeast coast. For a detailed account of the Lick expedition and others in Australia in 1922, see Crelinsten, Einstein’s Jury, chap. 8; and Campbell, “The Total Eclipse of the Sun, September 21, 1922.” See also Burman and Jeffery, “History of Australian Astronomy.”
EPILOGUE: MEN MADE ON DREAMS
1. Historian David Ball has an interesting observation about how Cottington’s work affected the students at Trinity: “There had been a tradition for students on the day of the Matriculation Dinner to try to run around the Great Court of Trinity, some 401 yards, while the clock struck 12 o’clock (in fact it struck 24 times). This event was made famous worldwide by the film Chariots of Fire, in which the future Olympic athletes Liddell and Abrahams raced each other. The “At Random” column in The Observer later noted: ‘To change the pace of a public clock is akin to the sin of removing one’s neighbour’s landmark and the famous horologist who has just died, Mr Edwin Cottingham, played at least a small part in deranging records. In tending the clock of Trinity Church, Cambridge, he speeded it up slightly, spoiling the sport of the undergraduates…’ In fact, no-one was then able to beat the chimes until Lord Burghley in 1927. That is why we must assume that E. T. Cottingham’s careful work was cursed by a generation of students” (Ball, “Cottingham, Edwin Turner”).
2. The face of the wall clock at St. James Church was stolen in 1984 and likely resides in a private collection. The Thrapston Town Council voted to have the mechanism for the chimes in the bell tower repaired in commemoration of Queen Elizabeth’s eightieth birthday. Several years ago, local historian David Ball went in search of the building that once had the Cottingham name proudly displayed over the large front window. “None knew where the shop had been,” Ball writes. “In fact, none of them had heard of Edwin T. Cottingham. Eventually a man did confirm that he had vaguely heard of him and he might have had the last shop before the mini roundabout.” Ball discovered the very shop where Cottingham had made such beautiful clocks. It had become an Indian restaurant. Eric Franklin, of the Thrapston Town Council and also a local historian, adds that “Cottingham Way is a small area of relatively new industrial units and, although well off the beaten track and of no real merit, at least commemorates one of the unsung heroes of our town.” (Ball, “Cottingham, Edwin Turner”).
3. One of Eddington’s fellow scientists who stayed in touch during these last years was none other than Subrahmanyan (Chandra) Chandrasekhar, who was then at the Ballistic Research Laboratories in Maryland. Chandra sent Eddington parcels of rice to help make up for food rationing. This gift seems a subtle, unconscious symbol, showing again the chasm that lay between the two men culturally. Rice, not English sausage or tea. Eddington’s public RAS ridicule of the younger man’s work is well known among physicists and astronomers. Chandra had shown Eddington some calculations he had written that would be the first irrefutable proof that black holes existed. Thinking Eddington was in support of his work, he was shocked when the famous astronomer instead humiliated him and his concept in front of the members. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1983, Chandra was asked his opinion on why Eddington had not eventually relented, as many scientists have done when they realize that they are mistaken. Chandra, who saw the attack as “racially motivated,” replied, “Eddington worked on the universe.” See Miller, Empire of the Stars.
4. For the last years of his life, Eddington was obsessed with a book that would harmonize quantum physics and relativity, a “theory of everything.” When it was published after his death, in 1946, it was given the title Fundamental Theory. Eddington usually destroyed his personal letters over the years, even those to other scientists, once the business in the letters was concluded. Perhaps he knew that death was near, for he set about destroying any personal correspondence that remained. Winnifred Eddington, once her brother was gone, finished the job. But, luckily for posterity, spared was a large file cabinet stuffed with papers that he bequeathed in his will to the RAS. The cabinet went to Frederick Stratton, known as “Colonel Stratton” for his war service. Stratton had been with Newall in the Crimean vineyard where Perrine and Freundlich had also set up, before being recalled when the war broke out. It was Stratton who, as president of the RAS in 1935, had called Chandra to the podium that fateful January day when Eddington so harshly criticized the young man’s work. Stratton sorted through the file cabinet of Eddington’s papers and then threw them away for being “merely of biographical interest.”
5. Much of the information about Charles Perrine’s private and professional life comes from Bob Kelly-Thomas and Diana Merlo Perrine, grandchildren of Charles Perrine, email correspondence with authors, June 2017 to May 2019.
6. Some papers written and published by these accomplished astronomers and men of science didn’t always pertain to their work at hand. Two papers Perrine published in 1914 were about lightning and a chicken. When lightning hit the dome of his observatory in January, before he and Mulvey left for the Crimea, Perrine commented on how well the metal dome fared as he stood outside the shop and watched the flashes. “Mr. Mulvey was in the underground optical shop at the time and thought there had been an explosion.” Another paper began, “On December 15, 1914, a chicken was hatched out of our settings which had four legs. It lived from one evening to the next noon when it was stepped upon by the mother-hen and killed. It seemed to be normal in every other respect, eating and walking about like the others” (Charles Perrine, “Effect of Lightning on a Reinforced Concrete and Steel Dome,” Science 40, no. 1032 [October 9, 1914]; and Charles Perrine, “A Chicken with Four Legs,” Science 42, no. 1072 [July 16, 1916]). In the spring of 1925, Einstein traveled to Argentina and also visited Córdoba, although he did not visit the observatory. Charles Perrine—the first man to journey thousands of miles in a failed attempt to test for light deflection—was in California until that September. Albert Einstein never visited Mount Hamilton either, although he was invited over the years. The famed physicist’s schedule was pressing when in the United States. In 1931, he and William Campbell finally met in person, but at Mount Wilson, near Pasadena, California.
7. An oral history interview with Lilo Leyendecker, the German housekeeper who came to Scotland after answering a newspaper ad placed by Freundlich’s brother, is quoted in Ledermann’s archive: “Freundlich often spoke of his friend Einstein, but by 1953 he had lost touch with him, something which he rather regretted. Einstein used to visit Freundlich’s house in Potsdam, Germany. After they had eaten dinner one evening, Einstein and Freundlich used the table cloth to write mathematics on. This greatly annoyed Mrs. Freundlich who was cross that her best table cloth was ruined.… After Freundlich came to St Andrews he sometimes went to London to act as an interpreter for Einstein, who did not speak English very well at that time, when he came to meetings. On one occasion Einstein, after listening to a speaker at a meeting, said, ‘That man is someone who can speak English well—I can understand what he says.’ The man in question spoke English with a very heavy German accent!” (John O’Connor and Edmund F. Robertson, “Walter Ledermann,” MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.html). See also Forbes and Ross, Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
8. The personal memories of the astronomer are from Rosemary Cecily Hannibal and Catherine Stella Court (Davidson’s granddaughters), correspondence with the authors, September 2018 to May 2019. In Woolley’s obituary, he has Davidson being educated at Christ’s Hospital, which had no record of his attending. His granddaughters are certain that his education was at the Royal Hospital School in Greenwich, which is confirmed by Graham Dolan’s research.
9. Israel, Ruckhaber, and Weinmann, Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein; and Epstein, Let There Be Sculpture.