“SO LONG ELUDING THE HUNTERS”
July 24, 1878, Rawlins, Wyoming.
The man from New Jersey had heard stories about the mythical West, but this was his first chance to compare the tales with the real thing—at least, as much of it as he could now observe it from the comfort of a rail carriage. His trip to Rawlins, on the Union Pacific line that ran to and through the little town, had thus far revealed only a sightseer’s version of the frontier. “The country at that time was rather wild,” he wrote. “Game was in great abundance and could be seen all day long from the car window, especially antelope.”
It all got a little more up-close-and-personal at the hotel. He and his roommate had settled down for the night when “A thundering knock on the door awakened us; on opening the door a tall handsome man in western style entered the room.” That visitor—on inspection, not entirely sober—introduced himself as Texas Jack. The hotel owner arrived and tried to persuade Jack to keep it down. He was bounced across the hall for his pains. Calmly, Jack “explained he was the top pistol shot of the West…and then suddenly pointing to a weather vane on the freight depot, pulled out a Colt, revolved and fired through the window, hitting the vane.”
Other guests swarmed into the room to see who’d just been killed. With no corpse in sight, calm, of a sort, soon returned, and it became clear that the Texan just wanted to talk. At last, by promising to make time for him in the morning, Jack was persuaded to pack it in, and the two strangers returned to their beds.
But not to sleep. They left this first true encounter with the West of legend “rather scared,” and, understandably, unsure “what would be the result of this interview.” Nothing that had followed reassured them, to the point that they became “so nervous we did not sleep any that night.” The next morning the travelers were relieved to find out that around town Texas Jack “was not one of the ‘badmen’ of whom they had a good supply.” Thus reassured, the traveler from New Jersey could focus on the business that had brought him west. The great eclipse of 1878 would be coming to Rawlins in five days’ time, and a tribe of visiting scientists were already racing to prepare. Among them, there to test his latest invention, came the man Texas Jack couldn’t wait to meet: Mr. Thomas Edison.
The eclipse of July 29, 1878, followed a route that stretched from Siberia across the Bering Strait into Alaska, then down through western Canada. From there it traversed the United States through the northern Rockies across Wyoming, before heading southeast into the Gulf of Mexico, finally coming to an end just east and south of Haiti. The total phase of the eclipse—the time the moon completely blocks the surface of the sun, thus revealing both the wispy, achingly beautiful corona and any faint celestial bodies close to the solar limb—had a maximum duration of about three minutes, eleven seconds, achieved in Siberia.*1 In Rawlins, totality would extend just two minutes and fifty-six seconds, but the site had one critical advantage: the decade-old transcontinental railroad ran neatly along the eclipse route, which meant astronomers and their bulky, awkward equipment could ride in unprecedented luxury to (hopefully) perfect vantage points.
Luxury is perhaps too strong a word. Wyoming had become a US territory only ten years before—the arrival of the railroad was no coincidence—and it was still very much a frontier outpost.*2 The Great Sioux War—during which the Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought—had ended only the year before, while in 1879, troops stationed at Wyoming’s Fort Steele would move against Ute bands protesting repeated white incursions onto their land. Fort Steele’s commander died in that campaign. The summer before he had accompanied Edison on his post-eclipse hunting vacation.
In other words, Edison had some reason to be a bit jumpy. For him along with everyone else coming from the settled East, the raw, desiccated ground around Rawlins lay at the very edge of the map—and yet for a week or so, it became a mecca for American astronomical research. The federal government had funded eight posts from the Wyoming territory through Colorado and down to Texas to enable scientists to track the eclipse. Several research teams concentrated on the Rawlins area, following the same logic that brought Edison: the adequately long totality there could be viewed within range of a transportation system that could carry the full arsenal of modern observing tools. And among the most prized trophies that brought them all to Rawlins? The outstanding solar system mystery: where, if anywhere, the elusive Vulcan might be seen.
Henry Draper, a physician-turned-astronomer and a pioneering astrophotographer, led the largest expedition in town. Edison joined Draper’s party to pursue a technical goal of his own, testing a device he called a tasimeter, an infrared measuring instrument so sensitive that he wanted to see if it could detect faint IR radiation from the corona. Along with him came Norman Lockyer, probably the best-known scientist in the group. Founder of the journal Nature, he was one of the pioneers of the new technique of spectroscopy. In 1868 he had noticed a bright yellow band in the spectrum of solar light, which led him to identify the element helium—the first to be found beyond Earth, untouched by human hands. Then there was the man on a mission: James Craig Watson. Director of the Ann Arbor Observatory, Watson was the veteran of two prior eclipses and had discovered more than twenty asteroids. His reason for being in Wyoming was simple: Vulcan. The few minutes of daytime darkness during totality would be, as every astronomer knew, the perfect time to detect any intra-Mercurian bodies.
He had company—or competition. Simon Newcomb from the Naval Observatory in Washington, still making his reputation as the preeminent analyst of the solar system to follow Le Verrier, also had his sights set on Vulcan. He had planned to set up his viewing station at the town of Creston, about thirty miles west of Rawlins, but when his advance men tested their site, they found that “at the point selected a violent westerly gale was blowing without any ready means of securing the instruments against its force.” The problem wasn’t just the sheer intensity of the wind. In the rain shadow of the Rockies, the long Wyoming slope was high desert country. Even a moderate blow kicked up a skein of dust thick enough to turn an eclipse into a shadow play.
Eclipse hunters at Rawlins, Wyoming, July 1878. Thomas Edison is second and James Craig Watson is sixth from the right.
Newcomb’s scouts turned east along the Union Pacific right-of-way, heading toward Great Divide Basin, just west of Rawlins. The railroad had placed outposts every few miles along the slow climb from Cheyenne and Laramie toward the continental crest. One, about equidistant between Rawlins and Creston, was a flyspeck of a place. The label on the Union Pacific maps identified it as Separation, Wyoming.
At its height, Separation never amounted to more than a telegraph office, a couple of rough houses, and a water tower. Today, to find where it used to stand, you have to look just to the south of Interstate 80, about thirteen miles past Rawlins. There’s nothing there now, no way to tell that human beings had once managed to scratch out a settlement. But in 1878, that’s where Newcomb’s men found “a small plain about fifty yards in extent, depressed below the general level and flanked on the south and west by a nearly perpendicular natural parapet some ten feet in height.” Simon Newcomb joined his heralds a few days later. In all, his expedition mounted four telescopes, one set up for astrophotography, and another, along with two chronometers, designated specifically for the search for Vulcan.
July 21, 1878.
The weather was a constant worry for the eclipse observers; it always is. As the days passed at Separation, a pattern developed: clear mornings in southern Wyoming with clouds stacking up in the afternoon—when the eclipse would occur. There was some hope, as the cloud cover appeared later and later each day, but there was no telling what would happen on the 29th.
Besides the weather, eclipse observers suffer nightmares thinking about the sudden-death nature of their science. Astronomical measurements are hard enough to make in controlled laboratory settings or within established observatories. The researchers at Separation sought to capture faint, small, highly uncertain observations with delicate and complicated equipment set up on uneven desert ground at an altitude of roughly 7,000 feet (2,150 meters)—with less than three minutes to get everything right. As the day of the eclipse approached, the tension within Draper’s party and Newcomb’s would have become as tight as a tie-down braced against a Wyoming summer wind.
July 29th, dawn.
The most famous description of that morning comes from the Cheyenne Daily Sun, which reported (in what reads now with a nasty edge) that the sky was as “slick and clean as a Cheyenne free-lunch table.” Léopold Trouvelot had set up his instruments in the dug-out remains of an abandoned settler shack a few miles west of Separation and confirmed that report. At dawn on the 29th: “the sun rose clear and bright above the distant horizon of the great alkali plain; not a cloud was to be seen in the deep-blue sky stretching above us in all its purity.”
Such glory did not last. By 8 A.M. as Trouvelot and his team were eating breakfast, they “found ourselves and the dishes completely covered with sand and dust, which had been forced by the violence of the wind through every opening and fissure.” The astronomers at Separation chewed the same dirt. Newcomb reported that “in the forenoon the most violent gale we had yet experienced began to blow from the west and increased in intensity until nearly the time of the eclipse.” Dust swiftly shrouded the sky, producing what he called “this obnoxious halo” around the sun. By noon, it became clear that the sand-ledge the astronomers had counted on to shelter their instruments couldn’t stand up against the strengthening gusts, so the team scrambled, drafting soldiers detached from Fort Steele to erect sections of railroad snow-fencing. The desperation move worked—barely: the fence “required their [the soldiers’] constant attention, and even then a portion of it was blown down.”
While fighting that skirmish, the Separation party found itself playing host to two new observers who had come up the line from Rawlins in a special car. The Englishman Lockyer had decided to get out of town, as had Newcomb’s fellow Vulcan hunter Professor Watson. Whatever pressure he may have felt, Newcomb managed to be gracious in the face of invasion. He invited Watson to set up near his own telescope, a sensible as well as a generous move. If either man were to catch sight of an intra-Mercurian planet, the other would be right at hand to check.
Or so they hoped. Eclipses are utterly unforgiving. There is usually only one chance to perform each action; the more complicated or delicate the operation planned, the more opportunities for a fatal error. Newcomb’s own telescope was the first to fall: ten minutes before the start of the eclipse, its clock drive failed “in such a way that it could not be used without taking the clock work all to pieces”—that is to say, with the finality that always seems to attend eclipse astronomy. First contact (the instant the face of the moon touches the edge of the sun) arrived remorselessly at 2:03:16.4 P.M. Newcomb gave up on his mechanical aid and tracked his telescope by hand—a task he made yet more difficult by his choice of a too-powerful eyepiece, one with such a tiny field of view that it made it very hard for Newcomb to be sure just when the eclipse truly began.
2:45 P.M. Totality minus twenty-eight minutes and some seconds.
Eclipses dance to a jagged rhythm. First contact shoots a jolt of adrenaline through any witness. What comes next soon becomes kind of dull. It takes about an hour for the moon to reach second contact—the onset of totality. For much of that interval, changes are subtle. Half a sun illuminates the world pretty much as well as the whole disk. Slowly some surreality takes hold. For example, during the partial phase a tree’s crown becomes a camera obscura: the gaps between leaves transmit an image of the crescent sun, bright curves dappling the shadows.
This Harper’s Weekly cover is a remarkably fine depiction of the strangeness of an eclipse.
For the most part, though, the real surprise of the first half hour or so of an eclipse is how ordinary the world still seems—until you peer at the sun and confront that eerie curve of dead-black slicing across its face.*3 The persistence of the ordinary slips as totality approaches. Perhaps most deranging, colors shift, then drain from the landscape. There are none of the cues of a sunset. Rather, the effect of pulling sunlight from the sky in the fullness of the day is just odd enough to make it seem as if reality itself has cracked. As each second ticks toward totality, the effects intensify; one feels an eclipse as much as one views it.
Eclipse veterans learn to guard against such distractions. At about a quarter to three, Simon Newcomb ducked into his makeshift darkroom to check on the photographic side of his planned work. He remained inside until three minutes before totality. At about 3:10, he emerged, his eyes adjusted to a sky grown strange. He took up station next to James Watson, already standing to his telescope.
One of the other men there kept time, beating the seconds and singing out the stations of the clock—each contact and the onset of totality. Watson, like all those with him, would have rehearsed his plan. He was a cautious observer, and aimed to avoid an excess of ambition: he would study only a narrow strip of darkness near the limb of sun, as “from my previous experience in work of this character, I had determined not to undertake to sweep too much space.” He had memorized the stars within that region of the sky, but still kept a star chart by him during the eclipse in a belt-and-suspenders move to avoid mistaking the familiar for a discovery. If Vulcan were there to be found, he had done what he could to bring it home.
3:13:34.2 P.M. Totality.
As soon as the shout came, James Watson fixed the sun in the center of his field of view. From there, he slowly swept due east. At the limit of his predefined search pattern, he moved his telescope one degree down and reversed direction, covering about eight degrees of sky each way. On his first pass, he recognized a familiar star, Delta Cancri. Back on the sun, he repeated the move heading west. Theta Cancri, another star in the constellation Cancer, slid into his eyepiece. There, so early in his run, Watson saw something new. He wrote that between the known star and the sun, “and a little south, I saw a ruddy star whose magnitude I estimated to be 4 1/2.” It was definitely brighter than Theta Cancri, Watson added, “and it did not exhibit any elongation, such as might be expected if it were a comet in that position.”
That star was not on his chart. A new object. No tail. Not, then, a comet. The stranger was running out of things to be…
Watson had come to Wyoming with a homemade device—a set of concentric disks faced with cardboard—to mark the location of any mysterious objects he might find. He set down unknown object “a,” noted the time, and returned to his eyepiece. He dropped down one degree, and swept out west a second time. Another strange star appeared, but with at least two minutes gone since second contact. Watson had a choice: to look for known stars to serve as landmarks—or to mark the observation on his rough-and-ready record. Seconds ticked by. Watson scribbled the location of his second unknown, dubbing it “b.”
A few yards away, Newcomb had spent the first minute or so of his eclipse on the solar corona—the wispy detail that to the naked eye extends as many as ten solar diameters across the sky. He saw bright rays shining through the fainter background glow, and he paused to jot some notes on the feature. He then jumped to his second instrument, the one tasked for Vulcan. He had no illusions about the obstacle he faced: “The sky was so bright that it would be very easy to overlook a faint object unless the eye looked directly at it.” His first survey found nothing more than two familiar pairs of stars, each clearly marked on his chart. Further sweeps turned up more spots of light, “but nothing that was not already on the map.” As totality approached its end, he simply gambled, making “wider sweeps much at random, with the object of picking up some object by chance.” One appeared at just about the last possible moment. As the final moments of totality flowed past, he held his telescope on it to fix its position.
Simon Newcomb’s drawing of the solar corona at the 1878 eclipse.
3:16:24.2 P.M. Third contact; totality ends.
When the moon’s disk slides past the face of the sun, the world jumps.
It feels unfair, as if one’s been granted a moment’s glimpse of an utterly different reality—that rectangle of Narnian forest through the open doors of a wardrobe, or a sudden vision of the train on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. Then, a crescent of sunlight appears and the normal, increasingly day-lit world returns. The corona switches off, and any stars that had appeared during totality rapidly fade. As sunlight returned to the high plain by Separation, Watson ran out of time. He hadn’t managed to find any landmark stars for “b.” Now, in a hail-mary bid to get at least a hint of replication, he ran over to Newcomb “in the hopes that he might, before the sunlight became too bright, get a place of the strange star I had first observed”—“a,” near Theta Cancri.
Newcomb couldn’t. He was still making sure of the position of the object he’d found on his last wide sweep north of the sun. Watson dashed back to his own instrument. No good: Watson could no longer make out either of his candidate objects. Newcomb later confirmed that his candidate was just a familiar star, adding, “it is of course now a matter of great regret that I did not let my own object go and point on Professor Watson’s.”
Watson did not seem to mind. Even without Newcomb, he had no doubt about “a”: “In the case of the star observed near Delta Cancri I was sure, and the discovery was accordingly announced by telegraph.” Or, as the Laramie Weekly Sentinel put it with some added exuberance: “Professor Watson of Ann Arbor, Michigan…had taken the job of FINDING VULCAN,” and then, on a historic Wyoming afternoon, “He found it,” adding, “It has come to be well understood among astronomers that Watson has a corner on the discovery of comets, asteroids, planets etc.”
Vulcan! Two decades after Le Verrier had, for the second time, conjured a planet at his desk, there it was: a small ruddy object, moderately bright, orbiting the sun undeniably inside the orbit of Mercury. Watson’s discovery was amplified and seemingly confirmed by a second sighting by Lewis Swift, a well-regarded amateur observer who watched the eclipse near Denver. The news rocketed around the world. Lockyer, with his front-row seat at Separation, wired the news to both the French and British national observatories. The British press picked up on the story, while The New York Times barely managed a scrap of journalistic restraint. Its first article, on July 30, merely noted that “Prof. Watson discovered an extra mercurial [sic] planet of the size of a 4 ½ magnitude star…” On August 8 it published Watson’s claim for his Vulcan that “its position in reference to the sun and a neighboring star I determined by a method which obviates the possibility of error,” which is why, he wrote, “I feel warranted in announcing it as an interior planet.” On August 16, the paper followed up with a longer analysis of both the sighting and its significance, writing “One brilliant discovery will probably date from this occasion….The planet Vulcan, after so long eluding the hunters, showing them from time to time only uncertain traces and signs, appears at last to have been fair run down and captured.” The paper conceded that at least one more confirmed sighting was needed to support Watson’s and Swift’s, but still, the anonymous reporter’s eagerness was obvious. The discovery would likely, the paper reported, “hold a conspicuous place in the annals of science.”
There was, to be sure, some need for caution, and the Times reporter was honest enough to acknowledge it: “The negative results of Profs. Newcomb, Wheeler, Holden and others, who, with similar instruments, went over the same ground and found nothing, are, indeed, unsatisfactory and puzzling.” But having allowed that caveat, the Times swiftly regained its good cheer: the missed sightings “can hardly outweigh the positive evidence on the other side…” Such confidence may have made for the better headline, but the article missed its own point. Almost everyone looking at the sky in Wyoming and along the long American swath of totality failed to see what had appeared so obvious to Watson and Swift. Whom to believe?
Almost immediately, the argument boiled down to the same one that followed every purported Vulcan sighting. Was Watson’s Vulcan a new planet or just a mistake, an ordinary object in disguise? Watson never confessed to any doubt: “there is no uncertainty in the place of (a)” and he was sure that “I saw both it and Theta Cancri.” That almost all other eclipse observers hadn’t seen it bothered him not a bit, and for a pretty good reason: any experienced worker, familiar with high-powered telescopes, he wrote, would “know how uncertain a search would be under the circumstances.” True enough. But even so, veterans of the Vulcan quest had heard this before. One man gets to see it; everyone else doesn’t. Again.
In the beginning, most of Watson’s colleagues were prepared to suspend judgment. He was a professional observer and a good one, so the astronomical community was unwilling simply to dismiss his findings. But the sheer weight of all that nothing seen in the other telescopes pointed at the sun at the same time left most astronomers unsure—at best—about what to make of this latest vision of the elusive planet.
A few flatly refused to defer to reputation. C. F. H. Peters—discoverer of forty-eight asteroids and one of Watson’s avowed rivals in the minor planet game—published a devastating attack on this latest Vulcan candidate. He accused Watson of making a series of elementary errors. Peters questioned Watson’s makeshift system for marking positions. He argued that Watson couldn’t have made a reliable assessment of the brightness of “a.” He offered an explanation for Watson’s description of the unusual ruddy color of the proposed planet. None of the steps in Watson’s procedure survived scrutiny, leading Peters to his blunt, almost brutal conclusion: “It is, therefore quite apparent to every unbiassed mind that Watson observed Theta and Delta Cancri, nothing else.”
Peters’s report bubbled with scorn, and Watson reacted with a mixture of formal defense and outrage, writing, “Professor Peters’s whole attack upon the integrity of my observations is not of the slightest consequence, since he has created the errors in his own brain,” adding “I do not intend to engage in any controversy about these matters and especially with a person who was, at the time of the observations, more than two thousand miles away.” Publicly, his colleagues gave him tepid support. Commentary in the journal Nature chided Peters for his tone, writing “Throughout Prof. Peters’s criticisms…there is evinced a certain animus which could have been as well avoided.” Fair enough, but for all its seemingly impartial account of the Peters-Watson fight, the Nature piece subtly made its judgment clear. “We will venture to say that the general feeling amongst astronomers when first reading Prof. Watson’s announcement…[is that he] would not risk his whole scientific reputation by putting forth such a statement to the world, unless he was firmly convinced of its truth.” The hammer fell in the next few words: “Otherwise, the fact that there were two known stars on the parallel or nearly so and less than one degree west of the objects supposed to be new, would probably have been felt to be an almost fatal objection to the reality of the discovery.”
Such delicate language muffled the blow, but the point was plain enough. Peters may have been a rude SOB, but he had said out loud what was rapidly becoming the consensus of astronomical opinion: “a” and “b” were nothing more than “two known stars,” misidentified amid the furor of an eclipse, recklessly trumpeted as discoveries in the adrenaline of the moment and preserved in the heat of desire, the felt urgency to make real what must be there. Watson disagreed, of course. He never retracted his Vulcan in what turned out to be the brief time left to him. In the autumn of 1880, he came down with a sudden infection and on November 23, he died. He was forty-two.
With Watson silenced, many, and not just the vengeful Peters, felt liberated to say out loud what they had previously only whispered. The old pattern held: Vulcan was to be found only when it was sought in the faith that it had to exist, never when anyone tried to confirm what had persuaded someone else. The astronomical community’s consensus quickly hardened. James Watson had seen what he longed to see. His “Vulcan” was nothing more than a mistake.
Almost a full two decades earlier, Vulcan had gained entry into the solar system. The eclipse of 1878 signaled its banishment. By the 1880s, the old saw flipped: absence of evidence had finally accumulated to the point where (to almost everyone) it had indeed become evidence of absence.
July 29, 1878, evening.
Thomas Edison knew his experiment had failed almost immediately. His tasimeter was not sensitive enough to pick up infrared radiation from the solar corona. That null result couldn’t dent his good mood, though. This western trip, he had told reporters, was the first vacation he’d taken in sixteen years, and he was prepared to enjoy himself, no matter what.
For their part, his hosts were eager to entertain their famous visitor, but no one let Edison suffer any delusions about his status: he was a tenderfoot. Edison got a taste of western humor a day or so after the eclipse, when he and some companions took a rail excursion up to Separation. Edison packed along his Winchester rifle, on the chance he might bag some local fauna. At the depot, the tourists were greeted by the station agent, John Jackson Clarke. Clarke wasn’t terribly impressed with the outdoor skills of his visitors—“their combined knowledge of game killing,” he wrote, “was about equal to mine of parallaxes and spectrums.” Out went the intrepid hunters anyway, straggling back that evening having bagged between them a grand total of exactly one sparrow hawk.
Edison returned to the station first, and he asked whether there might be anything else worth shooting nearby. Clarke told him that the surrounding plain enjoyed an abundance of jackrabbits—“what the locals call narrow-gauge mules.” Edison asked where he might find them, and Clarke “pointed west and noticing a rabbit in a clear space in the bushes, said there is one now.”
Edison picked out a silhouette from the platform, but he wanted to make sure of his kill. He “advanced cautiously to within 150 feet and shot.”
The animal did not move. He closed to one hundred feet. He fired again.
The beast wouldn’t jump. He aimed, pulled the trigger once, and then again.
His target stood its ground.
Edison glanced over his shoulder and saw that the entire station staff had gathered for the show.
The penny dropped.
He’d been set up, played for a dude. His target looked like a desert hare, all right, all ears and legs. It was exactly where one might expect to spy such an exotic creature. And yet…
Thomas Edison, genius, had just murdered…a stuffed jackrabbit.
It had seemed so real.
*1 This isn’t terribly impressive as such events go: given all the variables, the relative sizes of the sun and the moon and the variations in both the earth-moon system’s orbit around the sun and the moon’s around Earth, the longest possible eclipse lasts about seven and a half minutes.
Eclipses won’t be visible forever. The tidal dynamics affecting the earth and moon increase the distance between the earth and the moon—very slowly, by 2.2 centimeters, or less than an inch per year. In approximately 1.4 billion years, the moon will have drifted far enough away so that its apparent size will be too small to block out the sun.
For a very different kind of take on the fact that the earth and moon are drifting apart, see Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics.
*2 Also noteworthy: Wyoming, incorporated in 1868, became in 1869 the first US territory to grant the vote to women.
*3 Never, never, never look at a partial eclipse with the naked eye or through a telescope or binoculars: eye damage up to and including blindness will result. See NASA’s guide to viewing an eclipse safely: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhelp/safety.html, and in more detail this: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhelp/safety2.html. A nice do-it-yourself guide to eclipse watching can be found here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/how.html.