American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World

by David Baron

Overview

This “suspenseful narrative history” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR) brings to life the momentous eclipse that enthralled a nation and thrust American science onto the world stage.On a scorching July afternoon in 1878,at the dawn of the Gilded Age, the moon’s shadow descended on the American West, darkening skies from Montana Territory to Texas. This rare celestial event—a total solar eclipse—offered a priceless opportunity to solve some of the solar system’s most enduring riddles, and it prompted a clutch of enterprising scientists to brave the wild frontier in a grueling race to the Rocky Mountains. Acclaimed science journalist David Baron, long fascinated by eclipses, re-creates this epic tale of ambition, failure, and glory in a narrative that reveals as much about the historical trajectory of a striving young nation as it does about those scant three minutes when the blue sky blackened and stars appeared in mid-afternoon.
Lauded as a “sweeping, compelling” (Wall Street Journal) work of science history, American Eclipse tells the story of the three tenacious and brilliant scientists who raced to Wyoming and Colorado to observe the rare event. Dedicating years of “exhaustive research to reconstruct a remarkable chapter of U.S. history” (Scientific American), award-winning writer David Baron brings to three-dimensional life these competitors—the planet-hunter James Craig Watson, pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, and the ambitious young inventor Thomas Edison—to thrillingly re-create the fierce jockeying of nineteenth-century American astronomy. With spellbinding accounts of train robberies and Indian skirmishes, the mythologized age of the Wild West comes alive as never before. An “enthralling” (Daniel Kevles) and magnificent portrayal of America’s dawn as a scientific superpower, American Eclipse depicts a young nation that looked to the skies to reveal its towering ambition and expose its latent genius.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631494550
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	121,739
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Baron, an award-winning journalist and author of Beasts in the Garden, is a former science correspondent for NPR and former science editor for the public radio program The World. An incurable umbraphile whose passion for chasing eclipses began in 1998, he lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Prologue: Shall the Sun Be Darkened 1

Part 1 1876

Chapter 1 Reign of Shoddy 9

Chapter 2 Professor of Quadruplicity 19

Chapter 3 Nemesis 27

Chapter 4 "Petticoat Parliament" 34

Part 2 1878

Chapter 5 Politics and Moonshine 45

Chapter 6 The Wizard in Washington 60

Chapter 7 Sic Transit 70

Chapter 8 "Good Woman That She Are" 80

Chapter 9 Show Business 89

Part 3 1878

Chapter 10 Among the Tribes of Uncivilization 105

Chapter 11 Queen City 119

Chapter 12 Nature's Editor 133

Chapter 13 Old Probabilities 150

Part 4 1878

Chapter 14 Favored Mortals 167

Chapter 15 First Contact 175

Chapter 16 Totality 183

Chapter 17 American Genius 197

Part 5 1878-1931

Chapter 18 Ghosts 207

Chapter 19 Shadow and Light 221

Epilogue: Tendrils of History 231

Notes on Sources 239

List of Illustrations 283

Select Bibliography 289

Acknowledgments 309

Index 317

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/17/2017
Science journalist Baron (The Beast in the Garden) shares a timely tale of science and suspense in this story of rival Gilded Age astronomers contending with everything from cloudy skies to train robbers to observe the historic total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878. American scientists got little respect from their European counterparts in the 19th century, so when astronomers predicted an eclipse with a path of totality visible across much of the American West, reputation-bolstering plans to observe the spectacle were quickly hatched at universities across the nation. Baron focuses on three vibrant personalities: astronomy professor James Craig Watson, a planet hunter with a somewhat shady reputation; groundbreaking Vassar astronomer Maria Mitchell, who was determined to prove that women were as capable of great scientific work as any man; and ambitious inventor Thomas Edison, who’d built a scientific instrument that he hoped would prove he was more than a mere tinkerer. Hopping between the three narratives, Baron skillfully builds tension, giving readers a vivid sense of the excitement, hard work, and high stakes in play. With the first total solar eclipse to cross the U.S. in 99 years set to occur in late August 2017, this engrossing story makes an entertaining and informative teaser. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Baron, an award-winning journalist, uses exhaustive research to reconstruct a remarkable chapter of U.S. history. He tells the surprising story of how the eclipse spurred three icons of the 19th century—inventor Thomas Edison, planet hunter James Craig Watson, and astronomer and women's-rights crusader Maria Mitchell—to trek into the wild Western frontier to observe it.

Lee Billings - Scientific American

Baron mingles the excitement, aspiration and drama of these events with a good dose of technical information and scientific history. Archival photos, sketches and prints are scattered throughout the pages. This is a wonderful, dramatic piece of scientific history, and a fine companion for eclipses to come.

Sara Catterall - Shelf Awareness

The stories of these three enterprising scientists reflect the ambition and intellectual curiosity of the United States in the late-nineteenth-century, when the country was trying to cement its place in the international scientific community.

Concepción de León - New York Times Book Review

Brilliantly researched and beautifully crafted, American Eclipse conveys historical discoveries and scientific obsessions with the verve and excitement of a work of fiction. David Baron's vivid prose captures the wonder of an era in which modern astronomy was just beginning to reveal our connection to vast universe beyond our own small world.”

John Pipkin

David Baron contracted an incurable case of umbraphilia twenty years ago in Aruba. Fortunately for readers, Baron’s fever stokes his account of the first great American eclipse, in 1878, while priming us for the next one—and the next, and the next.”

Dava Sobel

Lucidly melds science, ambition, policy, technology, the interplay of personality and practice, and the immediacy of experience. The book is marked by wonderful, eye-opening surprises, notably Edison’s enthusiasm for and participation in the observation of the eclipse and the independent expedition of Maria Mitchell and her crew in the face of their exclusion from the effort.

Daniel Kevles

A suspenseful and dramatic account of the rival scientific expeditions that came to the American West to view and study this rare phenomenon…Baron enables us to understand what drew them to the eclipse and what this episode tells us about the changing role of science in American culture.

Paul Israel

A wonderful book, bringing lessons from the past to the present. In exceptionally clear and interesting prose, Baron brings nineteenth-century personalities to life, showing how men and, unusually, a female astronomy professor of that time observed the total solar eclipse of 1878.

Jay Pasachoff

David Baron beautifully captures the awe, the magic, and the mystery of one particular eclipse, an event in 1878 that spurred on America to embrace the sciences. A superb contribution to the history of astronomy.

Marcia Bartusiak

This fascinating portrait of the Gilded Age is suffused with the peculiar magic and sense of awe that have always attended eclipses, those fraught few minutes when day becomes night, time stands still—and anything seems possible.

Hampton Sides

03/15/2017
Instead of looking at the broader phenomenon of eclipses in general, this title focuses on a single eclipse, that of 1878. Baron (The Beast in the Garden) highlights the experiences of three observers of that event: Maria Mitchell, James Craig Watson, and Thomas Edison. Other individuals and scientific details are woven into the narrative as it moves the central figures toward the day of the eclipse. Throughout, the book depicts the United States as a young country striving to achieve parity with Europe on the intellectual stage. Many American astronomers saw the 1878 eclipse as a chance to demonstrate to the world what America could do for science. Watson was hoping to discover a new planet to win recognition for this country and himself. Mitchell led an all-female expedition to Colorado to show that women could contribute, too. And although Edison's experiments during the eclipse had no lasting impact on history or astronomy, Baron tells a compelling tale about the inventor. All of these figures also appear in John Dvorak's Mask of the Sun but only briefly. VERDICT Best for readers who are getting their technical details elsewhere yet enjoy a good story about science. [Prepub Alert, 1/9/17.]—Cate Hirschbiel, Iwasaki Lib., Emerson Coll., Boston

Library Journal

2017-04-04
The captivating story of a 19th-century solar eclipse.In this compelling social and scientific history, former NPR science correspondent Baron (The Beast in the Garden, 2003) begins with his own unexpectedly transformative experience witnessing a total solar eclipse for the first time. "For three glorious minutes," he writes, "I felt transported to another planet, indeed to a higher plane of reality, as my consciousness departed the earth and I gaped at an alien sky." Such a response is not atypical: "For millennia, total solar eclipses have awed, frightened, and inspired." Their occurrence, however, is rare, "passing any given point on earth about once every four hundred years." By 1878, astronomers accurately predicted that a total solar eclipse would be observable in the western United States, and they charted its likely path. Expeditions set out to witness the event in Wyoming and Colorado, including one led by Maria Mitchell, a female professor of astronomy from the women's college Vassar. Mitchell, writes Baron, "saw it as her role not only to teach female students but…to create the kind of supportive environment for intelligent women so lacking in the outside world." Another notable figure who traveled west to see the eclipse was Thomas Edison, who had invented an instrument that would hopefully measure differences in solar heat during and after the eclipse. Although the device was not as accurate as he had hoped, it anticipated the development of infrared telescopes. As Baron capably and enthusiastically shows, the solar eclipse of 1878 proved to be an important moment in the emergence of American science; another outcome was the creation of the first national weather service. Would-be eclipse watchers used the telegraph to track weather systems in order to determine the best time and place for their sightings. Two years later, President Ulysses Grant signed legislation creating the weather service, "to be operated by the Army Signal Corps." A timely, energetic combination of social and scientific history in anticipation of the total solar eclipse predicted for Aug. 21, 2017.

Kirkus Reviews