The highly anticipated total eclipse of the sun on April 8 will connect us to another time and place in history. The day was July 29, 1878, the last time Fort Worth witnessed a total solar eclipse.
I’ll spare you some battery life on your smart phone. That was 146 years ago.
Rutherford B. Hayes, who ascended to the presidency in, believe it or not, the most fiercely disputed election in U.S. history, was in the midst of the second year of the only term he said he would serve.
Richard B. “Dick” Hubbard, better known to friends, family, and presumed political enemies as “Jumbo,” was the governor of Texas, having succeeded as lieutenant governor, to the state’s highest elected position under the post-war Constitution of 1876 when Richard Coke resigned to run for the U.S. Senate. The Legislature was never in session during his abbreviated term of Dec. 1, 1876 – Jan. 21, 1879.
In Fort Worth, then still in swaddling clothes, Captain Giles Hiram Day, the second mayor, was in the final two weeks of his approximately four years in office. Day had succeeded Fort Worth’s first mayor, under the mayor-council form of government, when William Burts resigned under the burden of controversy revolving around the city deficit.
Much has changed since that time, though, as a wise man or woman once surmised, much has stayed the same.
For example, astronomers are as giddy today as they were 146 years ago about the opportunities the eclipse gives to study one of the most mysterious parts of the sun, the solar corona. The corona is the ring of fire, for lack of a better phrase, that stands out when the moon blocks out the blazing, bright star.
Originally, scientists believed the corona was a feature of the moon. Perhaps, they hypothesized, it was sunlight reflecting off the lunar atmosphere. Except that the moon has no atmosphere. It was in 1806 that Spanish astronomer José Joaquín de Ferrer recognized it was rather a feature of the sun. He gave it the name “corona,” the Spanish word for “crown.”
“An eclipse of the sun is always in the highest degree interesting because there is hardly any phenomenon of the heavens at once so startling, so beautiful, and so awe inspiring,” remarked Garrett T. Serviss, the secretary of the American astronomical society and well-known lecturer on astronomy, in remarks given to the Dallas Morning News only a few years after 1878.
“The number of persons who have ever seen a solar eclipse is very small. Probably the majority of astronomers themselves have never seen one.”
The path of totality for the 1878 eclipse ran eastward from a point in Siberia across the Bering Strait to Alaska, where it curved in a southeasterly direction, crossing British Columbia, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, what would become Oklahoma (then Indian Territory), and Texas, finally passing over the Gulf of Mexico and Cuba, and vanishing over the Atlantic Ocean.
We know much more about the corona today than we did in 1878, thanks to the work of scientists like Leonard Waldo, a Harvard astronomer who made Fort Worth his destination to observe and note the eclipse.
A news report of that day said: “The purpose of this is to arrive at a knowledge of the composition of the corona and what it consists of. There is a mystery about the composition of these banners of the sun that has never yet been solved. Some have regarded them as consisting of gaseous matter surrounding the sun and being perhaps the product of ejection from it. Others have thought that they might be vast swarms of meteors in its light, or perhaps something that might be likened to colossal dust clouds surrounding that tremendous solar engine, to whose unceasing activity we owe the light and heat that make earth habitable. It is to be hoped that a good deal of light will be thrown upon this question by the observations of the coming eclipse.”
Waldo’s team was comprised of R.W. Wilson, a Harvard colleague; J.K. Rees of Washington University in St. Louis; W.H. Pulsifer, also of St. Louis; and F.E. Seagrave of Providence, Rhode Island.
Waldo saved for history his experience and findings, as well as Fort Worth’s prominent role in it all, in a book published in 1879 titled, Fort Worth Eclipse Observations, July 29, 1878. As if we needed more evidence that its dominion is all of the world of retail, you can buy a copy of Waldo’s book on Amazon, shipped — “usually” — in three to five days.
Waldo noted that he selected Fort Worth as his base of operations for observation because “the chances of a clear day were as great [in Fort Worth] as for any point along the line of totality, according to the United States Signal Service.” Totality, he noted, would occur here 15 minutes after occurring in Colorado, which would cause the data recorded in Texas to have additional value as it concerned the rapid changes in the corona.
Plus, Waldo said, “there would be plenty of observers who would go to Colorado on such a mission, but it was not so certain that any well-equipped party would go to Texas in the summer.”
We could have told him that.
The observation site was at the home of S.M. Lomax, near Daggett Street at the intersection of South Adams and Ballinger or Summit, according to previous reporting on the subject. The team, which also included some amateur astronomers from Fort Worth, set up at the home of S.M. Lomax, roughly about a half-mile from the city limits.
In addition to the naked eye, they used seven telescopes with a variety of eyepieces that were also part of the team’s equipment. In all, 40 instruments were positioned about 40 feet apart.
On the top of the home’s roof, a flat platform, were nine people, eight of whom were assigned to draw what they observed.
One was to call off seconds remaining in totality every 15 seconds. A.M. Britton of the City National Bank was tasked with this duty.
To keep time, a pivotal element fraught with concern because of the Texas climate, the team used the Victor Kullberg 1178, a sidereal chronometer. Kullberg was one of London’s most notable watchmakers.
The timepiece, Waldo noted, “performs admirably at ordinary temperatures, [but] the extremely high temperatures at the observation station proved destructive to regularity.”
In addition to the heat, the team encountered something we generally only dream of in late July: rain. A good storm system came through on Friday, mere days before Monday’s eclipse. The rain continued through Saturday and Sunday.
This generated some angst, obviously, Waldo writing that he was “particularly fearful about the photographs.” And sure enough, the sky was overcast the day of, but, as if on command from a higher being, “the sun came out gloriously just before the time calculated for first contact.”
As the moon moved over the sun, eight sketcher artists began to draw what they saw as Britton, seated next to them, counted off every 15 seconds.
Waldo, Wilson, Rees, Pulsifer, and Seagrave were at their instruments looking toward the heavens. They also took photographs.
Western Union and Texas and Pacific Railroad Telegraph Co., meanwhile, were transmitting longitudinal signals between Fort Worth and St. Louis, where another observer was stationed.
The duration of totality was 2 minutes, 28.75 seconds.
There was one other dynamic Waldo’s non-Texan team of astronomers had to deal with.
Bugs. Those are the same as 146 years ago.
We’re guessing there were no repellent products for insects that faithfully served its role of irritant.
They “crept under their clothing or got into positions such that a movement of the instrument would jam them along with the extreme heat, conspired to render … observations both for time and latitude less accordant” than the team had hoped.
File that one under the “things we’d like to see disappear in 2024, even for a few moments.”
