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

Notes From Your Bookseller

Rivalries are fun to read about — and here, fact is stranger than fiction as two scientists race against time and each other to experience a total solar eclipse. This tense and vivid narrative is packed with personality.

Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
Winner of the AIP Science Communication Award
An Amazon Best Book of the Year (Science)
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the Colorado Book Award (Nonfiction)
Booklist Editors’ Choice (Science & Technology)

Featuring a new afterword priming readers for the total solar eclipse of 2024, this “essential” (BBC) account brilliantly captures the celestial and human drama of eclipses.

With this “suspenseful narrative history” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air), award-winning science writer David Baron tells the story of the enterprising scientists—among them, planet hunter James Craig Watson, pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, and ambitious young inventor Thomas Edison—who raced to Wyoming and Colorado in the summer of 1878, at the dawn of the Gilded Age, to observe the first great American eclipse. Thrillingly recreating the fierce jockeying of these nineteenth-century astronomers, Baron draws on years of “exhaustive research to reconstruct a remarkable chapter of U.S. history” (Lee Billings, Scientific American), when the fate of American science still hung precariously in the balance. Now updated with an afterword that unites eclipses and eclipse-chasers past and present—revisiting the total solar eclipse of 2017 and looking forward to that of 2024—American Eclipse reveals the enduring power of these ethereal events to bring people together across space and time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324094692
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/13/2024
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	28,354
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

David Baron, an award-winning journalist and author of The Beast 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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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."

Shelf Awareness - Sara Catterall

"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."

Scientific American - Lee Billings

★ 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

"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

"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 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

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

With verbal aplomb and a jaunty pace, Jonathan Yen deftly narrates this tale of scientific adventure. Every 100 years, a total solar eclipse darkens a path across the United States. In 1878, three notable research parties made extraordinary preparations to witness and measure the event. One was led by an eminent, though egotistical, asteroid hunter who was desperate to lay claim to planetary discovery. Another featured an up-and-coming inventor who was determined to be taken seriously in the scientific community. And, finally, another was organized by an accomplished astronomer whose gender prevented her advancement. While the story is filled with characters and rich in scientific detail, Yen keeps listeners engaged by embracing the momentum of discovery, driving the plot, and adding color through voices and accents. A.S. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2017 - AudioFile

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