Book Review: American Eclipse

One of the unique features of living on this planet is how the sun and moon appear the same size in the sky, even though we know the sun is way larger, and the moon way smaller. Trippy when things look like what they aren’t! Extra trippy when the moon obscures the disc of the sun, plunging a part of the earth into darkness for a moment. A full solar eclipse.

I was super into the 2017 American solar eclipse, so my mom bought me a book about another solar eclipse that happened in the USA in 1878.

Begin book review of American Eclipse: A nation’s epic race to catch the shadow of the moon and win the glory of the world, by David Baron.

What’s interesting about 1878 is that it’s a moment in history where the US was just beginning to establish itself as a mature (…ish) nation on the global scale, after the civil war, while locking in Manifest Destiny, a country spread coast to coast. The US was still considered primitive/backlands by Europeans, and the global science community was just beginning to track all the planets closely enough to predict when and where total solar eclipses would happen. Someone predicted an eclipse over the western states of the USA (eg Wyoming, Colorado, Texas), with time and day, with a bit of a “we’ll see what the Americans are able to do with this.”

I didn’t realize it until reading the book, but the planets influence each other a lot. Right now, the moon is pulled by the earth and by the sun and by mars and venus.

“Although to the casual observer, the moon’s journey around the earth appears as uniform as the movement of a precision timepiece, it is, when examined closely, the walk of a drunkard. The moon weaves and wobbles, jumps ahead and lags behind. Isaac Newton found the moon’s motion so puzzling that, as he told his friend Halley, it gave him a headache.”

But they were able to track it, by 1878, with enough accuracy to predict the eclipse. But they were still asking questions, eg about Mercury’s orbit, which was doing some unexplainable things, at the time, and some suspected a planet whose orbit was between Mercury and the sun… VULCAN. They suggested the reason we’ve never seen Vulcan is that it’s so close to the sun, that when the planet is out, the sun is also out, brightening the sky, but in a full solar eclipse, the sky is darkened enough to see it.

Other questions at the time involved the sun’s atmosphere. Does it have heat? How big is it? What is it like? We can’t see the sun’s atmosphere because of our bright sky, but when the moon obscures the sun’s view, the sky goes dark enough to see the atmosphere around the sun, glowing and big. It’s the only time on earth when you can see it. Scientists wanted accurate sketches and measurements.

Enter Thomas Edison, a famous inventor of the time, who has just made significant improvements on the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone required people to shout into it, while Edison’s phone allowed speaking at a normal volume.

Sidenote: Bell suggested that when people answer the telephone, they say the word “ahoy,” (like Mr Burns in the Simpsons!). Thomas Edison suggested the word “Halloo,” which later transformed into “hello” — did you know that the word Hello originated in the US?! A little more research puts it a few decades before Edison, in the early 1800’s, still much more recent than I’d imagined. I think of “hello” as being fundamental to the English language, like “yes” or “no” or “please” or “thank you,” but nope. People spoke English for quite some time before anyone ever said “hello” to anyone else.

Edison was a showman as much as he is an inventor. He was really good at hyping his inventions. At the time of the eclipse, he’d invented something he called a tasimeter, which could measure heat from a distance. He wanted to know the heat of the sun’s atmosphere, so he traveled west.

Other people venturing westward included astronomer Mariah Mitchell, who encountered trials and tribulations in her life as an academic, during a time when the very idea of a woman in college was hotly debated. There was a popular pamphlet at the time, suggesting that when women became intelligent, they also underwent all kinds of other changes, making them unfit to blah blah blah, and so women were dealing with what were essentially superstitions around whether they could study the world and the universe. The patriarchy benefits greatly from women feeding and clothing men who study that which is and isn’t, and it was outside of many people’s expectations of reality (or their desires of reality), that there would be women who wanted to study the stars. She studied the orbit of venus early in her career, and for the eclipse she organized a band of young women scientists to go west.

You can look at the sun with a telescope during the moments of the total solar eclipse. If you look at even a sliver of the direct sun with a telescope, during a partial eclipse, it can mess up your retinas, so don’t go for it.

The book begins with a scene in Texas, where many believed the end of the world was approaching. The total solar eclipse, a shadow of around a hundred miles in diameter moving across the surface of the earth at nearly two thousand miles per hour, plunges people into a darkness similar to the darkness of night, but more similar to an altogether foreign kind of darkness, with a sky the color gray, like being on a different planet, according to the author of this book, and a man in Texas, believing it to be the end of the world, murdered his son and then committed suicide during the minutes of the total solar eclipse. He was that ready for the end of the world, that he could run into his house and commit this violence within seconds. As a person who grew up very religious in Texas, this beginning did not make the best impression on me, but I did appreciate the rest of the book.

After the dramatic beginning, the next moment of totality in the book occurs at page 182 — everything in-between is build-up. I loved this. Big fan of the story structure where you start at the climax, then backtrack, building back up to the climax.

I don’t really want to spoil what happens at the moment of the eclipse (does the tasimeter work? does the group of women make it to the total eclipse in the West? is there a planet whose orbit is inside Mercury’s orbit??). But I did love this book, largely because of the Mariah Mitchell story and other elements of the history of science, like the fact that people were discovering asteroids in the asteroid belt during that time. I skimmed a lot of the stuff about Edison. I also appreciated learning about the eclipse itself.

For example, in one scene it’s very windy outside before the total eclipse, and during the eclipse the wind stops. I recently heard a story of an eclipse in Austria in 2000, when a man was watching from a sailboat. For him, the wind was dead before the eclipse, but during the moments of totality, the wind picked up enough to tip the boat over, and everyone got out of the water and viewed the rest of it sitting on the hull of the capsized boat. I’m fascinated by things like this.

The last 60-pages-or-so of the book are research notes, so if somebody wants to follow his tracks and see the documents that lead him to this book, you could just look in the back of the book and find the documents yourself (letters, newspapers, etc)

If anyone’s in the Bay Area and wants to borrow this book, I’m happy to lend it to you. Highly recommended to eclipse enthusiasts, or people interested in science history, feminist history, American history.