Sky & Telescope May 1979 [antikvár]

E. E.Barnard and the Comet-Seeker Hoax of 1891John Lankford, University of Missouri-ColumbiaIN THE 19TH CENTURY the spread of literacy and development of new technologies made America a newspaper-reading nation. By the 1880's and 1890's the great press lords vied with one another for readership. In the competition for readers, late Victorian editors printed articles dealing with the human side of the news. In contrast to our own day, "hard news" often played a small part m a given issue of a paper. The wonders of science and technology were quickly included under the human-interest rubric.Few would argue that the coverage of science and technology in 19th-century newspapers was sophisticated. Sometimes editors and reporters engaged in out-and-out hoaxes. The 1835 moon hoax which appeared first in the New York Sun told of Sir John Herschel observing lunar inhabitants with his telescope in South Africa. Given the professional standards of the time and the intense competitive pressures, it is surprising that there were not more newspaper hoaxes.The editorial policy of the San Francisco Examiner did not differ from these norms. Turning to the human interest section of the Examiner for Sunday, March 8, 1891, we find stories of romance in the nation's capital, tragic tales of crippled Civil War veterans from the Pension Office, and a discussion of the immodesty of current women's fashions all competing for attention. But surely the lead story, fea-This research was funded by grants from the Research Council of the Graduate School. University of Missouri-Columbia.tured prominently in the left-hand column, made readers sit up and take notice."ALMOST HUMAN INTELLECT" the headline proclaimed. "An Astronomical Machine That Discovers Comets All By Itself." And in somewhat smaller type, "The Meteor [sic] Gets In Range, 'Electricity Does The Rest.' "Like most Americans of the period, Cal-ifomians expected to learn about the latest developments in science and technology from the daily press. But readers of the Examiner and other regional papers had a special interest in astronomy. Long before its formal opening in 1888, they had been following the activities of the Lick Trust as the great observatory was designed and built on Mount Hamilton in Santa Clara County.The story, written by someone whose knowledge of astronomy was more than casual, began with remarks about the difficulties encountered in searching for comets. Much time was wasted in "useless labor." Indeed, "In any other branch of astronomical work the observer would have obtained in this time several volumes of results, possibly all of value." However, "in the age of invention," the discovery of comets was about to be mechanized. A machine would now do the work of men.Next the author sought to establish the credibility of his account by piling up detail. Having secured "a letter of introduction to Professor Barnard from a member of the Board of Regents [of the University of California, which controlled the observatory)," he set out for MountHamilton. "At first the astronomers were loath to disclose anything relating to the new machine, but upon finding that some of the facts were in my possession and to prevent a garbled version of the story. Professor Barnard himself explained his invention to me."Edward Emerson Barnard (1857-1923), then a junior member of the Lick Observatory staff, was already a public figure because of his success in discovering comets. Within a year he would firmly establish his professional reputation by discovering the fifth satellite of Jupiter with the great 36-inch Clark refractor. Barnard was known for diligence, patience, and persevering attention to detail that made him appear a Horatio Alger character dedicated to science rather than trade and commerce. The rest of the dispatch purported to be an interview with Barnard.Barnard, so the report ran, had been striving to develop an automatic comet seeker for years. "The mechanical details were clear enough in my mind," the Tennessee-born astronomer was made to say. "All I needed was the disclosure of some peculiarity in the comet's light which would announce itself immediately on entering the field of the telescope." Barnard turned to the young spectroscopist James Edward Keeler (1857-1900), who after leaving Lick for the directorship at Allegheny would join George Ellery Hale to found the Astrophysical Journal "Now Keeler knows all that is worth knowing about the spectroscope, and we studied the matter out together." According to the"An Astronomical Machine That Discovers Comets All By Itself" was how the San Francisco Examiner of March 8, 1891, described this invention. J is the assembled instrument, 2 a cross section of the tube, showing the prism to disperse the comet's light into a bright-band spectrum, and 5 the electrical system that rang an alarm bell.