American Eclipse by David Baron

Author:David Baron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

THOMAS EDISON, MEANWHILE, a man who hardly needed additional press attention, reaped the harvest of his adventures in the West and in the erudite realm of pure science. On the day after the eclipse, The New York Herald ran Edwin Marshall Fox’s account of the Draper party’s activities. “The observation of the eclipse has been a grand success and the astronomers here are in a high state of happiness,” Fox had telegraphed from Rawlins, offering dramatic details of the windstorm that nearly derailed the experiments. “Edison’s observatory, which, in its normal condition, is a hen house, was particularly susceptible,” he wrote. “Every vibration threw the tasimeter into a new condition of adjustment.” Fox told a gripping tale of Edison’s wresting victory from the forces of nature. “At last,” Fox wrote, “just as the chronometer indicated that but one minute remained of total eclipse, he succeeded in concentrating the light from the corona upon the small opening of the instrument. Instantly the [needle] on his graduating scale swept along to the right, clearing its boundaries. Edison was overjoyed.”

As with all stories about Edison, this one spread nationally, if not globally, although many journalists were at first unsure how to interpret the news. The New York Times, for instance, noted both that “Edison’s experiments with the tasimeter were quite satisfactory” and, two paragraphs later, “Edison’s tasimeter failed to work satisfactorily.” The Washington, D.C., Evening Star sought to clear up the confusion. “Edison’s trip to the west has resulted in the discovery that there is considerable heat in the sun’s corona,” it explained. “His tasimeter was, however, too delicately adjusted, and the unexpected heat could not be accurately measured. So the experiment was both successful and unsuccessful as reported, with seeming contradiction, in the dispatches.”

Although Edison could not say exactly how much heat came from the corona because his instrument’s needle had flown off the scale, this flaw in the experiment added ironic luster to his invention. The tasimeter had proved acutely delicate, so much so that Edison suggested a new application of his device—to scan the night sky for invisible celestial objects that are detectable only by the minuscule heat they emit. “His plan is to adjust his tasimeter to its extreme degree of sensitiveness and attach it to a large telescope which moves slowly in a semi-circular direction,” Fox explained in a follow-up story in the Herald. “In this way he states it will be possible to discover stars which are too remote to be seen. In other words, when he cannot see them he will feel them.” Scientific American praised the concept, and although the tasimeter never would be used in this manner, the idea was indeed ahead of its time. Edison had, in fact, anticipated the development of infrared telescopes, devices that a century later would allow astronomers to peer through interstellar dust clouds and to uncover hidden galaxies in the deep recesses of the universe.

Edison did not return directly to Menlo Park from Wyoming. He and George Barker

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.