The Rocky Mountain Eclipse of 1878: Changing Astronomy forever

America’s First Great Eclipse takes readers on a thrilling historical journey, revealing that in the nineteenth century, Americans were just as excited about a total solar eclipse as we are today. They were willing to travel thousands of miles to witness this amazing event. The ‘Great American Eclipse’ of 2017 and the upcoming ‘Great North American Eclipse’ of 2024 were not the first eclipses to deserve such titles.

In the summer of 1878, when the American West was still wild, hundreds of astronomers and thousands of tourists traveled by train to Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas to witness America’s first ‘Great Eclipse.’ America’s First Great Eclipse tells the story of a country and its scientists on the brink of a new era. Near the end of the nineteenth century, American astronomers were taking the lead in a science that Europeans had dominated for centuries. Samuel Langley, Henry Draper, Maria Mitchell, and even the inventor Thomas Edison were putting America at the forefront of what was being called the “new astronomy.”

On July 29, 1878, after braving treacherous storms, debilitating altitude sickness, and the threat of Indian attacks, they joined thousands of East-coast tourists and Western pioneers as they spread out across the Great Plains and climbed to the top of 14,000-foot Pikes Peak, all to glimpse one of nature’s grandest spectacles: a total solar eclipse. It was the first time in history that so many astronomers observed together from higher elevations. The Rocky Mountain eclipse of 1878 was not only a turning point in American science, but it was also the beginning of high-altitude astronomy, without which our current understanding of the Universe would be impossible.

22 illustrations.

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