OBSERVATIONAL ASTRONOMY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 1751 - 2007 corrected, revised, and enlarged from OBSERVATIONAL ASTRONOMY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 1751 - 1996 published privately in 5 print copies in 2005 ROBERT H. KOCH 2008 2010 - Revision B includes 2009 and 2010 Addenda and Errata For Joanne Koch and in memory of Harry and Veronica Koch Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2010 by Robert H. Koch Permission is hereby granted to any user of this file freely to store and transmit copies of it for non-commercial purposes. The original form without modification must be preserved but attributed quotations, with or without ellipses, may be used. 2 CONTENTS Preface 4 Acknowledgements 7 References 9 A Selective Astronomical Primer 10 Early Days 36 References 45 The Flower Observatory(FO) 47 References 87 The Roslyn House Observatory(RHO) of Gustavus Wynne Cook 90 References 111 The FCO and the SO 113 References 159 Some Afterthoughts 163 Name Index 165 Subject Index 173 Quiz to accompany Observational Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania 1751 – 2007 174 Addenda and Errata: 2009 and 2010 A-1 3 PREFACE INTRODUCTION In May 2003 Il-Seong Nha asked that I prepare a poster paper on the history of The Flower Observatory (FO) for the IAU General Assembly in Sydney. The two-month deadline was impractical but the idea seemed appealing and so led to a part of this document. Afterwards, Ben Shen suggested that I finish the job with a description of the two following observatories. I turned these ideas somewhat around and composed a text that starts with the 18th century beginnings of the University and ends in 2007 with the almost certain termination of local ground-based observing. The personalities who appear in the document are basically those who interrogated the sky telescopically or with the naked eye or who actively used measurements collected by others. Pure theoretical analysts or model builders hardly appear at all. They were not numerous. The justification for the dates in the title of this document is as follows. In order to be able to observe, you need to know where to direct your instrument at a specific time. We do this now by a distributed time signal and by on-line information. But into the 18th century, it was not possible to know where to point a telescope unless an object were a naked-eye one or unless you had access to a printed catalogue for a telescopic target. The beginning date is associated with an individual affiliated with the progenitor of the University who prepared and had published just such almanacs. The ending date could have been 1996 (based on my personal experience) or 2004 (from telescope log entries) or 2007. I chose the latest of these because it was more generous and less parochial and because of a particular physical event. RESOURCES AND METHODOLOGY Money is a significant matter in what follows. When specific sums are mentioned, they are cited first in the historically current amounts and then bracketed as nominal 2002 equivalents according to the conversion factors of Sahr (2003), who recommends that only three significant figures be kept. No matter how correct be the nominal conversions, there is no way by which uniquely local factors regarding cost-of-living can be accounted for. A summary page dated 2001 from the University Archives purports to list documentary materials relating to the FO: (1) a fairly complete set of reprints from 1929 to the termination of the facility; (2) a file relating to observations of the intrinsic variable EZ Aql; (3) observing logs from the 1930s and 1940s; (4) a few pieces of personal memorabilia; and (5) a photo of a solar eclipse in 1932. The eclipse photo comes from a Franklin Institute expedition to Conway, NH in which observatory staff did not actually participate and no FO equipment was used. This event is described by Stokley (1932) and no scientific results were obtained. There is also a very brief historical summary prepared by an archivist, Kaiyi Chen. Mostly through the constant attention of William Blitzstein, a much larger body of paper material and hardware was preserved in his personal files during his service as a member of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. When this passed temporarily into my hands from the attentive custody of Richard J. Mitchell, the materials were not consistently organized but it was possible to sort them easily. They comprise: (1) a more complete set of reprints than the Archives possesses; (2) individual manila- folder files on FO Directors, faculty members, some graduate students, staff appointees, and astronomers and other individuals transiently associated with all three observing stations; (3) two informal renderings of parts of all the observatories’ histories which supplement each other well; (4) taped conversations (both on cassette and in unedited transcription) between Blitzstein and two other people; (5) an almost complete set of the Publications of the University of Pennsylvania Astronomical Series; (6) a limited selection of the annual Observatory Reports; and (7) a small set of posed and candid print photos and lantern slides of people, buildings and hardware. All these holdings were at least perused by me if they were not read and studied in detail. Since the material is not professionally indexed, there is no unique and proper way to cite the individual files. I decided that I would write a text that preserves faithfully the sense of information in the materials but would not refer to individual documents as if they had really been archived. I make no attempt at a complete list of faculty, staff, and student literature citations, which would be at least three times longer than my selections. All this material (which is really in less than 3 shelf-feet of manila folders) used by me has been deposited with the University Archives or with the Department of Physics and Astronomy. In the Archives there is essentially no information regarding the observatories subsequent to the FO. What is recorded here is from my and Blitzstein’s collections, what I have been able to recover from other people still living and from technical hardware/software files that I have inherited. A valuable external source exists in the collection of obituaries published by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and in Physics Today and I have used these freely without specific attribution. I have also used without individual citations assorted editions of American Men of Science, American Men and Women of Science, Philadelphia City Directories, Who’s Who in this and that, Ritter’s (1860) Philadelphia and Her Merchants, Jordan’s (1911) Colonial Families of Philadelphia, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians by Simpson (1859), The Dictionary of American Biography and The Dictionary of National Biography. The 2nd edition of DeFilippo’s (1992) The History and Development of Upper Darby Township was also helpful. If all these sources failed to yield useful biographical information, I had recourse to the web site maintained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and this was sometimes useful. Many individual photos appear in the panoramic group shots of attendees at meetings of the AAS and printed in its Publications. These are all small-scale and were used when no better ones could be found. Some good images are in the John Irwin Slide Collection archived at The Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics. Technically, a certain number of the illustrations are deficient either because the originals were in very poor condition or because I couldn’t figure out how to improve their brightness or contrast. I’d like to think that the text is substantially better than the illustrations. Four organizations appear sporadically in later chapters. The first of these, due to Benjamin Franklin’s initiative in 1743, is the American Philosophical Society (APS). Its writ has been summarized as pursuing equally "all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniencies or Pleasures of Life". Early members included all kinds of professionals and artisans as well as workers in the fine arts with some interest in science, technology or agriculture – it is difficult to fit Thomas Jefferson uniquely into any of these categories. With the usual difficulties a publication vehicle was started as soon as possible. It is not surprising that there would be accepted for publication a large number of singular anecdotal accounts of curious natural phenomena from the interior of North America. Something of the same kind is associated with the early issues of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London which published accounts of oddities from all over the world. From the point of view of astronomical science, perhaps the finest issue of the 20th century Transactions of the APS is that containing the superb spectral atlas of β Lyr prepared by Sahade et al. (1959). Membership is still by election and the premises and events of the Society are sustained in an agreeable fashion. Its breadth of interest is what sets the APS apart from other learned societies. It offers grant support not limited to scientific and technological programs and sustains a creditable publication record. The year 1824 saw the foundation of the second of the organizations: The Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts (FI). The formation of the organization is a testimonial to the expected continuing prosperity of the city’s industrial capability. The original building now houses the Atwater Kent Museum of the City of Philadelphia and its present home is, from the outside, an impressive pile in a very advantageous site.