American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World [Hardcover]

Baron, an award-winning journalist, uses exhaustive research to reconstruct a remarkable chapter of U.S. history. He tells the surprising story of how the eclipse spurred three icons of the 19th centuryinventor Thomas Edison, planet hunter James Craig Watson, and astronomer and women's-rights crusader Maria Mitchellto trek into the wild Western frontier to observe it. The stories of these three enterprising scientists reflect the ambition and intellectual curiosity of the United States in the late-nineteenth-century, when the country was trying to cement its place in the international scientific community. David Baron contracted an incurable case of David Baron beautifully captures the awe, the magic, and the mystery of one particular eclipse, an event in 1878 that spurred on America to embrace the sciences. A superb contribution to the history of astronomy. This fascinating portrait of the Gilded Age is suffused with the peculiar magic and sense of awe that have always attended eclipses, those fraught few minutes when day becomes night, time stands stilland anything seems possible. A suspenseful and dramatic account of the rival scientific expeditions that came to the American West to view and study this rare phenomenon&Baron enables us to understand what drew them to the eclipse and what this episode tells us about the changing role of science in American culture. A wonderful book, bringing lessons from the past to the present. In exceptionally clear and interesting prose, Baron brings nineteenth-century personalities to life, showing how men and, unusually, a female astronomy professor of that time observed the total solar eclipse of 1878. Lucidly melds science, ambition, policy, technology, the interplay of personality and practice, and the immediacy of experience. The book is marked by wonderful, eye-opening surprises, notably Edisons enthusiasm for and participation in the observation of the eclipse and the independent expedition of Maria Mitchell anl£-