Editor’s note: This story is part of The Dallas Morning News’ coverage of the 2024 total solar eclipse. For more, visit dallasnews.com/eclipse.
Clouds hung low in the sky the night before, and by sunrise they still hadn’t cleared.
“All the morning people were seen carrying their pieces of smoked glass,” a predecessor to modern eclipse glasses, wrote a Ross Avenue woman. The woman, N.L. Belsterling, had made her pieces of glass herself, but newsboys were selling them across the country.
“I, too, smoked my piece manfully — no, womanfully — at the risk of cut and burnt fingers, and succeeded in getting a piece well blackened,” she recalled in a letter decades later. “Several scientific gentlemen,” she added, were on hand.
Dallas was 36 years old and about to see its first total solar eclipse — if the weather would cooperate.
Ahead of the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse, The Dallas Morning News conducted archival research on the 1878 eclipse, shedding light on its legacy in the region. The event, like today, was a sensation. For decades, observers recalled the moon’s shadow and the preparations that heralded the eclipse’s arrival.
No total solar eclipse had crossed the state since the arrival of Europeans centuries earlier, this paper wrote. And for the country, the stakes were even higher.
“It was a really important day for America and for American science because this was a time when the United States was still a young country,” David Baron, author of American Eclipse, said in an interview with The News.
Just two years earlier, America had celebrated its centennial and was becoming a global industrial power. “But when it came to intellectual pursuits,” he said, “the Europeans looked down their noses at us,” confident the U.S. would never catch up. The date of July 29, 1878, was America’s chance to prove its intellectual might matched its economic muscle — and the public, galvanized by science they could see — was on board.
Eclipse expeditions
Knowing bad weather could spoil any one viewer’s observations, the U.S. Naval Observatory had launched about a half dozen eclipse expeditions across the country.
The zone of total darkness cut a path east from Russia to Alaska, crossed through British Columbia and traced large parts of the Rockies before entering Texas, where it curved out into the Gulf of Mexico and eventually passed over Cuba.
The chances of clear skies were better in Colorado and Wyoming, said Baron, so more resources were allotted to those expeditions. (Thomas Edison was among the scientists in Wyoming, though he was on a private trip.) In Dallas, things were a bit more DIY.
David Todd arrived by himself in Denison on July 12 after a four-day trip from Washington, D.C., according to the report he later submitted to the Navy.
A 23-year-old astronomer, Todd brought with him a $500 budget; a sextant; a chronometer; and a comet seeker, a type of small telescope.
“Todd was a one-man expedition,” Baron said. “The other expeditions were much more elaborate — more people, more equipment.” In Wyoming, Edison brought along a device he called along the tasimeter, which he claimed could register changes in temperature as tiny as a millionth of a degree Fahrenheit, according to Baron. Billed as “bigger than the phonograph,” it turned out not to be very reliable.
The sun’s corona
Todd got situated, setting up communication with Washington and with people across Texas drafted to make their own observations of the eclipse and the sun’s corona, a mysterious phenomenon to scientists at the time.
“It was recommended that drawings of the corona be made at the three stations nearest the center of the shadow-path, namely Decatur, Jacksborough, and Henrietta,” he wrote in his report.
After a detour to Houston to pick up extra equipment, he returned to Dallas on Saturday night, two days before the eclipse, and checked in on his headquarters, the house of J.M. Oram, a local jeweler.
The house was about a quarter-mile from the telegraph office, and Todd later boasted of having someone on horseback standing by at the facility to grab any message that might come in from Wyoming during the eclipse and rush it to him “with all possible despatch.”
Like the other scientists around the country, Todd saw in the eclipse a rare chance to bring clarity to two big scientific mysteries.
The first was the corona, which becomes visible when the moon obscures the sun in what’s known as totality. Scientists today know the corona is the sun’s outer atmosphere, but 19th-century theories ran the gamut. Was it even a part of the sun? Maybe it was an effect of the Earth’s own atmosphere on the sun’s light, said Baron.
One theory, he added, even posited it was meteors burning up as they fell into our star. By 1878, scientists had ruled out the most outlandish hypotheses, settling on a consensus that the corona was in fact part of the sun, but that was about as far as they’d gotten.
The other question the eclipse could answer was perhaps even bigger by today’s standards. Scientists hoped in the span of mere minutes to catch a glimpse of an entirely new planet they believed existed — without having been definitively observed.
“There was good reason to believe that there was at least one other planet between Mercury and the sun,” Baron said. “The belief was so great that in fact astronomers gave it a name.” They called it the planet Vulcan.
The planet Vulcan
Vulcan, astronomers thought, had to exist to explain a quirk in Mercury’s orbit. “Mercury behaved as if there was some mass between it and the sun, tugging it along,” Baron said. The problem was that “No one had ever reliably seen Vulcan.”
But that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there. Astronomers theorized if the planet was close enough to the sun, it would set with the sun at dusk, never to be seen in the night sky. Daytime observation would be impossible, owing to the sun’s glare.
“So, about the only time you might catch a glimpse of this supposed planet Vulcan would be during those few minutes of midday darkness when the moon covers the bright surface of the sun and you could actually look at what is right around the sun,” Baron said.
Todd’s position in Dallas meant he wouldn’t be the first to spot Vulcan in 1878, but he might get a tip by telegram about where to point his telescope if another observer saw it before him.
As the big day wore on, the weather improved. Only high clouds floated when the phenomenon was due. Todd stood by his instruments at Oram’s house and his volunteers took their places, too. Smoked glass in hand, the city looked up at about 3:14 p.m.
About an hour later, totality began.
“I almost held my breath in awe,” wrote Belsterling, the Dallas woman who saw it with her own eyes. “The birds, overhead, blew hither and thither in alarm. Chickens went to roost and began their pecking and crowding, preparatory to their night’s rest. The frogs on the banks of the Trinity set up their sad, musical refrains. As totality passed and the first rays of the sun fell upon us the scene was one of rare brilliancy. I watched it as it slowly passed over, and felt sorry it was over.”
The next one wouldn’t be until 2024.
Belsterling’s account, captured in a letter, appeared in The News 50 years later. She’s one of several Texans whose memories of the eclipse stayed with them for decades and resurfaced in newspaper coverage that looked back on the event.
‘Wonder and awe’
Ola Comer Haley, a young girl in Pittsburg, Texas, northeast of Tyler, watched the eclipse with her family in 1878 and told the Dallas Times Herald 45 years later, “I shall never forget the look upon mother’s face as I looked into it and saw an expression of wonder and awe, which as a little child, I mistook for sadness.”
Todd’s observations were less sentimental. Tables and measurements make up his detailed report on what he saw during his stargazing. But he did look back on his time in the city half a century later, calling himself a young scientist whom “a kindly cloudless sky favored so that Dallas has ever since held unchallenged a grateful nook in his heart.”
In the days and weeks after the eclipse, headlines shouted news of scientific breakthroughs. But as often happens in hindsight, little of the science held up.
“I mean, you know, this was the most important eclipse ever observed,” said Baron, miming the refrain of the time. “And Vulcan was found!” But of course, there was no Vulcan, he said. Studies of the corona turned out not to have revealed much either.
Still for Todd, it was the beginning of a long career. After packing up his comet chaser, he went on to become a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts and an eclipse chaser whose expeditions took him around the world. The Dallas expedition was his first. He died in 1939.
Baron said despite it being largely a scientific dud, the eclipse remained a turning point in the country’s intellectual history because it whet the public’s appetite for more discovery. “Here was the scientific event that got America jazzed about showing the world that we could compete in this realm,” he said. “And it wasn’t long after this, that we really did lead the world in astronomy and many sciences.”
Signature moment
In Dallas, the events of 1878 became the stuff of legend, revived in the papers when a partial solar eclipse was visible here.
“You Can’t Find Eclipses Anymore Like One In ‘78,” said a cheeky headline in 1963. “When Dallas Watched The Sun Go Out,” read the front page of The News on the 50th anniversary. That story took a more solemn tone, however, tributing the eclipse as a signature moment in the city’s history.
“It was an event anticipated with immense interest and caused the greatest possible excitement,” the writer, Geoffrey E. Govier, declared.
At the end, Govier’s tone softened into something more contemplative as he pondered whether eclipses would mean as much in the future.
He told readers the next total eclipse in Texas wouldn’t be for nearly a century and, in the last sentence, made an admission: “enthusiasm for these far-away darkenings of the Sun is naturally feeble,” he wrote, “and by that remote epoch further mysteries of space and time may have been penetrated.”
They certainly have, but we’ll still be watching.
Staff researchers Jennifer Brancato and Spencer Bevis contributed to this report.
