ASTRONOMY - B.A.S., ECLIPSE 1900, AND THE YERKES TELESCOPE

Photograph album containing views relating to the British Astronomical Society expedition to view the total solar eclipse at Wadesborough, North Carolina in 1900, [1900]

Footnotes

TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE IN 1900 - a fine album of photographs following the pioneering expedition undertaken by the British Astronomical Society (under the leadership of J.M. Bacon) to view the total eclipse of the sun, on 28 May 1900, at Wadesborough, North Carolina. Images in the album, almost certainly compiled by a member of the expedition, include the voyage across the Atlantic aboard SS. Minneapolis (18, including members of the "Clipper" party), arrival in New York (5, including Brooklyn Bridge), and stops elsewhere including Washington (where J.N. Maskelyne joined the group), Chicago and Quebec, but focuses mostly on the British and American scientific camps at Wadesborough (19, including installation of equipment, the Princeton and Smithsonian groups, portraits - with telescopes - of Charles W. Young, and Edward E. Barnard, Bacon and others), and a subsequent visit to the Yerkes Observatory (9, exterior and interior, library and Barnard with his wife). The B.A.S. party was well represented by female astronomers, all illustrated actively engaged, including Bacon's daughter Gertrude, and Mrs. Maskelyne (along with her husband John Nevil Maskelyne, who was able to capture an eclipse on film for the first time, this recently rediscovered and restored by the British Film Institute). In his report on the Eclipse expedition (a photocopy of which is included in the lot) Bacon noted that "Mrs. Maskeleyne kindly took over the management of a clock-driven actinometer... Miss Woolston elected to confine her attention to photographing the Corona [the album includes two images of the Corona], Miss Dixon took charge of the opera glass spectroscope... my daughter was provided with a battery of four cameras, with which she proposed to photograph the outer extensions...". Other images include views of Wadesborough (8), Judge Bennett, "principal among inhabitants at Wadesboro'" and family (3), and a series of studies of the local black population (9, including hotel waiters and chambermaids, nurses and street groups, according to Bacon "cheery, good-natured willing folk").