Apparently we have not seen a solar Eclipse of such long “totality” since 1806, and in that year the “point of greatest duration” of daytime darkness was Salem, timed at 4 minutes and 48 seconds! When I read that, I had to drop everything and do a little research into this very notable eclipse in early America, starting with a pamphlet by Boston instrument maker Andrew Newell entitled Darkness at Noon (more than a century before and much more literal than Koestler). This is a wonderful little book that Newell published just before the 1806 eclipse, to get everybody ready, and it actually made me more excited for the great North American Eclipse of 2024! I will not be following Newell’s advice for eclipse-viewing, however, using “a piece of common window glass, smoaked on both sides sufficiently to prevent any injury to the eye.” The author James Fenimore Cooper offered colored panes of glass to friends and family viewing the eclipse in New York State, where Spanish astronomer José Joaquín de Ferrer, made measurements and drawings of its totality in Kinderhook, and coined the term corona
Andrew Newell, Darkness at Noon: or, the Great Solar Eclipse of the 16th of June, 1806. Boston: D. Carlisle & A. Newell, 1806 (you can read the entire text at the Linda Hall Library); Ferrer’s Corona Sketch, 1806.
Back in Salem, the famed mathemetician Nathaniel Bowditch was also recording observations of the phenomena he observed on June 16, 1806, right in his backyard. They were later published as a Memoir on the Solar Eclipse of June 16, 1806 (plus an addition). You can sense the intellectual community in which he lived from his notes: The time of conjunction deduced from my observations at Salem compared with the time of conjunction at Paris, computed by La Lande, gives, by allowing 53 seconds for the difference of meridians of Salem and Cambridge, the longitude of Cambridge Ah. 44 24 *9 W from Greenwich, as is shown in the additional observations on that eclipse given in this memoir. Among the general population, there is no sense of fear, only wonder, and the most popular adjective in day-after reports of the eclipse was sublime. The Salem Gazette’s report was purely descriptive: Yesterday the great solar eclipse took place, agreeably to the calculations which had been made. The day was very favorable to viewing it. The air was remarkably clear, and there was not a cloud in the hemisphere. As the sun shut in, the stars appeared, and many were visible at the time of total darkness. A considerable alteration in the temperature was felt during the continuance of the eclipse.
Philadelphia publisher John Poulson adapted Newell’s pamphlet for his Philadelphia readers in the “Approaching Solar Eclipse” (courtesy Boston Rare Maps) and Simeon De Witt, the Surveyor General of New York State, described the eclipse in Albany in a letter to the American Philosophical Society which was accompaned by a painting of its corona by local artist Ezra Ames. (I’m kind of anxious about how these guys captured their coronas!) The broad swath of the 1806 eclipse.
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