Even if you find talk of 19th-century astronomy and cinematography boring, stick around and you'll be rewarded by a bit of a colorful excursion regarding David Peck Todd, the astrophotographer behind this title, and his circle's colorful lives, which involve poet Emily Dickinson and a double ménage à trois. And with that hook put aside for a moment....
When French astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen's teams and English astronomers using his method recorded series of photographic images of the transit of Venus on daguerreotype metal plates with a so-called photographic revolver (despite it looking more like a cannon), it had profound effects on science and the invention of motion pictures--not least because Janssen's experiment, along with those of Eadweard Muybridge, influenced physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, who arguably more than anyone was responsible for developing what would become known as cinematography and what he termed chronophotography--by ultimately inventing motion-picture cameras a modern eye, or at least a pre-digital one, would readily recognize as such and that eventually recorded images on strips of paper and celluloid. Whereas Muybridge and his disciples--the likes of Ottomar Anschütz, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Edison, W. K. L. Dickson, Louis Lumière and even Marey's former assistant Georges Demenÿ--took this invention in the direction of art and entertainment, others followed Janssen and Marey in taking up chronophotography to revolutionize scientific measurement--the likes of medical researcher Albert Londe, gymnastics instructor Ernst Kohlrausch, and the American astronomer behind this series of photographs, Todd.
The 1874 transit was a big deal in the scientific community and which came to be largely considered a failure for systematic scientific measurement, such as for calculating the solar parallax. Jimena Canales claims (see sources at end) that nothing less than the scale of the universe was at stake, as, indeed, this would determine the distance between and masses of planets and other celestial objects. Fortunately, transits of Venus always have a predetermined sequel, followed as they are by a second one nearly eight years later. Mess that one up, too, though, and one won't have another chance for over a century; for instance, after our last one back in 2012, we won't see another until, well, probably after everyone reading this around the time that I wrote it is dead, in the year 2117.
Although it wouldn't be until the invention of radar that a more accurate number for the solar parallax would be established, it was hoped that photography would yield a more objective perspective than methods of the day that included drawing eclipses. Indeed, by 1882, Marey had invented a chronophotographic gun that had much more the appearance of a handheld rifle, for which he recorded images of birds in flight at up to 12 images per second upon glass discs and using the superior dry-place process as opposed to the wet-collodion one of Muybridge's battery of single-image cameras, let alone the bulky daguerreotypes that were already dated when Janssen employed them. Although he also decided on gelatin wet plates, it was with such other advancements and interest in scientific cinematography that upon Venus's return across the Sun on 6 December 1882, Todd headed up one of the many expeditions departing for and from across the world--The U. S. Naval Observatory alone funded eight of them--to record and measure the eclipse. Instead financed personally by Captain Richard S. Floyd, trustee president of Lick Observatory, Todd and campus photographer John L. Lovell departed their Amherst College in Massachusetts to cross the continental U. S. for Mount Hamilton in California, where this first permanent mountain-top observatory was being constructed. There, overseeing construction, Thomas Fraser was also putting together a photoheliograph with lenses made by Alvan Clark, for Todd and his team's use.
Whereas Janssen's metal daguerreotypes were already an early instance of time-lapse photography if ever synthesized back into motion, as one test series has been since in documentaries and on YouTube, as more than a second lapsed between each picture, Todd's glass-plate negatives are even more so the case taken at two-minute intervals over hours to create 147 sequential images. As with Janssen's test footage, Todd's images have since been reanimated, as well--in this case, digitally by Anthony Misch and Bill Sheehan, which they first presented at an astronomical assembly in Sydney, July 2003, and which various articles later mentioned back during the 2012 transit and for which the animation has also become available across the web, including YouTube.
Unlike Todd's 12 other eclipse expeditions in all, reportedly, and despite this one not necessarily settling any astronomical disputes, this 1882 work on the transit of Venus seems to have been considered successful. Contemporary astronomer Antoine A'Abbadie cited it as among the best of such astrophotography. Another astronomer, Charles A. Young thought them as probably the best photographs obtained of the event. Todd himself claimed they surpassed the best results obtained by the Navy expeditions, although a small lens and distortions caused by Earth's atmosphere are said to have nonetheless resulted in fuzziness and reduced their scientific utility. To my layman eyes, too, the telescope's crosshair lines and the way the black dot of Venus makes its way across an otherwise seemingly nondescript face of the Sun has a dull, science-y aesthetic to it. Not unlike how Marey included clocks and measurements in his photographs otherwise set against pure black backgrounds, or even how Muybridge pretended scientific inquiry (but was, in fact, foremost an artistic inquiry) with the purposeless grid-patterned backgrounds in his magnum opus at the University of Pennsylvania. Apparently, Todd's subsequent expeditions tended to be ruined by such astronomers' nightmares as clouds.
Anyways, as promised and speaking of positions of bodies in motion and awkward transitions, Todd seems to have led a life that would make for an interesting story--even a biopic, or at least a better supporting role in someone else's than he had in "Wild Nights with Emily" (2018). Besides traveling the world to document eclipses during his turbulent tenure at Amherst, he seems to have accepted, if not encouraged, an adulterous ménage à trois involving his wife, Mabel. Perhaps, that's because he, too, was a philanderer, and his wife's lover, Austin Dickinson, was the treasurer in charge of Amherst's purse strings. He was also Emily Dickinson's brother, and his wife, Susan, was at the center of the second ménage à trois, being in a sapphic relationship with Emily.
See, the movie practically writes itself. David a musically-inclined child prodigy who attended college at 15 years of age to become an astronomer, overseeing the observatory at Amherst, coming into conflict with the university's theological tradition as it moved towards secular academics, his open marriage an open secret, chasing eclipses across the globe and perfecting automatic photography, including by a piano or organ-like paper-roll-film machine of his own invention, to document eclipses during a time of substantial debate in the scientific community over the usefulness of astrophotography, and inspiring at least one former student to go so far as to speculate of his influence on Edison--which was probably nil, but Todd did turn down working as a mechanic in Edison's laboratory before setting out on his career in astronomy. Eventually, David was forced into early retirement, became convinced of life on Mars and experimented with ways to communicate to the planet, and went mad from syphilis and was institutionalized.
Then, there's Mabel Loomis Todd, who after the death of Austin accompanied her husband on many of his expeditions, although not the one to Lick Observatory--she was still having an affair with Austin at that time, she was also musically-talented, including performing at and being a frequent guest in Emily's home, and a published author, including writing about her and her husband's travels. Despite Mabel and the famously-reclusive Emily, reportedly, never meeting face to face, they did exchange correspondence, and Emily's sister enlisted Mabel with editing and publishing Emily's poetry and letters posthumously. Mabel also became a lecturer promoting Emily's unorthodox poetry and the mystique of her reclusive habits. Mabel also, now notoriously, is believed to have erased Susan's name from Emily's writings.
It wouldn't be until 1907, in the film "L'éclipse du soleil en pleine lune," that cine-magician Georges Méliès would realize cinematically the apparent sexual proclivities of eclipses (the Sun and planets get around, if you know what I mean), but these Amherst figures surrounding the 1882 transit were living it. To bring it all together, and to repeat its citation in Martha Sexton's book (again, see sources below), with another intersection of art and science, as well as religious conflict, one poem of Emily's goes like this:
Eclipses be -- predicted --
And Science bows them in --
But do one face us suddenly --
Jehovah's Watch -- is wrong.
Main Sources:
Canales, Jimena. "Photogenic Venus: The 'Cinematographic Turn' and Its Alternatives in Nineteenth-Century France." Isis 93, 4 (2002).
Saxton, Martha. "Eclipses, Ecology, and Emily Dickinson: The Todds of Amherst." Amherst in the World (2020).
Sheehan, William and Anthony Misch. "Menage a Trois: David Peck Todd, Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin Dickinson, and the 1882 Transit of Venus." Journal for the History of Astronomy (1 May 2004).
When French astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen's teams and English astronomers using his method recorded series of photographic images of the transit of Venus on daguerreotype metal plates with a so-called photographic revolver (despite it looking more like a cannon), it had profound effects on science and the invention of motion pictures--not least because Janssen's experiment, along with those of Eadweard Muybridge, influenced physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, who arguably more than anyone was responsible for developing what would become known as cinematography and what he termed chronophotography--by ultimately inventing motion-picture cameras a modern eye, or at least a pre-digital one, would readily recognize as such and that eventually recorded images on strips of paper and celluloid. Whereas Muybridge and his disciples--the likes of Ottomar Anschütz, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Edison, W. K. L. Dickson, Louis Lumière and even Marey's former assistant Georges Demenÿ--took this invention in the direction of art and entertainment, others followed Janssen and Marey in taking up chronophotography to revolutionize scientific measurement--the likes of medical researcher Albert Londe, gymnastics instructor Ernst Kohlrausch, and the American astronomer behind this series of photographs, Todd.
The 1874 transit was a big deal in the scientific community and which came to be largely considered a failure for systematic scientific measurement, such as for calculating the solar parallax. Jimena Canales claims (see sources at end) that nothing less than the scale of the universe was at stake, as, indeed, this would determine the distance between and masses of planets and other celestial objects. Fortunately, transits of Venus always have a predetermined sequel, followed as they are by a second one nearly eight years later. Mess that one up, too, though, and one won't have another chance for over a century; for instance, after our last one back in 2012, we won't see another until, well, probably after everyone reading this around the time that I wrote it is dead, in the year 2117.
Although it wouldn't be until the invention of radar that a more accurate number for the solar parallax would be established, it was hoped that photography would yield a more objective perspective than methods of the day that included drawing eclipses. Indeed, by 1882, Marey had invented a chronophotographic gun that had much more the appearance of a handheld rifle, for which he recorded images of birds in flight at up to 12 images per second upon glass discs and using the superior dry-place process as opposed to the wet-collodion one of Muybridge's battery of single-image cameras, let alone the bulky daguerreotypes that were already dated when Janssen employed them. Although he also decided on gelatin wet plates, it was with such other advancements and interest in scientific cinematography that upon Venus's return across the Sun on 6 December 1882, Todd headed up one of the many expeditions departing for and from across the world--The U. S. Naval Observatory alone funded eight of them--to record and measure the eclipse. Instead financed personally by Captain Richard S. Floyd, trustee president of Lick Observatory, Todd and campus photographer John L. Lovell departed their Amherst College in Massachusetts to cross the continental U. S. for Mount Hamilton in California, where this first permanent mountain-top observatory was being constructed. There, overseeing construction, Thomas Fraser was also putting together a photoheliograph with lenses made by Alvan Clark, for Todd and his team's use.
Whereas Janssen's metal daguerreotypes were already an early instance of time-lapse photography if ever synthesized back into motion, as one test series has been since in documentaries and on YouTube, as more than a second lapsed between each picture, Todd's glass-plate negatives are even more so the case taken at two-minute intervals over hours to create 147 sequential images. As with Janssen's test footage, Todd's images have since been reanimated, as well--in this case, digitally by Anthony Misch and Bill Sheehan, which they first presented at an astronomical assembly in Sydney, July 2003, and which various articles later mentioned back during the 2012 transit and for which the animation has also become available across the web, including YouTube.
Unlike Todd's 12 other eclipse expeditions in all, reportedly, and despite this one not necessarily settling any astronomical disputes, this 1882 work on the transit of Venus seems to have been considered successful. Contemporary astronomer Antoine A'Abbadie cited it as among the best of such astrophotography. Another astronomer, Charles A. Young thought them as probably the best photographs obtained of the event. Todd himself claimed they surpassed the best results obtained by the Navy expeditions, although a small lens and distortions caused by Earth's atmosphere are said to have nonetheless resulted in fuzziness and reduced their scientific utility. To my layman eyes, too, the telescope's crosshair lines and the way the black dot of Venus makes its way across an otherwise seemingly nondescript face of the Sun has a dull, science-y aesthetic to it. Not unlike how Marey included clocks and measurements in his photographs otherwise set against pure black backgrounds, or even how Muybridge pretended scientific inquiry (but was, in fact, foremost an artistic inquiry) with the purposeless grid-patterned backgrounds in his magnum opus at the University of Pennsylvania. Apparently, Todd's subsequent expeditions tended to be ruined by such astronomers' nightmares as clouds.
Anyways, as promised and speaking of positions of bodies in motion and awkward transitions, Todd seems to have led a life that would make for an interesting story--even a biopic, or at least a better supporting role in someone else's than he had in "Wild Nights with Emily" (2018). Besides traveling the world to document eclipses during his turbulent tenure at Amherst, he seems to have accepted, if not encouraged, an adulterous ménage à trois involving his wife, Mabel. Perhaps, that's because he, too, was a philanderer, and his wife's lover, Austin Dickinson, was the treasurer in charge of Amherst's purse strings. He was also Emily Dickinson's brother, and his wife, Susan, was at the center of the second ménage à trois, being in a sapphic relationship with Emily.
See, the movie practically writes itself. David a musically-inclined child prodigy who attended college at 15 years of age to become an astronomer, overseeing the observatory at Amherst, coming into conflict with the university's theological tradition as it moved towards secular academics, his open marriage an open secret, chasing eclipses across the globe and perfecting automatic photography, including by a piano or organ-like paper-roll-film machine of his own invention, to document eclipses during a time of substantial debate in the scientific community over the usefulness of astrophotography, and inspiring at least one former student to go so far as to speculate of his influence on Edison--which was probably nil, but Todd did turn down working as a mechanic in Edison's laboratory before setting out on his career in astronomy. Eventually, David was forced into early retirement, became convinced of life on Mars and experimented with ways to communicate to the planet, and went mad from syphilis and was institutionalized.
Then, there's Mabel Loomis Todd, who after the death of Austin accompanied her husband on many of his expeditions, although not the one to Lick Observatory--she was still having an affair with Austin at that time, she was also musically-talented, including performing at and being a frequent guest in Emily's home, and a published author, including writing about her and her husband's travels. Despite Mabel and the famously-reclusive Emily, reportedly, never meeting face to face, they did exchange correspondence, and Emily's sister enlisted Mabel with editing and publishing Emily's poetry and letters posthumously. Mabel also became a lecturer promoting Emily's unorthodox poetry and the mystique of her reclusive habits. Mabel also, now notoriously, is believed to have erased Susan's name from Emily's writings.
It wouldn't be until 1907, in the film "L'éclipse du soleil en pleine lune," that cine-magician Georges Méliès would realize cinematically the apparent sexual proclivities of eclipses (the Sun and planets get around, if you know what I mean), but these Amherst figures surrounding the 1882 transit were living it. To bring it all together, and to repeat its citation in Martha Sexton's book (again, see sources below), with another intersection of art and science, as well as religious conflict, one poem of Emily's goes like this:
Eclipses be -- predicted --
And Science bows them in --
But do one face us suddenly --
Jehovah's Watch -- is wrong.
Main Sources:
Canales, Jimena. "Photogenic Venus: The 'Cinematographic Turn' and Its Alternatives in Nineteenth-Century France." Isis 93, 4 (2002).
Saxton, Martha. "Eclipses, Ecology, and Emily Dickinson: The Todds of Amherst." Amherst in the World (2020).
Sheehan, William and Anthony Misch. "Menage a Trois: David Peck Todd, Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin Dickinson, and the 1882 Transit of Venus." Journal for the History of Astronomy (1 May 2004).
