Simon Newcomb: America’s Unofficial Astronomer Royal , Bill Carter and Merri Sue Carter, Mantanzas, St. Augustine, FL, 2006. $26.95 (213 pp.). ISBN 1-59113-803-5
Simon Newcomb (1835–1909) was the most famous and influential astronomer of a century ago. He was a founding member and the first president of both the American Astronomical Society and the American Society for Psychical Research, as well as president of the American Mathematical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Newcomb’s 1882 value of the speed of light was 30 times more accurate than all previous measurements and was only substantially improved in the 1920s by Albert Michelson.
Newcomb grew up in Wallace, Nova Scotia, and at age 18 hitched a ride on a ship headed for Massachusetts, penniless and with little education. Self-taught, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University at age 24, and by 34 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His career was centered at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, where he rose to be the superintendent of the Nautical Almanac Office in 1877 and controlled the largest astronomical organization in the world. Newcomb’s lifelong project was to collect all available data on the positions of solar-system bodies and combine them into one grand system of consistent orbits and constants. Back then, such dynamical work represented the bulk of frontline astronomy. Newcomb’s comprehensive and definitive system of constants was adopted in 1896 during an international conference in Paris, and his results were the basis for all dynamical astronomy calculations up until the space age.
Bill Carter and Merri Sue Carter, the authors of Simon Newcomb: America’s Unofficial Astronomer Royal, are a father–daughter team; both are astronomers and geodesists working in areas close to Newcomb’s research. They collaborated together on an earlier, similar book, Latitude: How American Astronomers Solved the Mystery of Variation (Naval Institute Press, 2002), about Seth Chandler and the wobble of the North Pole. Bill Carter is an adjunct professor in the department of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and Merri Sue Carter works at the US Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. With their combined institutional and research connections, the Carters are sympathetic to Newcomb.
Throughout the book the authors refer to Newcomb as “Simon” and describe episodes from his personal viewpoint. Generally, the first-person narrative does not distract from the enjoyable stories in the book, but it does lead the Carters to conclude the opposite of most other historians’ opinion that Newcomb was cold, ruthless, and more feared than liked. The authors’ reversal of Newcomb’s character is most prominent in the incident in which Newcomb made an abortive attempt to take credit for Asaph Hall’s discovery of the two moons of Mars. The authors turn the blame on Hall for having created the incident. They point out that Hall had intentionally gotten rid of his assistant so that he would not have to share the glory of the discovery; they think that Hall was judging Newcomb by his own behavior.
The book is organized around a dozen events in Newcomb’s life, leaving gaps that miss many fun anecdotes. For example, readers do not learn that Newcomb was the intentional prototype for Arthur Conan Doyle’s arch-villain Professor James Moriarty. They also are not told that Newcomb was the “learn’d astronomer” in Walt Whitman’s famous When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer . Nor are they told about how Newcomb restored the reputation of Father Maximilian Hell, S. J., by showing that the astronomer did not fake his observations of the 1769 transit of Venus. And Newcomb is not credited with discovering and explaining the logarithmic distribution of the leading digit in lists of real-life statistics, which came to be known as Benford’s law.
Such gaps also leave unanswered in-depth questions and evaluations. One example is the paradox of how Newcomb went from being the most famous astronomer in the world to a name recognized mostly by older astronomers who have an interest in the history of astronomy. My resolution for why Newcomb is now so little known is twofold: First, the dynamical astronomy of old is now solved and out of fashion, so no forum exists for trumpeting its greatest practitioner. Second, Newcomb never had a discovery named after him.
Simon Newcomb is not the definitive biography, but it contains many intriguing stories. It captures well the sweep of astronomy from the Civil War to the early 1900s. The only other biography of Newcomb, Albert E. Moyer’s A Scientist’s Voice in American Culture: Simon Newcomb and the Rhetoric of Scientific Method (U. California Press, 1992), is for scholars interested in the sociology and philosophy of science. Thus the Carters’ book fills an important gap in astronomical history. I recommend it to libraries and individuals interested in the history of American astronomy. But maybe the best recommendation is that I had a lot of fun reading the book—and I could not put it down until finished.
