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""The Heavens on Earth" raises the bar for the historiography of astronomy and observatory techniques. The collection stands out from the existing literature in its attention to the broad cultural context of observatory work and techniques; continental Europe in addition to Great Britain and the United States; the connections between the observatory and 'popular' astronomy; and the links between astronomy and concerns such as geodesy, the rating of chronometers, and military science. It is a major contribution to the history of not only astronomy but also nineteenth-century science and its culture."--Robert W. Smith, University of Alberta, co-author of "Hubble: Imaging Space and Time"

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THE HEAVENS ON EARTH

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.............................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments...................................................................................................................................................xiDAVID AUBIN, CHARLOTTE BIGG, AND H. OTTO SIBUM Introduction: Observatory Techniques in Nineteenth-Century Science and Society....................................11. SIMON WERRETT The Astronomical Capital of the World: Pulkovo Observatory in the Russia of Tsar Nicholas I.....................................................332. MASSIMO MAZZOTTI The Jesuit on the Roof: Observatory Sciences, Metaphysics, and Nation Building...............................................................583. DAVID AUBIN Eclipse Politics in France and Thailand, 1868.....................................................................................................864. SIMON SCHAFFER Keeping the Books at Paramatta Observatory.....................................................................................................1185. GUY BOISTEL Training Seafarers in Astronomy: Methods, Naval Schools, and Naval Observatories in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France.....................1486. SVEN WIDMALM Astronomy as Military Science: The Case of Sweden, ca. 1800-1850.................................................................................1747. MARTINA SCHIAVON Geodesy and Map Making in France and Algeria: Between Army Officers and Observatory Scientists...............................................1998. RICHARD STALEY Michelson and the Observatory: Physics and the Astronomical Community in Late-Nineteenth-Century America.......................................2259. JOHN TRESCH Even the Tools Will Be Free: Humboldt's Romantic Technologies.....................................................................................25310. THERESA LEVITT "I thought this might be of interest ...": The Observatory as Public Enterprise...............................................................28511. CHARLOTTE BIGG Staging the Heavens: Astrophysics and Popular Astronomy in the Late Nineteenth Century........................................................30512. OLE MOLVIG The Berlin Urania, Humboldtian Cosmology, and the Public..........................................................................................325Bibliography......................................................................................................................................................345About the Contributors............................................................................................................................................367Index.............................................................................................................................................................369

Chapter One

SIMON WERRETT

A high appreciation of astronomy seems inherent in the Romanov race. -WILHELM STRUVE (1862).

After its foundation in 1839, Pulkovo observatory near St. Petersburg quickly became a much-admired model for the organization of observatory sciences. Astronomers deemed acquaintance with Pulkovo and its first director, the Baltic German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Struve, as paramount to successful observing. George Biddell Airy, British astronomer royal, visiting Pulkovo in 1847 wrote: "No astronomer can feel himself perfectly acquainted with modern observing astronomy ... who has not well studied the observatory at Pulkowa." The American astronomer Benjamin Gould (the younger) said of Struve that his "biography might almost be said to be the history of stellar astronomy during the period of his labors." By the 1860s Struve and Pulkovo had gained a glowing reputation across Europe and America for contributions to the pressing astronomical concerns of the nineteenth century, including the accurate positional surveying of the heavens, searches for double stars and optical pairs for determining stellar parallax, and practical geodesy in pursuit of precision cartography. Astronomers everywhere emulated Pulkovo, the "astronomical capital of the world" (figure 11).

What was distinctive about Pulkovo as an observatory in the mid-nineteenth century? What made Pulkovo the astronomical capital of the world? Examining Pulkovo's local Russian context may provide an answer. Alexander von Humboldt described Pulkovo as an "astronomical city whose form of government may be difficult to conceive." His remark is suggestive of Pulkovo's unique place within the Russian polity, ill fitting the various models that historians have proposed for observatories elsewhere. Pulkovo was not a "Hevelian" observatory, with civic funding and an urban location. With princely patronage and a focus on stellar astronomy, Pulkovo was closer to Tycho's observatory Uraniborg. Jean-Baptiste Biot called it a "Uranian colony," a group of Baltic Germans working in Russia. But Pulkovo also engaged in major state-funded geodesic surveys and was intended to serve a network of imperial observatories. Unlike the British or Dutch empires, the Russian empire grew out of military rather than commercial demands, since in Russia industrialization was never the priority that it was elsewhere. Consequently, Pulkovo did not "keep the books" in the same way as economically minded British astronomers, and it ill fits the model of Greenwich as a center for imperial astronomy focused on the accounting of time to aid overseas colonial exploitation. As a contemporary noted: "Pulkowa is like the palace of an astronomical autocrat, who has but to will, and men and money appear at his call to take the heavens by storm. Greenwich resembles the counting-houses of some of our opulent city merchants, showing more brick than marble, but whose cellars are stored with the accumulated wealth of generations." If Pulkovo did have a precedent, it was perhaps the Paris Observatory, founded by Louis XIV as an act of both symbolic prestige and practical, cartographical administration. This had been the model for Russia's first observatory, in the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences founded by Peter the Great in 1725, and directed by a French astronomer, Joseph Delisle. But by the early nineteenth century the analogy no longer held. The Paris Observatory's nature had changed significantly. As Theresa Levitt shows, Arago tried to make his institution the very opposite of a centralized, absolutist observatory. Pulkovo, meanwhile, expressed the concerns of a continuing autocratic regime in Russia.

In contrast to western European states, Russia adopted new modes of life comparatively recently, beginning in the late seventeenth century and accelerating under Peter the Great. This profoundly shaped the country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, making it, according to the Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman, a fundamentally theatrical culture, as Russians imitated foreign manners, traditions, and institutions, from dress and appearance up to government ministries and military organization. Understanding this theatricality is useful in assessing the nature of Pulkovo observatory and Russian imperial astronomy.

Theatricality made Russia seem curiously illusionistic. Mikhail...