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Summary
Summary
The author of the highly acclaimed Founding Gardeners now gives us an enlightening chronicle of the first truly international scientific endeavor--the eighteenth-century quest to observe the transit of Venus and measure the solar system.
On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the earth and the sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system--but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in remote corners of the world, only to have their efforts thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs: eight years later, the scientists would have another opportunity to succeed.
Chasing Venus brings to life the personalities of the eighteenth-century astronomers who embarked upon this complex and essential scientific venture, painting a vivid portrait of the collaborations, the rivalries, and the volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. In the end, what they accomplished would change our conception of the universe and would forever alter the nature of scientific research.
Author Notes
Andrea Wulf is an English historian and writer, born in New Delhi, India in 1972. She studied design at the Royal College of Art. She is a public speaker and has lectured in the UK and USA. Her books include This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History; Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation; and Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens. Her award winning book, The Brother Gardeners, received a CBHL Annual Literature Award in 2010. The Invention of Nature: How Alexander Von Humboldt Revolutionized Our World, received the 2015 Costa Book Award in the biography category, and the 2016 Royal Society Science Book Prize for 'outstanding popular science books' written for a non-specialist audience.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Booklist Review
A rare, once-in-a-lifetime celestial event, a transit of Venus across the solar disk enables astronomers to measure the distance between the earth and the sun. The trigonometry of the measurement, however, requires observers to be separated by thousands of miles, which in 1761 and 1769, when transits were predicted by Edmund Halley, necessitated months and years of arduous travel to get into position. The voyages and their inevitable misadventures inspire Wulf's enthusiastic account, which opens with the international ringmaster for 1761, French astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle. His pleas successfully instigated several expeditions that faced, in addition to the hazards of the sea and atrocious roads, those of the Seven Years' War. Whether enemy warships or clouds, mishaps so interfered with seeing Venus that 1761 was a dud. Motivated not to squander 1769, scientists again spread across the globe. Wulf details their finances, instruments, journeys (which cost several astronomers their lives), and the observations that triumphantly revealed the true dimensions of the solar system. With the next transit predicted for June 6, 2012, Wulf's well-handled history arrives in a timely manner.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Perilous Crossing With a Venusian transit imminent, 18th-century astronomers risked their lives for a chance to measure the solar system. CHASING VENUS The Race to Measure the Heavens. By Andrea Wulf. Illustrated. 304 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. NEXT time you find yourself grousing when the passenger in front reclines his seat a smidge too far, consider the astronomers of the Enlightenment. In 1761 and 1769, dozens and dozens of stargazers traveled thousands of miserable miles to observe a rare and awesome celestial phenomenon. They went by sailing ship and open dinghy, by carriage, by sledge and on foot. They endured discomfort that in our own flabby century would generate years of litigation. And they did it all for science: the men in powdered wigs and knee britches were determined to measure the transit of Venus. That beautiful name, transit of Venus, describes the hours-long passage of our nearest planetary neighbor across the face of the sun. Transits occur in eight-year pairs followed by interludes of more than a century. Their rarity highlights the news hook for Andrea Wulf's account of this ur-Big Science project: the next transit of Venus happens to be soon, on June 5 and 6, 2012. For a writer, that's deadline pressure on a cosmic scale. So get ready for transit-themed crossword puzzles and astronomers on "Good Morning America." On the day itself, count on a tsunami of Twitter and Tumblr feeds. But from June 7, 2012, until Dec. 11, 2117, all that publicity goes away. June's transit will be a lovely spectacle, but it has little real scientific significance. When Wulf's story begins, in the early 1700s, the situation was very different. The British astronomer Edmond Halley had realized that precise measurement of a transit might give astronomers armed with a clock and a telescope the data they needed to calculate how far Earth is from the Sun. With that distance in hand, they could work out the actual size of the solar system, the great astronomical problem of the era. The catch was that it would take multiple measurements from carefully chosen locations all over the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. But that was somebody else's problem. Halley knew he wouldn't live to see the transit of 1761. That challenge fell to the French astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, who managed to energize and rally his colleagues in the years leading up to the transit, then coordinate the enormous effort that would ultimately involve scientists and adventurers from France, Britain, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden and the American colonies. When you think about how hard it is to arrange a simple dinner with a few friends who live in the same city and use the same language when e-mailing, it's enough to take your breath away. And all this travel and data-sharing had to happen, Wulf notes, at a time when "a letter posted in Philadelphia took two to three months to reach London." What's more, standardized measurements were nonexistent. An English mile was different from a German mile; a Swedish mil was shorter than the Norwegian version. Don't even start on France, where units of measurement varied from village to village, like wines or cheeses. Sea travel was so risky in 1761 that observers took separate ships to the same destination to increase the chances some of them would make it alive. The Seven Years' War was on, and getting caught in the cross-fire was a constant concern. One French scientist carried a passport arranged by the Royal Society in London advising the British military "not to molest his person or Effects upon any account." Others were shelled by the French or caught in border troubles with the Russians. An observer en route to Tobolsk, in Siberia, found himself floating in ice up to his waist when his carriage fell through the frozen river they were traveling in lieu of a road. He made it to his destination. Another, heading toward eastern Finland via the iced-over Gulf of Bothnia, was repeatedly catapulted out of his sledge as the runners caught on the crests of frozen waves. He made it too. ONCE the astronomers got to their destinations, their troubles really began. Dates with Venus are like outdoor weddings, except that in a pinch you can get married in the living room. If it's cloudy or foggy during a transit, you're out of luck. Perhaps the sorriest transit tale Wulf tells is that of the French observer who set off for Pondicherry, in southern India, a prime viewing spot. He dodged British warships on the way, but when nearly there learned that Pondicherry was under British siege. He wound up gamely trying to observe the transit from the pitching deck of a ship in the Indian Ocean, but clouds spoiled even that effort. A British observer spent months slogging around the mountains of St. Helena looking for a vantage point not blocked "with Fogs & vapours," but on the day itself the hoped-for observation was impossible. In a perfect world "Chasing Venus" would read like a Patrick O'Brian novel with references. Wulf gives it her best shot, but the sprawling narrative defeats her in the end. Even a writer as supple as she is can't sustain momentum in a story with two climaxes - 1761 and 1769. It's an impossible structure. There's a huge cast of characters, each with a tale of his own, and it's hard for a reader to keep them all straight. In sentences like "Nevil Maskelyne and his assistant left Britain for St. Helena at the end of January 1761, just as Pingré's ship sailed past Madeira and as Le Gentil was agonizing about where to go to from Mauritius," I could feel Wulf throwing me a lifeline. Despite her efforts, I just thought, "Which one was Pingre, again? And where is Mauritius?" That's not to say that transit fanatics - who, judging from the Internet, are legion - won't find much to delight in here. But dabblers might do better to sit quietly during this year's transit and simply watch the goddess's stately progress, either in the sky or - wouldn't Halley love it? - with the free smartphone app. Sic transit the glory of Venus. Observers took separate ships to the same destination to increase the chances some of them would survive. JoAnn C. Gutin is a science writer living in New York.
Choice Review
In the middle of the 18th century, the distance between the sun and Earth was not accurately known. As author/journalist Wulf (Founding Gardeners, CH, Oct'11, 49-0852) describes in this fascinating book, careful observations of the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun would enable an estimate of the solar distance. The observations required an extraordinary effort by astronomers, since the critical observing sites were remote. The observations of the transit of 1761 were generally unsuccessful because of bad weather and interruptions by warfare. The second attempt in 1769 was much more successful, and although some of the important observations failed, the expeditions did yield an estimate of the distance to the sun, which is close to the modern value. The well-written narrative successfully describes both the scientific considerations and the personal hardships the scientists endured. Especially important are the prologue, which beautifully motivates this first international science project, and the epilogue, which explains why a greater understanding of the Earth itself came from the expeditions such as those of Captain James Cook. The text is supported by an extensive section of notes and an excellent bibliography. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All general, academic, and professional readers. D. E. Hogg emeritus, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Guardian Review
It is the things one has not done that one regrets, they say. A debatable proposition, but I now have one more regret to add to the list: that I did not make any effort to see the transit of Venus across the sun's face last year. There had been one eight years before, you see, and I was getting blase; and I had not fully appreciated that there would not be another one until 2117. So what, I thought. It's just a little dot, an astronomical phenomenon of small significance, and you couldn't even see it with the naked eye. Had I read this book when it came out in hardback a year before, I would have changed my tune: I'd have made a great deal of effort to see it, in honour of the scientists who had travelled to the most remote, far-flung and desolate parts of the globe to observe the transits of 1761 and 1769. The story of their various journeys bears retelling: we have it here. In 1716, Edmond Halley published a paper in which he predicted, correctly, that the planet would appear, for a few hours on 6 June 1761, and then again eight years later, as a black dot moving across the face of the sun. As the phenomenon had only been observed once before, by Jeremiah Horrocks in 1639, let's just pause to give Halley some credit for this achievement in the first place. He urged the scientists of the next generation, or the next-but-one, to make sure that as many of them saw it from as many parts of the world as possible, and made the most accurate observations possible, and then combined their results. Because if they did, then we would finally be able to make a decent calculation of how far it was from the Earth to the sun; and thence make a start on working out the dimensions of the solar system. I do hope that everyone reading this agrees that it is much, much better to know these things than to be ignorant of them. Travelling across the globe in the 18th century was not a walk in the park at the best of times; and having to make sure you got to a precise spot at a precise time - or rather, in time to build a functioning observatory which would be open for business at a precise time - was even more difficult. Pause before you curse your flight's delay, and reflect that you do not have to wait weeks for the winds to become favourable, or for the rivers to freeze (so you can sledge along them), or that you do not have to push your carriage from ditches, or that your wheels don't break, or that you don't get massacred by bandits. Now imagine that you are carrying an enormous amount of extremely expensive and irreplaceable scientific equipment, which is also very fragile. Every single piece has to get to its destination in perfect nick, or the months-long trip will have been utterly pointless. And your coach driver is drunk. And everyone's at war with everyone else. And there must be clear skies on the day. So the story zips along. Of its 300 pages, 100 are notes, as well as complete lists of all the observers in 1761 and 1769. It is right that these are honoured. The rest is like an astonishing pre-Verne Around the World in Eighty Days. The science is grounded at the start of the book professionally enough to satisfy the reviewers of Nature and New Scientist; the rest is adventure story, against the clock. We meet familiar faces: Captain Cook, freaking out when he discovers the Tahitians have stolen an essential quadrant; Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon on their first expedition together, trying to back out when attacked by a French warship and being told to go on Or Else; and overall, a thrilling, stirring tale, very well told, of global cooperation, and how the passion for Enlightenment triumphed against enormous odds. Let's hope it continues to do so. - Nicholas Lezard Travelling across the globe in the 18th century was not a walk in the park at the best of times; and having to make sure you got to a precise spot at a precise time - or rather, in time to build a functioning observatory which would be open for business at a precise time - was even more difficult. Pause before you curse your flight's delay, and reflect that you do not have to wait weeks for the winds to become favourable, or for the rivers to freeze (so you can sledge along them), or that you do not have to push your carriage from ditches, or that your wheels don't break, or that you don't get massacred by bandits. Now imagine that you are carrying an enormous amount of extremely expensive and irreplaceable scientific equipment, which is also very fragile. Every single piece has to get to its destination in perfect nick, or the months-long trip will have been utterly pointless. And your coach driver is drunk. And everyone's at war with everyone else. And there must be clear skies on the day. - Nicholas Lezard.
Kirkus Review
In the late 18th century, European astronomers scurried about the globe measuring the transit of Venus, hoping, at last, to learn the size of our universe. Until this busy narrative, Wulf had turned her eyes more earthward with three previous outings about gardens (The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, 2011, etc.). Here she glides easily into the heavens, where she clearly explains how Venus' transit across the sun, which occurs every 105 years (and each time does so twice, at eight-year intervals--one will occur in June 2012), gave Enlightenment astronomers a chance to figure out such things as the distance between the earth and the sun. Their 1769 calculation--transit-derived--was quite close. The author follows the two international attempts, in 1761 and 1769, to accomplish the measurements from various global viewing points, describing in grim detail the vast difficulties of travel and communication, the geopolitical complications (wars didn't help) and the various personalities of potentates and scientists that characterized the endeavor. The 1761 transit occurred before everyone were sufficiently ready, and the measurements were disappointing; 1769 was better--though poor Guillaume Le Gentil of France, who'd spent nine years devoted to the projects, saw only clouds at his observatory in Pondicherry, India. Worse, Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche died of typhus only days after his successful recordings. The author notes the imprecision of the instruments, the difficulties of determining precisely when the dark spot of Venus began and ended its journey across the sun's yellow wafer and the arduous treks Enlightenment men (yes, all men) undertook to Lapland, Tahiti, Hudson Bay and Baja. More than 100 pages of back matter reveal the sturdy research undergirding the lively narrative. Like a nonfiction National Treasure with myriads of Nicholas Cages darting around--in a good way. Enlightening Enlightenment fare.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
During Venus's transit, observers can see the planet as a small black dot against the face of the sun. The transit is a rare event: while the last one occurred in June 2004 and the next will occur in June of this year, Venus will not appear again between Earth and the Sun until December 2117. Like Mark Anderson's The Day the World Discovered the Sun (reviewed above), Wulf's (Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation) book is concerned with Venus's 1761 and 1769 transits, when the international science community dispatched a remarkable set of expeditions to remote parts of the world to observe and measure the planet's passages across the sun. Their primary objective was to use newly acquired observational data to improve knowledge of the distance between Earth and the Sun and the solar system's dimensions. Many of the traveling scientists underwent great travails, and several died. VERDICT Wulf well describes the scientific problems and physical trials these astronomers had to solve and endure. Recommended for all readers interested in the history of science.-Jack W. Weigel, Ann Arbor, MI (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens By Andrea Wulf Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group ISBN: 9780307700179 Prologue The Gauntlet The Ancient Babylonians called her Ishtar, to the Greeks she was Aphrodite and to the Romans Venus -- goddess of love, fertility, and beauty. She is the brightest star in the night sky and visible even on a clear day. Some saw her as the harbinger of morning and evening, of new seasons or portentous times. She reigns as the 'Morning Star' or the 'Bringer of Light' for 260 days, and then disappears to rise again as the 'Evening Star' and the 'Bringer of Dawn'. Venus has inspired people for centuries, but in the 1760s astronomers believed that the planet held the answer to one of the biggest questions in science -- she was the key to understanding the size of the solar system. In 1716 British astronomer Edmond Halley published a ten-page essay which called upon scientists to unite in a project spanning the entire globe -- one that would change the world of science forever. On 6 June 1761, Halley predicted, Venus would traverse the face of the sun -- for a few hours the bright star would appear as a perfectly black circle. He believed that measuring the exact time and duration of this rare celestial encounter would provide the data that astronomers needed in order to calculate the distance between the earth and the sun. The only problem was that the so-called transit of Venus is one of the rarest predictable astronomical events. Transits always arrive in pairs -- eight years apart -- but with an interval of more than a century before they are then seen again. Only once before, Halley said, in 1639, had an astronomer called Jeremiah Horrocks observed the event. The next pair would occur in 1761 and 1769 -- and then again in 1874 and 1882. Halley was sixty years old when he wrote his essay and knew that he would not live to see the transit (unless he reached the age of 104), but he wanted to ensure that the next generation would be fully prepared. Writing in the journal of the Royal Society, the most important scientific institution in Britain, Halley explained exactly why the event was so important, what these 'young Astronomers' had to do, and where they should view it. By choosing to write in Latin, the international language of science, he hoped to increase the chances of astronomers from across Europe acting upon his idea. The more people he reached, the greater the chance of success. It was essential, Halley explained, that several people at different locations across the globe should measure the rare heavenly rendezvous at the same time. It was not enough to see Venus's march from Europe alone; astronomers would have to travel to remote locations in both the northern and southern hemispheres to be as far apart as possible. And only if they combined these results -- the northern viewings being the counterpart to the southern observations -- could they achieve what had hitherto been almost unimaginable: a precise mathematical understanding of the dimensions of the solar system, the holy grail of astronomy. Halley's request would be answered when hundreds of astronomers joined in the transit project. They came together in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The race to observe and measure the transit of Venus was a pivotal moment in a new era -- one in which man tried to understand nature through the application of reason. This was a century in which science was worshipped, and myth at last conquered by rational thought. Man began to order the world according to these new principles. The Frenchman Denis Diderot, for example, was amassing all available knowledge for his monumental Encyclopédie . The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus classified plants according to their sexual organs, and in 1751 Samuel Johnson imposed order upon language when he had compiled the first English dictionary. As new inventions such as microscopes and telescopes opened up previously unknown worlds, scientists were able to zoom in on the minutiae of life and gaze into infinity. Robert Hooke had peered through his microscope to produce detailed engravings of magnified seeds, fleas and worms -- he was the first to call the basic unit of biological life a 'cell'. In the North American colonies Benjamin Franklin was experimenting with electricity and lightning rods, controlling what until then had been regarded as manifestations of divine fury. Slowly the workings of nature became clearer. Comets were no longer viewed as portents of God's wrath but, as Halley had shown, predictable celestial occurrences. In 1755 the German philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested that the universe was much larger than his contemporaries believed and that it consisted of uncountable and gigantic ' Welteninseln ' -- 'cosmic islands', or galaxies. Humankind believed it was marching along a trajectory of progress. Scientific societies were founded in London, Paris, Stockholm, St Petersburg, and in the North American colonies in Philadelphia, to explore and exchange this new-found knowledge. Observation, enquiry and experimentation were the building blocks of this new understanding of the world. With progress as the leading light of the century, every generation envied the next. Whereas the Renaissance had looked back upon the past as the Golden Age, the Enlightenment looked firmly to the future. Halley's idea of using the transit of Venus as a tool to measure the heavens was born out of developments in astronomy over the previous century. Until the early seventeenth century man had observed the sky with his naked eye, but technology was slowly catching up with the reach of his ambitions and theories. Astronomy had changed from a science which mapped stars to one which sought to understand the motion of planetary bodies. In the early sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus had proposed the revolutionary idea of the solar system with the sun rather than the earth at the centre, and the other planets moving around it -- a model that had been expanded and verified by Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler in the early seventeenth century. But it was Isaac Newton's groundbreaking Principia, in 1687, which had defined the underlying universal laws of motion and gravity that ruled all and everything. As astronomers gazed at the stars, they were no longer in search of God but of the laws governing the universe. By the time Halley called upon his fellow astronomers to view the transit of Venus, the universe was regarded as running like a divinely created clockwork according to laws which humankind had only to comprehend and compute. The position and movements of planets were no longer seen as ordained arbitrarily by God but as ordered and predictable, and based on natural laws. But man still lacked the knowledge of the actual size of the solar system -- an essential piece of the celestial jigsaw puzzle. Understanding the dimensions of the heavens had 'always been a principle object of astronomical inquiry', the American astronomer and Harvard professor John Winthrop said in the transit decade. Already in the early seventeenth century Kepler had discovered that by knowing how long it took for a planet to orbit the sun, the relative distance between the sun and the planet could be calculated (the longer it took a planet to orbit the sun, the further away it was). From this he had been able to work out the distance between the earth and the sun relative to the other planets -- a unit of measurement that became the basis for calculating comparative distances in the universe.† Astronomers knew, for example, that the distance between the earth and Jupiter was five times that of the distance between the earth and the sun. The only problem was that no one had as yet been able to quantify that distance in more specific terms. Eighteenth-century astronomers had a map of the solar system, but no idea of its true size. Without knowing how far the earth really was from the sun, such a map was all but useless. Venus, so Halley believed, was the key to unlocking this secret. As the brightest star in the sky, Venus became the perfect metaphor for the light of reason that would illuminate this new world and extinguish the last vestiges of the Dark Ages. Unlike most astronomers whose lives were ruled by the repetitive labour of their nightly observations, Halley had embarked on a far more exciting career -- which was probably why he could envisage a global army of swashbuckling astronomers. Not only had he spent one and a half hours in a diving bell submerged almost twenty metres deep in the Thames, he had also undertaken three expeditions to the South Atlantic as the first European to map the southern night sky with a telescope. Halley 'talks, swears, and drinks brandy like a sea captain', a colleague said, but he was also one of the most inspired scientists of his age. He had predicted the return of the eponymous Halley's Comet, produced a map of the southern stars and convinced Isaac Newton to publish his Principia . Knowing that he would not be alive to orchestrate the global cooperation to view Venus's transit -- a fact that Halley lamented 'even on his death-bed' whilst holding a glass of wine in his hand -- all he could do was to place his trust in future generations and hope that they would remember his instructions half a century hence. 'Indeed I could wish that many observations of this same phenomenon might be taken by different persons at separate places', he wrote. 'I recommend it therefore, again and again, to those curious Astronomers who (when I am dead) will have an opportunity of observing these things'. Halley was asking his future disciples to embark on a project that was bigger and more visionary than any scientific endeavour previously undertaken. The dangerous voyages to remote outposts would take many months, possibly even years. Astronomers would be risking their lives for a celestial event that would last just six hours and be visible only if weather conditions permitted it. The transit would be so short that even the brief appearance of clouds or rain would make accurate observations difficult or even impossible. In preparation for it, scientists would need to secure funding for the best telescopes and instruments as well as for travel, accommodation and salaries. They would have to convince their respective monarchs and governments to support their individual efforts and would have to coordinate their own observations with those from other countries. Nations locked in battle would have to work together in the name of science for the first time ever. From many dozens of locations, hundreds of astronomers would have to point their telescopes to the sky at exactly the same moment in order to see Venus's progress across the burning disc of the sun. And perhaps even more challenging still -- though less exhilarating -- they must then share their findings. Each observer would have to add his or her observations to the pool of international data. No single result would be of any use without the others. In order to calculate the distance between the sun and the earth, astronomers would have to compare the figures and consolidate the different data into one definitive result. Timings obtained across the world using a disparate range of clocks and telescopes would somehow have to be standardised and made comparable. The transit of Venus observations were to be the most ambitious scientific project that had ever been planned -- an extraordinary undertaking in an era when a letter posted in Philadelphia took two to three months to reach London, and when the journey from London to Newcastle was six days. It took a great leap of the imagination to propose that astronomers should travel thousands of miles into the wildernesses far north and south, laden with instruments weighing more than half a ton. Their idea of calculating exact distances in space was a bold concept too, considering that clocks were still not accurate enough to measure longitude precisely, and there was as yet no standardised measurement on Earth: an English mile was a different length from a mile in German-speaking countries -- which also varied between northern Germany and Austria. A ' mil ' in Sweden was more than ten kilometres, in Norway more than eleven, while a French league could be three kilometres but also as much as four and a half. In France alone there were 2,000 different units of measurement -- which varied even between neighbouring villages. In light of this, the idea of merging hundreds of observations taken by astronomers across the world to find one common value seemed outrageously ambitious. The scientists, who were to leave their observatories in the learned centres of Europe to view Venus from remote outposts of the known world, made for strange adventurers too. At first sight they might not have looked like heroic explorers, but as they chased Venus across the globe they did so with extraordinary intrepidity, bravery and ingenuity. On 6 June 1761 and again on 3 June 1769, several hundred astronomers all over the world pointed their telescopes towards the sky to see Venus travel across the sun. They ignored religious, national and economic differences to unite in what was the first global scientific project. This is their story. Excerpted from CHASING VENUS by Andrea Wulf. Copyright © 2012 by Andrea Wulf. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted from Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens by Andrea Wulf All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher. Excerpted from Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens by Andrea Wulf All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Author's Note | p. xv |
Dramatis Personae | p. xvii |
Prologue: The Gauntlet | p. xix |
Part I Transit 1761 | |
1 Call to Action | p. 3 |
2 The French Are First | p. 19 |
3 Britain Enters the Race | p. 31 |
4 To Siberia | p. 42 |
5 Getting Ready for Venus | p. 52 |
6 Day of Transit, 6 June 1761 | p. 68 |
7 How Far to the Sun? | p. 87 |
Part II Transit 1769 | |
8 A Second Chance | p. 101 |
9 Russia Enters the Race | p. 111 |
10 The Most Daring Voyage of All | p. 122 |
11 Scandinavia or the Land of the Midnight Sun | p. 133 |
12 The North American Continent | p. 141 |
13 Racing to the Four Corners of the Globe | p. 155 |
14 Day of Transit, 3 June 1769 | p. 175 |
15 After the Transit | p. 189 |
Epilogue: A New Dawn | p. 200 |
List of Observers 1761 | p. 207 |
List of Observers 1769 | p. 212 |
Selected Bibliography, Sources and Abbreviations | p. 217 |
Suggested Further Reading | p. 237 |
Picture Credits | p. 239 |
Acknowledgements | p. 247 |
Notes | p. 251 |
Index | p. 295 |