“Paper Comets: Prophecy, Panic and Public Judgement in the Nineteenth Century”

Jim Secord (University of Cambridge)

During the first half of 1857, the urban populations of Europe and the United States were warned of a comet, predicted to arrive on the 13 of June, which would destroy civilisation and perhaps the Earth itself. The most remarkable feature of this terrifying celestial object, however, is that it never appeared. It is the perfect example of a paper comet: any panic it caused could not be because it was observed in the heavens, but because it was read about in the newspapers or heard about through conversation with people who had. Its existence depended on literacy and knowledge of the news.

My discussion is will be in three parts. I will first discuss the role of comets in print in in general terms, in the process showing how the announcement of this particular comet came to be made. Second, I will focus on the role of astronomers and astrologers, an especially important issue for relating expert knowledge to other forms of understanding. And third, I will look at the question of “panic” in relation to the effects of mass journalism and the possibility of individual judgement within the crowd. Here we will see how the debate about astronomy was used to illuminate problems of democracy in relation to scientific expertise.

“Global Astronomical Expeditions and the Longing for Simultaneity”

Anna Henchman (Boston University)

This paper explores the longing to grasp the feeling of simultaneity at a distance between 1850 and 1890, as it manifested itself in both British astronomical exploration and literature. This is a period when coordination at a single moment in time from disparate positions on the surface of the globe was almost within grasp, but still maddeningly elusive. My paper examines several literary techniques for representing simultaneity: cross-cutting; juxtaposition of separate conversations or scenes; and uniting distant characters through the view of a shared object, such as a battle, a storm, or a star. It links these literary techniques with the extensive materials produced before and after the Transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882.

Engineering expeditions to view the Transits of Venus from across the globe involved a tense balance of collaboration and competition--multiple players, multiple positions, complex prediction and planning, controversy over methods, and a lengthy process of compiling results. Attempts to freeze moments invite us to isolate the shifting angles of vision at play in a finite set of relations. At its most successful simultaneity—astronomical or literary—makes visible a set of relations the relative motions of which otherwise involve far too many variables to visualize, whether those relative motions involve the chance alignments of planets or shifting arrangements of characters.

“Provincial British Astronomical Societies and Their Journals”

Bernard Lightman (York University)

The question for provincial astronomical societies that formed in the 1890’s was how to work out their relationship to the British Astronomical Association (BAA). The periodicals of two of them, the Leeds Astronomical Society and the Astronomical Society of Wales, will be the focus of this paper. They included Journal and Transactions of the Leeds Astronomical Society (1893-1922), Journal of the Astronomical Society of Wales (1895-1897), and the Cambrian Natural Observer (1898-1910). Since the BAA had established itself as the national society for amateurs, the provincial organizations conceived of their purpose as building a local community of observational astronomers, and this was reflected in their journals. Their readership was primarily society members, many of whom interacted in person frequently. There was no need for a correspondence column, the tool used by previous journals for amateurs, to connect to their readers. Instead, these periodicals emphasized the sharing of observations. In comparison to the BAA publications, the provincial journals were more permissive of unorthodox astronomical theories and of discussions of religious themes.

“A Science Fit for the Chapel: Astronomy, Communities of Science, and the Nature of Knowledge in Wales, 1805–1914”

Jake Bridges (University of Alberta)

This paper analyzes astronomical practice and the dissemination of knowledge on astronomy in Wales during the nineteenth century. I compare developments in Wales to those in England, Ireland and Scotland. A study of Welsh perceptions of astronomy and astronomical phenomena helps to understand what British astronomy meant to both astronomers and the public, and I examine how astronomy was used differently to conform to Welsh preconceptions of nature and the universe. Scientific interests in Wales have been dismissed by previous scholars for a number of reasons, including the bible-centric nature of Welsh society and difficulties of incorporating scientific terminology into the Welsh language. I instead argue that astronomy played a significant role in Welsh society as evidenced by the popularity of astronomical lectures, scientific societies and scientific journals, and the cultural prominence of local astronomers. Leading lecturers and astronomers such as Edward Mills, Eleazar Roberts, and John Jones were wildly popular individuals who were culturally celebrated and represented in poems, songs, and literature. The cultural role of Welsh astronomy was created in an environment which differed from the rest of Britain in terms of government control and levels of institutionalization and professionalization, while the interplay between the Welsh and English languages influenced how astronomical knowledge was disseminated in lectures, publications, and the scientific societies.