Starlight Detectives

by Alan Hirshfeld

  With professional validation in hand, Bond delved into the complexities of celestial position measurement. His first transit instrument, nailed up near the roofline of his family’s Dorchester home around 1813, was a homely strip of brass with a sighting hole. Bond would lie supine on the ground, wait for a star to appear in the hole, then record the time of its meridian passage. He could barely contain his excitement upon seeing the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn through his first telescope.

  Bond further distinguished himself in 1815 with the completion of America’s first sea-going chronometer. Three years in the making, the device was based on a plan by the celebrated eighteenth-century French clockmaker Ferdinand Berthoud. Unable (or unwilling) to obtain the specialized British spring steel during the War of 1812, Bond fabricated a descending-weight mechanism to keep the device running. A voyage in 1818 aboard a U.S. Navy vessel to Sumatra proved Bond’s marine chronometer to be as accurate as the world’s finest. (The device resides in the Physical Science Collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.)

  Bond’s astronomical bona fides got an unexpected boost in 1815 with the death of his father’s brother, a wealthy and childless widower in England. Although the finances were tight, Bond’s parents booked him passage overseas to represent his family’s interests in the estate. Learning that Bond would be traveling to England—home of the Royal Greenwich Observatory and several noted telescope makers—a group of faculty and administrators at Harvard College revived their moribund plan to erect an observatory on campus. Their stated goal was to purchase a world-class telescope and establish Harvard as a leading astronomical research center. The lofty proposal had been stirring since 1806, but had so far foundered for lack of money. Harvard offered to pay half of Bond’s travel expenses if he would make the rounds of British observatories and report back on their design and functionality.

  The letter of terms from Professor Farrar specified that Bond visit the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the Kew Observatory at Richmond, and William Herschel’s observatory at Slough. He was to record the size, form, depth, height, and composition of the piers that supported the instruments; width of apertures in the roof, how they opened and closed, how they were protected against the elements; plus every conceivable particular—both optical and mechanical—about the instruments themselves. Bond was also to inquire about the cost of an eight-foot-long transit telescope from England’s leading instrument maker, Edward Troughton. Harvard faculty members would furnish letters of introduction they were confident would gain Bond admittance to any scientific facility in Britain. Most significantly, Farrar directed that Bond’s report “must be such as to enable you or another person to superintend and direct in the erection of an Observatory.” The Harvard academics declared their full faith in Massachusetts’s own “ingenious mechanic.”

  Upon his arrival in Liverpool, Bond headed to his uncle’s house in Kingsbridge, in southwestern England, where his mother had been raised. Entering the garden, he was immediately smitten by his young cousin Selina Cranch standing among the roses. (He returned to marry Selina four years later, in 1819.) After a futile effort to promote his father’s claim on the deceased brother’s estate, Bond spent his last shilling to reach London, where he was to meet Harvard’s local agent and receive his promised travel funds. He was stunned to learn that the agent had gone on holiday, his destination and date of return unknown. Bond knew from his uncle in Kingsbridge that his elder brother Thomas, at that time a sailor, was on a stopover in London. The siblings had been inseparable as children, Thomas marveling at his brother’s home-brewed genius. Now penniless, hungry, and alone in a metropolis of a million souls, William Bond was surely eager to find a familiar face. After spending a fitful night on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, he managed to locate Thomas and borrow enough money to continue his trip. (Harvard reimbursed him after his return to the United States.)

  Bond was warmly welcomed at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and at a number of private facilities. He duly took notes, made measurements, drew detailed floor plans, and interviewed astronomers and instrument makers about the complexities of building and maintaining an observatory. He spoke colleague-to-colleague to Astronomer Royal John Pond, talked shop with like-minded mechanic Edward Troughton, and was treated to a VIP tour of William Herschel’s observatory at Slough by Herschel’s sister Caroline. The sight of Herschel’s towering reflector telescope—which American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., likened to “a piece of ordnance such as the revolted angels battered the walls of Heaven with”—was indelibly impressed upon Bond’s memory.

  In the end, Bond’s overseas trip counted for naught. His 1816 report made clear that the cost of building and running a new observatory far exceeded the resources Harvard had hoped to tap. As Bond would write in his history of the Harvard College Observatory, “The time had not yet arrived when the project could be prudently or conveniently carried forward.”

  Meanwhile, the Bond family business began to take off. The firm moved to larger quarters on Congress Street, with William now at the helm. Its manufactured and imported chronometers, an essential element of marine navigation, stood at the forefront of the clockmaker’s art. In the coming years, Bond’s firm would serve the interests of a growing number of New England ship captains—who were required to purchase their own navigational instruments—as were the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Survey, and the U.S. topographical engineers. It was a lucrative enterprise: chronometers were expensive—up to $300—and maintenance and repair costs were likewise high. Adjustment of a chronometer spring might run five dollars, as much as an entry-level clerk earned in a week. (The company also entered the broader commercial market for precision time; in 1849, the New England Association of Railroad Superintendents would mandate that all station clocks, conductor’s watches, timetables, and trains be synchronized with William Bond’s timepiece.)

  His fortunes secure, Bond married Selina Cranch in 1819. The couple settled into a large clapboard house on Cottage Street in Dorchester, a few blocks from his childhood home. Observations began right away. By late 1820, Bond had acquired two telescopes and was lent a third from Harvard College. Around 1823, an attached parlor was sacrificed to astronomy, with Bond and his brother Thomas sinking a multi-ton, granite-block telescope pier five feet into the earth below the floor and cutting an observing aperture into the ceiling. “His antipathy to an insecure foundation many would have thought extravagant,” recalled Bond’s son George, “the tremor of an instrument would annoy and fret him as a harsh discord does the cultivated ear of the musician.” Smaller telescope-mounting stones dotted the garden and the surrounding fields like a scatter of neolithic monuments. To rest atop these rocky pedestals was a growing array of high quality instruments purchased from Europe. By the 1830s, William Bond’s private observatory in Dorchester had become America’s hub of precision astronomy.

  William Bond’s house on Cottage Street, Dorchester, Massachusetts.

  Carving out time for astronomy was a never-ending challenge, with the incessant demands of business, support of his elderly parents, and eventually, six children padding around the house. Bond had assured his wife that he would earn enough from his profession to cover all household expenses. That meant spending full days at the shop plus regular evening hours at home dealing with the steady stream of watch repairs. Only then would he surrender himself to his ruling passion—a pursuit most would have regarded as the acme of tedium.

  Bond’s son George, who (with initial reluctance) took up cosmic studies, understood perfectly the lure that had drawn generations of precision-obsessed men, from Tycho Brahe to every Astronomer Royal since John Flamsteed. “To watch the motions and record the positions of the heavenly bodies,” George writes, “was an occupation perfectly congenial to his tastes. . . . For thirty years this was done, not merely without compensation, but to his manifest pecuniary disadvantage. This consideration, it is probable, never entered h
is mind.”

  At the same time, George Bond recognized that his father’s enterprise bordered on obsession: “There is something to my mind appalling in the contemplation of my father’s labors, from the time when he was first enabled to indulge freely his passion for observation. The accumulated volumes filled with manuscript records give me a shudder at the thought of the weary and straining eye, the exposure [to the elements], and the long, sleepless nights that they suggest.”

  Through the 1820s and 1830s, William Bond’s primary project was to ascertain, through celestial measurements, the position of the granite pier in his parlor relative to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. This he announced in an 1833 report to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: latitude 42° 19' 20" north; longitude 71° 4' 15" west of Greenwich. So precise was this determination that, in 1838, the Navy Department’s worldwide survey of foreign ports referenced their entire set of geographic coordinates, not to Washington, DC, but to William Bond’s house in Dorchester. (Although Bond received a nominal sum by the government for his work, he spent around ten times that amount out of his own pocket for the requisite equipment.)

  In 1839, fully twenty-four years after enlisting William Bond in its failed attempt to build an observatory, Harvard College again came calling. Seeking to capitalize on public interest raised by the recent passage of Halley’s comet, Josiah Quincy, Bond’s longtime champion and now president of Harvard, made an admittedly desperate offer. He invited Bond and his family to take up residence in the Dana House, a recent acquisition at the southeast corner of the Harvard campus. Bond would bring with him all of his astronomical equipment, turning the Dana House into the college’s de facto observatory, with Bond as so-named Astronomical Observer. The college offered no salary and only the promise to seek funds for new equipment. Bond declined, replying charitably that “his habits were not adapted to public station [and] that he preferred independence in obscurity to responsibility in an elevated position.”

  Quincy persisted, despite his own reflections on the absurdity of the job offer: “Mr. Bond was well established in a profitable manufacturing business, happily situated in his domestic and neighborhood surroundings, with an avocation fascinating enough to occupy all his leisure, and a fame extensive enough to satisfy his own modest estimate of his abilities. There was no pecuniary betterment for Mr. Bond in the suggested change. [Harvard] could only offer him what he already had, a family domicile; so that the proposal might warrant an adaptation of Sydney Smith’s famous phrase, and be described as an invitation to come to Cambridge and ‘cultivate astronomy upon a little oatmeal.’” By way of explanation, Quincy maintained that in Harvard’s mean proposal, “there is no disparagement of the college; it was the day of small things, of pennies, not dollars, in the college treasury.”

  After sustained appeals, Bond relented; in the autumn of 1839, he moved his family and his operations to the Dana House. On December 31, he made his maiden observation as a Harvard astronomer. Bond’s children were pressed into service: the mathematically gifted William Cranch Bond, Jr., who died during his senior year at Harvard in 1842; George Phillips Bond, who would eventually succeed his father as observatory director; and Richard Bond, who developed and maintained the timekeeping equipment. The Dana House site was far from optimal for sky viewing, being hard up against neighboring structures, trees, and streets. Among other things, Bond had to pay for permission to bore a sighting hole through an adjacent building to align his telescope to a seven-foot-tall meridian marker twelve miles away on Great Blue Hill in Milton.

  Four years into his Harvard appointment, the heavens blessed William Bond with yet a third career-altering spectacle. The Comet of 1843 appeared in the spring, growing and brightening until its two-hundred-million-mile tail could be seen even during the daytime. Not since the solar eclipse of 1806 were Boston’s residents so galvanized by a celestial sight. In the comet’s wake, contributions totaling $35,000 poured into Harvard’s coffers for the establishment of a world-class observatory.

  The core specification for Harvard’s new telescope was straightforward, if overtly ambitious: a refractor-style instrument with a main (or objective) lens larger and optically finer than any other in the world. The telescope would rest on a sturdy equatorial mount with built-in clockwork to rotate the instrument in synchrony with the nightly movement of celestial objects. After consultations with prominent astronomers and optical craftsmen in Europe, Bond and his Harvard colleagues concluded that the German establishment of Merz and Mahler, celebrated successor of master optician Joseph Fraunhofer, was the only firm capable of meeting their requirements. In fact, the company had just completed a similar refractor, fifteen inches in diameter, for Russia’s Imperial Central Observatory in Pulkovo. With lens-making still an imperfect art, Merz and Mahler agreed to fabricate two fifteen-inch objective lenses, and Harvard could choose the better—or reject both.

  In 1843, Harvard purchased acreage on Summer House Hill, three-quarters of a mile northwest of the main campus, a remote rise surrounded by meadows with few neighbors and only spotty transport to Harvard Square or Boston. The site was an astronomer’s dream: pitch dark at night, with an unobstructed view of the horizon in every direction—although the fickle New England climate meant frequent overcast skies.

  Construction of the observatory and family residence began immediately. An increasingly harried Bond, now a gray-haired fifty-four, confided his concerns to longtime friend and amateur astronomer William Mitchell: “In regard to the principle features of the observatory, I suppose we must say it is getting on as well as can be expected. Merz is progressing with the second object glass, the carpenters promise to have the new house ready by July [Bond doubted them], but for two years we must be prisoners of hope.” He added, with uncharacteristic frankness, that he considered the Dana House period, “in common with the rest of the family, as the most unpleasant in my whole life.”

  In September 1844, Bond moved his family and his instruments from the Dana House to the grounds of the new Harvard College Observatory. An avid gardener, he covered the yard with flowers, shrubs, and exotic plants given him by noted botanist Asa Gray, his new neighbor. The family residence “was approached by terraces on which grew cherry trees and clumps of peonies. Rose vines and honeysuckle were trained over the house and an arbor vitae hedge screened the lower rooms from view. . . . A barn stood near the kitchen wing, the home of a cow, several horses, pigs and poultry.”

  Despite Bond’s exasperation with the financial and engineering complexities of the observatory project, he was fully devoted to the fledgling institution. When the Naval Observatory offered a substantial sum to recruit him in 1846, Bond turned them down, writing: “An astronomical observer to be useful in his vocation should give up the world, he must have a good eye, a delicate touch and above all, entire devotion to the pursuit.” Learning of the Naval Observatory’s overtures to the prime mover of its astronomy initiative, Harvard immediately provided Bond with an annual salary of $1,500, plus a $640 stipend for his son George, a recent Harvard graduate, to act as his chief assistant. (In 1851, the salary was made permanent through a $100,000 bequest by George’s college classmate Edward Bromfield Phillips, who had committed suicide.)

  Through a shipping error, the completed telescope lens arrived by steamer in New York, instead of in Boston, on November 28, 1846. (One day later and the lens would have been subject to an ill-conceived 30 percent tariff enacted by Congress on imported scientific equipment.) The lens was rushed to Cambridge, where it awaited completion of the building, copper-clad dome, support pier, and telescope tube.

  Bond made every effort to prepare a solid, vibration-free base for the new telescope, an edifice described by William Mitchell: “An excavation was first made twenty-six feet below the natural summit of the hill; and at the bottom of this was placed a coating of cement intermixed with coarse gravel ten feet in thickness, which, when hardened, formed an entire mass of great firmness. On this bed, the pier
, composed of five hundred tons of large granite blocks, well fitted to each other and laid in cement, rises thirty-three feet to the upper surface of the floor of the dome. On the cap-stone of this rests, on three bearers, a solid granite tripod or pedestal, of eleven tons’ weight, to the top of which is attached the Great Equatorial.”

  On Wednesday, September 22, 1847, at 3:30 a.m., Bond turned his new telescope to the Orion Nebula. “[T]he revelation was sublime,” he jotted in his observing diary, “the first appearance was like bright clouds—the fifth star in the Trapezium was conspicuous, many stars were seen among the clouds of light, & about the borders.” On October 7, he added, “It is delightful to see the stars brought out which have been hid in mysterious light from the human eye, since the creation. There is a grandure [sic], an almost overpowering sublimity in the scene that no language can fully express.” (In his enthusiasm, Bond mistakenly believed he had resolved the entire nebula into individual stars. It would be some twenty years before astronomer William Huggins proved spectroscopically that the Orion Nebula is, in fact, a star-studded fluorescent gas.)

  The Great Refractor of the Harvard College Observatory.

  Although reluctant at first to join his father’s line of work, George Bond became William’s steadfast companion in the observatory. The two of them had similar reserved dispositions, as well as a preternatural ability to focus on tedious tasks for long periods. George would eventually pursue projects outside the narrow confines of his father’s positional astronomy, but he performed whatever was required of him without complaint. Father and son are curiously intertwined in the observatory’s record books and in their joint professional diary, the published title of which is Diary of the Two Bonds. Entries are not identified by name, nor was the handwriting always distinguishable. Sometimes the only clues as to who wrote what were subtle stylistic differences.