HIS ASTRONOMICAL WORK
Maury took charge, on July 1, 1842, of the Depot of Charts and
Instruments, of which he had just been made the superintendent by
Secretary of the Navy Upshur. This depot had been established by the
Navy Department in 1830, and Lieutenants Goldsborough, Wilkes, and
Gilliss in succession had been its former superintendents. Wilkes had
moved it from the western part of the city to Capitol Hill probably,
as has been suggested, that its virtues and its needs might the more
readily be noticed by Congress. Be that as it may, Congress passed an
act on August 31, 1842, appropriating the sum of $35,000 for supplying
adequate buildings and equipment for the depot. On the same day was
passed another act, which dissolved the Board of Navy Commissioners
that had ruled the navy for twenty-seven years and had recently been
attacked so forcefully by Maury, and established the Bureau System in
its place. The Depot of Charts and Instruments, accordingly, was placed
under the Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography.
Immediately after becoming superintendent, Maury moved the depot to
a building between 24th and 25th Streets, N. W., known formerly as
2222–24 Pennsylvania Avenue, and to the rather limited accommodations
here he brought his family. Meanwhile a new building was being
constructed on a reservation at 23d and E Streets, N. W., where
the Naval Medical School is now located,—a site covering about
seventeen acres which had been reserved by General Washington for a
great university. This new building was to be of brick, in the form
of a square about 50 feet by 50, surmounted by a dome 23 feet in
diameter, with wings to the south, east, and west. Later, in 1847, the
superintendent’s residence was constructed and connected with the main
building by an extension of the east wing.
[Illustration:
AN ENGRAVING OF THE UNITED STATES NAVAL OBSERVATORY BUILDINGS AS
THEY APPEARED WHEN MAURY WAS SUPERINTENDENT ABOUT 1845
From an engraving in the title page of “Astronomical and
Meteorological Observations Made during the Year 1875, at the U. S.
Naval Observatory,” 1878.]
The name of the institution varied. As the Depot of Charts and
Instruments it was officially known from 1830 to 1844; but for the
next ten years the names Naval Observatory and National Observatory
were used indiscriminately, sometimes even in the same publication.
In December, 1854, the Secretary of the Navy instructed that it
should henceforth be called the United States Naval Observatory and
Hydrographical Office, and as such it was known until the establishment
of the Hydrographic Office as a separate division in 1866. Since that
date the official name of the institution has been the United States
Naval Observatory.
Near the close of September, 1844, the Observatory was reported to be
completed, and on October 1 Maury was ordered to take charge with a
staff of line officers and professors of mathematics of the navy, and
civilian professors. Lieutenant James M. Gilliss, Maury’s predecessor,
had been greatly interested in astronomy, especially that field of
the science having to do with navigation, and it was largely through
his exertions that the necessary legislation had been passed making
possible a building, adapted not merely to the housing of charts and
instruments but suitable as well for astronomical observations. He had
been sent to Europe to consult about the purchasing of instruments for
the new Observatory, and there were those who thought that he should
have been made its first superintendent.
However scantily informed Maury may have been in the beginning as to
the great advance in astronomical science recently made in Europe, his
great energy and native ability soon enabled him to overcome any such
handicaps. He assisted with his own hands in the installation of the
instruments, in which he took great delight, writing that the Great
Refraction Circle was such an exquisite piece of machinery and so
beautiful that he would like to wear it round his neck as an ornament.
He was constantly endeavoring to secure better and larger instruments,
and wrote with pride when the Observatory, as far as equipment was
concerned, became the second most important in the world and needed
only a larger telescope to make it the very first of all. Maury quickly
saw the value of the Electro-Chronograph, invented by John Locke of
Cincinnati, in determining longitude with the aid of the magnetic
telegraph, seeing that it would practically double the number of
observations that one observer could make; and it was largely through
him that Congress was persuaded to appropriate the $10,000 necessary
for installing the instrument at the Observatory.
Maury was, moreover, by no means a mere figurehead in the making of
astronomical observations, but soon mastered the details of this work
which might have been left wholly to his subordinates. During the first
two years he was the principal observer with the equatorial, and it
is interesting to note how often his name appears as the observer in
the published extracts from the notebooks of the Observatory. That he
had much more than a mere passing interest in astronomy is evident
from the following account of his emotions during an astronomical
observation: “To me the simple passage through the transit instrument
of a star across the meridian is the height of astronomical sublimity.
At the dead hour of the night, when the world is hushed in sleep and
all is still; when there is not a sound to be heard save the dead beat
escapement of the clock, counting with hollow voice the footsteps of
time in his ceaseless round, I turn to the Ephemeris and find there, by
calculation made years ago, that when that clock tells a certain hour,
a star which I never saw will be in the field of the telescope for a
moment, flit through, and then disappear. The instrument is set;—I
look; the star, mute with eloquence that gathers sublimity from the
silence of the night, comes smiling and dancing into the field, and at
the instant predicted even to the fraction of a second it makes its
transit and is gone! With emotions too deep for the organs of speech,
the heart swells out with unutterable anthems; we then see that there
is harmony in the heavens above; and though we cannot hear, we feel the
‘music of the spheres’”.[3]
Maury’s first volume of astronomical observations, the first indeed to
be issued from an American observatory, appeared in 1846. Though this
was pioneer work, it was important enough to cause one of the most
distinguished astronomers of Europe to conclude that it had placed
the American observatory in the front rank with the oldest and best
institutions of the kind in Europe. In the appendix to this volume,
Maury gives very generous credit and praise to his helpers, among whom
were at this time the distinguished mathematicians Hubbard, Keith, and
Coffin; but he adds that he considers himself alone responsible for
the accuracy of the work as nothing had been published until it had
passed his supervision and approval.
A very ambitious work which Maury began during the year 1845 was a
catalogue of the stars. The aim was to cover every point of space
in the visible heavens with telescopes, get the position of every
star, cluster, and nebula, and record both magnitude and color, with
the angle of position and the distance of binary stars together with
descriptions and drawings of all clusters and nebulæ. No astronomical
work on such an extensive scale had ever before been executed or even
attempted, though the value and importance of it were manifold and
difficult of full estimation. Maury wrote that it was his intention to
make a contribution to astronomy that would be worthy of the nation
and the age, and to so execute the undertaking that future astronomers
would value it so highly as to say that such a star was not visible in
the heavens at the date of the Washington Catalogue because it is not
recorded therein.
An interesting example of the extremely practical value of such a
catalogue came up in connection with Leverrier’s discovery of the
planet Neptune. In the autumn of 1846, after the discovery of this
planet, Maury ordered one of his observers to trace its path backwards
to see if some astronomer had observed it and entered it as a fixed
star. On February 1, 1847, the observer, Sears Cook Walker, gave a list
of fourteen stars from Lalande’s catalogue in his “Histoire Céleste”,
where Neptune should have been approximately in May, 1795. Professor
Hubbard was then directed by Maury to examine with the equatorial,
and he found on the night of February 4 that the suspected star was
missing. It was concluded, therefore, that Lalande had observed and
recorded Neptune as a fixed star on the nights of May 8 and 10, 1795.
This discovery enabled astronomers to compute the new planet’s orbit
from observations extending over a period of fifty years.
The work on this catalogue was carried forward industriously for
several years, but the results were not ready to be published in the
volume of observations for the year 1846 because of the continual
drafts on the personnel of the Observatory for sea duty, which made
it impossible for the computers to keep pace with the observers.
Eventually, Maury was compelled to abandon the hope of ever finishing a
complete catalogue of the stars, as at first planned. The observations
continued to be made, however, and by January of 1855 the number of
stars which had been so observed reached the grand total of 100,000;
but these results were not published until 1873, long after Maury’s
superintendency had come to a close. Maury would never have undertaken
such an ambitious work, if he had realized the Herculean labor involved
in the cataloguing of all the stars down to the 10th magnitude in all
the heavens from 45° south to the North Pole, a colossal undertaking
that was entirely beyond the capacity of any one observatory to
accomplish in a generation.
The appearance of the second volume of astronomical observations was
delayed because of the inroads made on Maury’s staff by the demands
of the Mexican War. Then when the work was on the point of being
published it was destroyed by a fire which burned the printing office.
So the volume did not appear until the year 1851; and as the years
went by publications fell further and further behind the observations.
There is no doubt but that Maury was greatly handicapped by the
assignment of officers to the Observatory for irregular periods, and
by the reduction of the number of his mathematicians as time went
by. There was, besides, the hydrographical work of his office which
made constantly increasing demands on him and his staff. When he was
forced by this lack in personnel to make a choice between the more
complete development of astronomical observations on the one hand, and
hydrographical and meteorological research on the other, he wisely
chose the latter as of more immediate and practical value to the United
States, and indeed to the entire world.
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of “The Journal of American History,” Vol. IV, Number 3
(1910)._
DECORATIONS CONFERRED UPON MAURY
(From reader’s left to right) First and fourth are the obverse and
reverse of the decoration of the Tower and Sword conferred by the
King of Portugal. Second is the diamond pin presented by Maximilian
of Austria. Third and sixth are the obverse and reverse of the
decoration, Cross of the Order of Dannebrog, given by the King of
Denmark. Fifth is the pearl and diamond brooch presented to Mrs.
Maury by the Czar of Russia, see page 65. (Maury was also made a
commander of the Legion of Honor, and a knight of the Order of St.
Anne by the Czar of Russia.) ]