A Handful of Eclipses in History

Humans have been recording instances of solar eclipses for thousands of years. Today, we're walking through some of the famous eclipses in history, all while wearing proper eye shielding.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry. I'm Tracy me Wilson, Jersey. Do you
know what everyone on Earth is talking about? It is?

(00:22):
We've reached It's all eclipses all the time. We've reached
the point that my mom and her sisters are talking
about eclipses on our family Yahoo group, which is a
threshold in how many people are talking about something right. Uh.
And that is, of course because of the event that
is being built at least in the US as the
Great American Eclipse, which will have happened on the same

(00:42):
day that this episode publishes August. Uh. I suspect this
episode will air after the eclipse actually happened, or right
around it in terms of when it goes live. But um, Moreover,
if people are into the eclipse, they're probably out watching
the eclipse and not sitting somewhere listening to a podcast.
I'm gonna tell you that's where I will be is

(01:04):
the I'm traveling to because we you are near the
line of frutality. I am not. So we're going on
a trip. Yeah, we have a little officey thing planned. Um.
But so for that end, we are not going to
fill this with warnings about how to carefully observing eclipse.
I hope you will have gotten those before you may

(01:25):
be looked up. Um. But it seems like a great
time to discuss some eclipses in history. There are a
lot of eclipses that have been recorded through the ages,
but today we're going to talk about five of them. Uh,
if we leave your favorite out, our apologies, but we
just wanted kind of a sampling of eclipses and kind
of their interesting points in the historical record. Yeah. And

(01:47):
to be clear, today we are talking specifically about solar
eclipses when the Moon passes between the Earth and the
Sun and at least a portion of the Sun is blocked,
casting a shadow on the Earth. We are not getting
as who lunar eclipses when the Earth passes between the
Sun and the Moon, which causes the Moon to go dark. Right.
And there are four types of solar eclipse, partial, annular, total,

(02:11):
and hybrid. And a partial eclipse occurs when the Moon
only obstructs a part of the Sun, and this is
often described as the Sun looking as though there is
a bite taken out of it annular means ring shaped.
I don't know about you, Holly, but the eclipses that
I have seen so far, aside from partial ones, have
all been annular eclipses um, which comes from the Latin

(02:33):
word annulus, So an annual. An annular eclipse is when
the Moon passes in front of the center of the Sun,
but it leaves a ring of the Sun visible around
the moon, and a total eclipse as when the Moon
is close enough to the Earth that as it passes
in front of the Sun, the Sun is completely blacked out,
so there's not a sliver or a ring around the
outside as in the case of the annular eclipse. The

(02:55):
Sun's corona is still visible though, and there is this
much talked about eclipse that's happening that the day this
episode airs, which is August, that is a total eclipse. Yeah,
sometimes I have found in it. When I was younger.
It took me a long time to really grasp This
sounds so foolish as I say it, but the difference

(03:16):
between an annular eclipse and a total eclipse, because you
still see that coronal ring on a total eclipse, And
I'm like, but you can still see it and They're like, no,
you're not seeing the sun. You're seeing the light off
of the sun, right, And I'm like, but I'm seeing
sunlight and so but it's that's the thing. You still
see light. And as we were planning our whole our trip,
we were talking to the other folks who are going

(03:38):
to be traveling with us um and I had I
was like, okay, but I remember watching an eclipse at
my elementary school and I had to go look that
up and like figure out what year was that, what
was going on? It was an annular eclipse. And then
I said, okay, now I also remember watching one in
our yard. Look that one up, also an annular eclipse.
And then I was like, okay, obviously my memory is

(04:00):
not as sharp as I would like it to be
regarding what eclipses I have seen. Oh, mine definitely is
not um And the fourth type that we mentioned, a
hybrid eclipse, is one that appears to be a total
eclipse from one vantage point on Earth and an annular
eclipse from another point on Earth at the same time.
And that has to do with where the moon is

(04:20):
in position in relation to your position on Earth, in
the position of the Sun. So additionally, annular, total and
hybrid eclipses will look like partial eclipses from positions they're
outside of the path of totality. So where you are
in Atlanta is near the path of totality, so we
mostly covered up. Yeah. Also, we're kind of excited about

(04:42):
this whole eclipse situation. If you cannot tell. The oldest
known story of a solar eclipse also comes with a
sad tale of two men who failed to predict it. Uh.
This particular event took place in China around seven b C.
There are actually some discrepancies as to whether or not
that you res accurate. Writings in China from this period

(05:03):
have described such events really quite poetically, as quote, the
Sun and Moon did not meet harmoniously. So to be clear,
there were eclipses before this point, but we are just
talking about ones that were recorded. It was not the first,
I must have been, but yeah, so ancient China's mythology

(05:23):
around eclipses was that they took place when a celestial
dragon was eating the sun, and in a tradition that
built around the idea of scaring the dragon a way
to get the sun back, people would make lots of
noise by blinking banging pots together, playing drums, and basically
doing anything that would create the loudest sound possible. It
sounds pretty fun, uh. The apocryphal story attached to this

(05:47):
ancient eclipse involves to court astronomers Ho and He. Their
job was to predict any important celestial events and inform
the emperor of them, and as the story goes, in
this case, the empre only learned of the eclipse event
when he heard the banging noises of his people trying
to frighten the mythical dragon. Naturally, this failing on the

(06:10):
part of the astronomers, who according to legend, were drunk
when they should have been doing their jobs, was met
with a great deal of anger on the part of
the emperor, and the story goes that they were then
executed for their poor job performance. There's even a pretty
unkind poem that's often cited when the story is discussed,
and the poem goes, here lie the bodies of Ho

(06:33):
and He, whose fate, though sad, was visible, being hanged
because they could not spy the clips which was invisible.
Hi Ho Ti said a love of drink occasioned all
that trouble, But this is hardly true. I think for
drunken folks c double. This text is unattributed. We don't

(06:53):
know who wrote it, and it was likely almost certainly
written long after the event in China by a Western author,
just based on these sort of apocryphal stories of Ho
and He, and this has led to this blanket assumption
that these two men were incompetent. But there have been
other discussions of them in the historical record and China's
astronomical knowledge that was done in a few different works

(07:17):
throughout the centuries. So according to Chinese animals analyzed by
later astronomers, he and Ho had actually done a great
deal of work on reforming the Chinese calendar through their
observations and their calculations, and they had made it a
lot more accurate. Eighteenth century Englishman John Jackson, after doing
his own research and analysis and pulling from translations of

(07:39):
Chinese animals as well as contemporary astronomy authors, found that
accounts suggested that this eclipse, if it's the one that
astronomers were pointing to, was very brief, and he wrote
in seventeen fifty two quote, if the eclipse was really
so small and so short, it is not to be
wondered that the two astronomers He and Ho should not
have observed it, nor could any others hardly be supposed

(08:02):
to have seen it. But part of the problem is
that all of this is backwards engineering an event that
could have been just one of any number of possible
eclipses that were referenced within ancient Chinese writings. The Jackson
quote that we just mentioned is an analysis of one
of those events, which may or may not have been
the one that sealed the astronomer's spates. So again, that

(08:24):
is if this whole execution story is actually true. The
Proceedings and Transactions of the Scientific Association includes the full
text of an address that was given by the Reverend J. T.
Petty about this story, and he makes the case that
if you take this story at its word, it really
serves as a testament to how advanced China's astronomical knowledge

(08:46):
was at the time. As part of his case, he says, quote,
China must have been pretty well stocked with astronomers, or
she could not have afforded to sacrifice two of them.
Had they been the only astronomers in the empire, their
lives would have been spared for future service. Whatever their
dereliction of duty. Yeah, so those poor drunken astronomers maybe

(09:07):
just got a bad room. Uh. And next up, we're
going to talk about Homer's Odyssey, but before we get
into that, we're gonna pause and have a little sponsored break.
The Odyssey was written by Homer around eight hundred b C,
but it tells the story set around twelve BC, centuries

(09:30):
before this poem was actually conceived, and in telling the
tale of Odysseus in his decade long voyage, Homer might
have recounted an eclipse that took place in eleven seventy
eight b C. E The Acclimatists, a seer character within
the narrative, shares a prophecy about the doomed fate of
penelope suitors, and ends with what some people believe is

(09:52):
a description of an eclipse quote, the sun has been
obliterated from the sky and an unlock, an unlucky dark
nous invades the world, and the story that's still very
much alive. Odysseus kills all of the suitors during this event.
In the early part of the twentieth century, astronomers Carl
Shock and Paul Nugebauer determined that the Ionian Islands would

(10:15):
have seen a total solar eclipse on April sixteenth of
eleven seventy eight BC, and this place did about one
decade after the city of Troy was destroyed, But this
idea was largely dismissed by critics, who felt that there
was no way that Homer could have had knowledge of
such an event and written about it when it had
happened several hundred years before his time. But this topic

(10:36):
was revived in two thousand seven when two biophysicists, Constantino
by Cusas and Marcello oh Magnasco, used software to analyze
data they collected from this text. They combed through the
Odyssey and noted mentions of constellations and the positions of
Venus and Mercury, and the new moon which happened the
night before the prophecy, and using all of that collected data,

(10:57):
they determined the possible day eights that could have matched
the descriptions in the epic poem, and their match was
drumroll please April seventy eight. But even in their paper,
which was published in two thousand eight by Cusius and Magnasco,
are very clear that it would be amazing and not

(11:19):
terribly likely if Homer knew about this event, they wrote,
quote The main implausibility in the conclusions is that they
imply that the author of the lines in question was
first interested in advanced astronomy at a time when there
were no traces left that the Greek had an interest
in it beyond cylindrical purposes, and in possession of detailed
astronomical data of events happening perhaps five centuries before him.

(11:43):
This paper goes on to discuss the indications that Homer
was interested into in astronomy, and then examines various improbable
but not impossible means by which the knowledge of a
historical eclipse could have made its way into his sphere
of knowledge. But they acknowledged that it's really hard, a
really hard case to pre and they conclude with quote
much research is needed before we can move beyond such speculations.

(12:05):
We can only modestly hope to convince other scholars that
the case against Chokes eclipse may have been too hastily closed,
and just inspire them to ponder if the remarkable coincidence
described in this paper may in fact not be coincidental
at all. And to be clear, they have definitely had
detractors like they have. They have had people right response

(12:27):
papers that are criticizing all of this. But it's an
interesting idea to think about. The next eclipse that we're
going to talk about happened in eighteen thirty six. So
on May fifteen, thirty six, there was an annular eclipse
that crossed over the United Kingdom and its totality. And
during this particular event, a characteristic of eclipses was identified

(12:47):
and named for its observer, Francis Bailey. Francis Bailey was
a British astronomer who had been born in seventeen seventy four,
and initially he had gone into business and done quite
well for himself, but at the age of fifty one
and he retired from his work on the London Stock
Exchange and writing books about annuities to instead devote his
time to science. That charms me a lot, me too.

(13:10):
But this really wasn't like an out of the blueshift
for him. It's not like he said, Okay, business time
over now, I'm when I think about the night sky.
He had actually been interested in science and astronomy for
quite some time, and in eighteen twenty, which was five
years before he left his finance work. He had been
a driving force behind the formation of the Royal Astronomical
Society and in the founding of that society, which aimed

(13:32):
to promote research in astronomy. He was among colleagues such
as John Herschel and Charles Babbage for the eighteen thirty
six eclipse. Bailey, wanting to see it at his best advantage,
traveled to Scotland and the weather on a day of
the event was excellent. The sky was cloudless, and Bailey's
experience was relayed in a December ninth, eighteen thirty six,

(13:53):
proceeding of the Royal Astronomical Society, as he had spoken
about it at their meeting, and this is kind of long,
but it's a relaying of what he saw, so bear
with us on this lengthy quote. After a brief discourse
on Bailey's position and set up to watch the eclipse,
this account in the proceedings reads quote he says he

(14:15):
was in expectation of meeting with something extraordinary at the
formation of the Annualists, but imagined it would only be momentary,
and consequently that it would not interrupt the noting of
the time of its occurrence. In this However, he was deceived,
as the following facts will show, For when the cusps
of the Sun were about forty degrees asunder, a row

(14:35):
of lucid points, like a string of beads, irregular in
size and distance from each other, suddenly formed around that
part of the circumference of the Moon that was about
to enter on the Sun's disk. This he intended to
note as the correct time of the formation of the annualists,
expecting every moment to see the ring of light completed
round the Moon, and attributing this serrated appearance of the

(14:57):
Moon's limb, as others had done before him, to the
lunar mountains. Although the remaining portion of the Moon's circumference
was perfectly smooth and circular as seen through the telescope,
he was somewhat surprised, however, to find that these luminous points,
as well as the dark intervening spaces, increased in magnitude,
some of the contiguous ones appearing to run into one

(15:19):
another like drops of water. Finally, as the Moon pursued
her course, these dark intervening spaces were stretched out into long, black,
thick parallel lines joining the limbs of the Sun and
the Moon, when all at once they suddenly gave way
and left the circumference of the Sun and the Moon
in those points, as in all the rest, apparently smooth

(15:39):
and circular, and the Moon perceptibly advanced on the face
of the Sun. After the Moon had crossed over the
center of the Sun, Bailey observed another surprise. According to
his account, quote, all at once, a number of long, black, thick,
parallel lines exactly similar in appearance to the former ones mentioned,
suddenly darted forward and joined the two him says before,

(16:01):
and the same phenomena were repeated, but in inverse order.
So we witnessed the lines terminating in a curved line
of bright beads, which vanished as the annualists ended. The
formation of the beads wasn't witnessed by other astronomers as well,
several of which Bailey consulted with. And Bailey was right.
It's the lunar geography that causes these beads to form,

(16:23):
as the Sun outlines the valleys and peaks on the
Moon's surface. Uh Incidentally, when only one beat is visible,
this is called a diamond ring effect because you kind
of see the little corona of light and then one
bright spot, so it kind of looks like a sparkly ring.
And though other astronomers did observe this happening, the beat
effect is named for Bailey, and while observing eclipses after

(16:44):
the one in May of eighteen thirty six, astronomers continued
to look for Bailey's beads as hallmarks of the eclipse process. Today,
photos of eclipses are readily available in books and online,
but that certainly was not always the case. So in
a moment we are going to talk about the first
photo of an eclipse, but first we will pause for
a word from a sponsor. On July one, there was

(17:15):
a total eclipse with the totality over Prussia, and this
particular eclipse is noteworthy because in preparation for the event,
the director of the Royal Observatory in Knigsberg hired a
photographer to capture it. Johann Julius Friedrich Brokowski was a
skilled the garatypist, and he was the man the observatory
reached out to. Brokowski used a small refracting telescope in

(17:37):
conjunction with a heliometer, which is a telescope design for
measuring the apparent diameter of the Sun and for measuring
angles between celestial bodies or points on the lunar surface.
It took an eight four second exposure. Once the eclipse
is totality began and what resulted was the first successful
photo of a solar eclipse, which included the visual cant

(18:00):
sure of prominences emanating from the Sun's surface. And this
image is tiny. It's one of those things when you
think about a photograph, and especially if you've seen it
online or in books, you think of like photograph size,
like four by. This thing is little, little, it's way
smaller than that. The moon on the original plate was
only seven point eight five millimeters in diameter. And while

(18:20):
the director of the observatory initially wrote about the groundbreaking
photo without crediting Burkowski, eventually the photographer Slash Degirotypist made
his own prints from his plate. These prints were slightly enlarged,
but still quite small. As a point of reference, the
moon's diameter and these prints was eight point six nine millimeters.
One of these prints still exists and is in the

(18:43):
collection of the Yenna University Observatory in Yenna, Germany. Another
set of prints from Burkowski's plates was ordered by German
astronomer Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Peters in and copies of the
Peters prints would go on to be used in textbooks
and other publications. Today you can easily find Brokowski's iconic
photograph online and there are even some images of a

(19:05):
human hand holding a framed prince to illustrate how little
this groundbreaking photograph is. Yeah, it with the frame included.
We're talking like a couple inches that someone can just
hold between their thumb and four finger is very small.
The last eclipse that will talk about is one that's
come to be known as Einstein's eclipse. It took place
on May twenty nine of nineteen nineteen, and several years

(19:28):
prior to this eclipse, Einstein had published his now famous
General Theory of Relativity UH for very broad strokes. The
crux of the theory is that space can be curved
by the influence of gravity of anybody with mass, and
this was at odds with Newton's Principia, which we have
talked about on the podcast before, and which established mathematical
rules that applied to celestial motion and was more static

(19:51):
and did not take into account something like a gravity bend.
Sir Frank Watson Dyson, Astronomer Royal of Britain, began to
think about the possibility of testing the theory by observing
light with gravity could distort space, then light passing through
that space would also curve. But our Sun is so
bright that we can't really see the way other stars

(20:12):
light might be bent by the Sun's gravity, and this
led him to realize that the darkness of the Sun
as viewed from Earth during an eclipse would offer an
opportunity to observe light bending as it approached the Sun's
edge if Einstein's theory was correct. In side note, you
might be wondering if photographs of previous eclipses in the

(20:33):
decades since Burkowski's first digaratype would have offered any evidence.
But this bending light is seriously slight the photographs at
that point we're not of good enough quality to detect
such a change, which really can only be analyzed with
really quite precise measurement. Once it was determined the eclipse
would be the testing ground, another British astrophysicist, Arthur Stanley Eddington,

(20:55):
led the test in the first two months of nine nineteen.
He measured the position of the stars that the Sun
would be passing in front of during the predicted May eclipse.
For the eclipse itself, he traveled to an island off
of Africa's western coast, and at the same time he
dispatched another team of astronomers to Brazil to take measurements,
and this was for coverage in the event that the

(21:16):
island had cloud cover on May the twenty nine, but
as it turned out, both locations had a clear view
of the eclipse, so there were two separate sets of
measurements to use. The eclipse lasted for six minutes during
its totality, and both teams took photos throughout that brief
time and after the eclipse ended, Eddington gathered all the
information and went back to England and spent the next

(21:37):
several months analyzing it. Eddington's findings, which are announced on
November six, nineteen nineteen, vindicated Einstein improved his general theory
of relativity was correct. While there were certainly detractors who
suspected that Eddington had somehow falsified the data to support Einstein,
this is literally the moment that made Einstein famous. On

(21:58):
November seven, he was front page news and suddenly the
German born physicist was the global poster child for genius
measurements taking during eclipses after continued to back up Einstein's
theory and Eddington's findings. Yeah, which is really cool. I
did somehow I missed that growing up, that piece of
information that it was really an eclipse that made Einstein

(22:22):
famous in my head because he's such a famous figure.
I think in my head he just people are like, wow,
this is an amazing theory. You're smart. I never think
of him as being, you know, having detractors, but of
course he did, and it's just my weird, uh take
on it. But yeah, So those are a few stories
of eclipses in history. As we said, there are many

(22:43):
many more. I think the next eclipse doesn't happen until
four So if we're still doing this podcast is seven years,
we can do another, or just if we want to
talk about eclipses at some point between now and then,
we could do an eclipse Survey episode and talk about
a few more about lunar eclipses. People don't get as
excited about lunar eclipses, yeah, because they're like, it's already dark,

(23:09):
so the darkening of the moon isn't quite as dramatic,
even though it's very cool and you can sometimes get
like a blood moon, which is amazing. Um yeah, yeah,
but they're fascinating. I hope if everybody listening watched it,
whether in person or online or some other way one.

(23:29):
I hope anybody that actually watched it in person was
very careful with their vision and camera. Don't and does
your camera point your camera at the sun. No, there
are so many things you have to be careful with. Uh. So,
I hope you enjoyed it, and if you, uh you know,
missed it. The good news is we live in an
information age where it's all going to be online instantly. Hooray. Yeah. So,

(23:54):
do you have some listener mail for us? I do
I have a correction and then a gift mail. So
we got I feel super stupid, but I'll explain my
stupidity and my um blind spot in knowledge, which was
a pleasant blind spot to have, and then it went away.
Yeah yeah yeah. So when we did the sit Boy

(24:15):
mutiny sometimes called the rebellion, sometimes also called a freedom movement,
we talked about one of the punishments of the Indian
resistors on the part of the British Empire, let's just
shoot them from cannons, but that's not correct. It's so
much grosser. And several people wrote us, We're like, well,
you didn't get this right. In my defense, the way

(24:37):
it is written, and I'm gonna read one of the
accounts that describes it. If you don't know what it is,
that is a fairly reasonable way to place to land
in your head. Um, I'm reading a piece written by
Douglas Peers about it. Uh, And I didn't in my
little note that I wrote here, I didn't cite the
book it came from, so my apologies, but it says
quote the fear of spiritual debasement came full sir goal

(25:00):
for the mutineers. The British deliberately defiled rebel suit boys
that were caught. Some were blown from cannon, Some Hindus
were smeared with cow fat before they were hanged. Some
Muslim rebels were forced to chew pig fat. So blown
from cannon, to my mind, meant blown from a cannon.
But that's not what blown from cannon means. What it

(25:21):
actually means is that the person this is so horrifying.
So I apologize for those of you that also would
have liked to maintain that blind spot um the person
is strapped to a cannon while it is shot, and
the resulting force causes dismemberment, and the body, in terms
of religious matters, is defiled, and it prevents the proper
administration of religious funeral rights for Hindus and Muslims. So uh,

(25:46):
really really gross but important distinction to make. So thank
you to all the people that wrote in and mentioned that. Uh,
and then to bring it up because that's a terrible
note to land On. I have a wonderful gift that
we got from our listener, Kaylee. She send us some
really fun jewelry, which she describes herself. In her note.
She says, Hello, I'm a big fan of the show.

(26:06):
I have a d h D. So it's great to
listen to you while I'm working on crafts. Speaking of which,
one of my crafts this chain mail, and I wanted
to make you guys some pieces. The gold one is
a tribute to Holly's laughter, because there's nothing that makes
my day brighter than hearing such full laughter or an
amused tittering at the ridiculousness of history. The purple bracelet
is a weave called byzantine, and the silver piece I dedicated,

(26:28):
which is a little cuff I dedicate to Tracy's sigh.
The pursing of lips that could all is so good.
She's so great. Um, the pursing of lips that could
almost be a smirk as she knows she's about to
drop a knowledge bomb that will blow everyone's minds wide open. Uh,
it's so cool, Like, what an amazing honor and delight

(26:48):
to have an artist, you know, memorialize our behaviors and
in jewelry form. And then she has a little suggestion
for a topic, but she says lots of love, Kaylee.
Oh my gosh, that is so sweet and thoughtful and amazing.
So thank you, thank you, thank you, Kaylee. Those are
fantastic and just such a delight and put a huge
smile on my face as I read your card this morning.
So thank you, thank you, thank you. Uh. If you

(27:09):
would like to write to us, you can do so
at History Podcast at house to works dot com. You
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You can visit us at our home page, which is
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(27:31):
long before Tracy and I were attached to it, as
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like to visit our parents site, you can do that.
That is how stuff works dot com. If you type
in the word eclipse in the search bar, you're going
to get a recent article that was written called three
times total Eclipses Influenced World History. We only have one
overlap eclipse with that article, so you'll get some new knowledge.

(27:54):
If this wedded your appetite, but we encourage you come
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(28:16):
M