Abstract
William Cranch Bond (WCB) was the first director of Harvard College Observatory (HCO) and for the history of astronomy the most renowned member of an extended Boston-based family committed to scientific activity, principally astronomy and mechanical horology, and having strong connections to England, at least for the early generations of their American experience. A chapter in this book unpicks the complex familial relationships and reveals a remarkable sequence of scientific ability and commitment, from women and men, young and old. The founder of the dynasty in the United States, who opened the family business of William Bond & Son in Boston in 1793, had trained as a clockmaker in London.
The business survived in family ownership until 1941 and finally ceased to trade in 1971. WCB was apprenticed to his father and introduced making their own chronometers into the firm’s activities. He was self-taught in astronomy. It is noteworthy that, despite the family’s links to England, a convincing case is made here for Ferdinand Berthoud’s influence on Bond’s first chronometer. The financial independence that derived from his business activity was important to the foundation of HCO since Harvard’s president persuaded Bond to act as astronomer without a salary in an observatory not equipped by the College with instruments. Public interest in the Great Comet of 1843 precipitated a chain of events that led to the building and endowment of an observatory and the purchase of the famous equatorial by Merz and Mahler in 1847 and a transit circle by Troughton and Simms in 1848. Bond had started to receive a salary in 1846, after 7 years of unpaid work.
One of the aims of this book is to accord more appropriate recognition to WCB’s son, Richard Fifield Bond, whose innovative mechanical talent forwarded both practical astronomy, through his regulator clocks, equatorial drives, and chronographs, and navigation and field astronomy, through his chronometers. He too worked for both the family firm and HCO, as well as at times for the US Coast Survey. Another son, William Cranch Bond, Jr, became First Assistant at HCO, while a third, George Phillips Bond, progressed from First Assistant to succeed his father as Director. A daughter, Selina Cranch Bond, became a “computer” under Edward C. Pickering.
Transatlantic chronometric expeditions, mainly directed by Richard Bond, had the effect of establishing HCO for a time as the unofficial zero longitude for the United States, enhancing the esteem and reputation of the Observatory. HCO was also central to the story of the pioneering work of the Bond firm in the technology for which they are best remembered in the history of astronomy, the “American transit register” as it became known in Britain. There were a number of designs of circuit-interrupters for clocks and chronometers, for transmitting time signals electrically to chronographs and to distant displays of “slave” devices. Through the creative interplay of mechanical and electrical horology, automatic recording by chronograph, and the borrowed functionality of the electric telegraph, a distributed time service could fall under the ultimate but also immediate control of astronomical observatories. The Bond company and HCO played a central role in this development, but other inventors, manufacturers, and observatories in America had their parts in the complex story told and thoroughly documented here. The Bond system for registering transit observations had an international impact, not least through its success at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and its adoption in principle by George Airy at Greenwich. The development of the chronograph also is treated across a range of designers and makers and in technical detail. The book concludes with accounts of innovative designs of escapements and detailed technical accounts of three regulators by Richard Bond, engaged in time signal distribution.
This well-documented and beautifully illustrated book is mainly of interest to horological historians, but, in the aspects of the discipline covered, its subject matter is inextricably linked to astronomy. In parallel with this linkage, the entanglement of an observatory with a commercial workshop and retailer, where the programme and character of each organisation were profoundly influenced by their relationship, makes a fascinating case study.