Abstract
At the heart of this engaging book is the author’s claim that an emerging transatlantic print culture contributed to a distinct set of disciplinary practices constitutive of the “new astronomy.” Using the public interest around Mars observations between 1860 and 1910, with all its related controversies, Joshua Nall adroitly examines the role of mass media in astronomy’s disciplinary formation at a time when astronomy was in a state of flux. Refusing to take for granted the history of these formations, he does not assume what would later become more established astronomical identities like the amateur and professional. Rather, by appreciating their fluidity, the author is able to place astronomers like Richard Proctor, William Pickering, and Percival Lowell into contexts that enrich our appreciation of the period’s practices, personae, and what counted as astronomical labour.
Standing between a lively introduction and a stimulating conclusion, News from Mars is composed of four chapters that move us from Great Britain to the United States in a chronological order. Chapter 1 foregrounds Richard Proctor’s “imaginative astronomy” by setting it against two competing views about astronomy: positional and physical. Proctor’s alternative prominently featured speculation and democratization of knowledge, utilizing anti-elitist science journalism for the moral betterment of the masses. This populist attitude happened to go hand-in-glove with the ongoing Americanization of the British newspaper industry, particularly in the person of William Thomas Stead, editor of London’s Pall Mall Gazette and steady supporter of Proctor. Chapter 2 argues that America’s growing dominance in astrophysics had more to do with geography than high-cost massive telescopes. As observatories moved westward and onto mountain tops, the more did their remote locality became central to their authority. But their locality demanded new disciplinary practices that relied heavily on communications technologies and fast-moving media, connecting news agencies like the Associated Press to “frontier” observatories that came to resemble news distribution centres, serially shaping astronomical news in turn.
Chapter 3 takes as its case study William Pickering’s relationship to the New York Herald on two Harvard Observatory expeditions in order to elucidate another novel disciplinary practice, “event astronomy.” Underwriting the expenses for a 3000-mile telegraph line, with its own dedicated time-signal, that ran from Pickering’s temporary station in Willows, California, all the way to the Manhattan offices of the Herald, the newspaper published first-person, near-real-time reports about the eclipse event of 1889. Later in connection to the highly anticipated perihelic opposition of Mars in 1892, Pickering telegraphed astronomical observations, from Harvard’s mountain-top observatory in Peru, in a “clipped telegraphic vernacular” to the Herald – much, that is, in the style of an explorer or foreign correspondent – using submarine cables, to which the newspaper had gained exclusive rights. This did not only result in the fastest reports of the Mars observations anywhere, something competitors could only envy; it also altered the style of observational reports connected to Mars.
In the last chapter, we finally come to Percival Lowell, who no longer occupies the front and centre of the story but whose efforts were conditioned by already existing infrastructures and practices. Nall approaches Lowell obliquely by means of Simon Newcomb’s editorship of astronomical entries for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As a major opponent of newspaper astronomy, Newcomb’s correspondence with Lowell, begun in a bid to find someone to write the entry on “Mars,” honed his outdated critique of Lowell’s popular views on Mars. Despite the lack of initial expertise, Newcomb would end up writing the entry himself. Even those who opposed the disciplinary transformations described so far had eventually to rely on mass media – in this case, an encyclopaedia that reached millions.
Rewarding as these chapters are, I raise three general issues. When exemplifying media for his purposes, Nall moves freely from newspapers, telegraphic technologies, books, encyclopaedias, styles, and world expositions, leaving this reader to wonder what exactly media means in this account. Second, “imaginative astronomy” is curiously left without a genealogy. This has the strange effect of making Proctor appear a lone wolf, when in fact there were others in the same century who advocated something similar. Although James Nasmyth is identified as one example, he, unfortunately, did not engage mass media in the same way that Proctor did. Finally, Nall does a superb job juxtaposing emerging disciplinary practices of planetary science with more established ones in positional astronomy on a number of fronts, including the latter’s derogatory characterization of mass media as serving “public imbecility” and appealing to the “unintelligent classes.” But in the case of the newspaper astronomers central to this work, very little is said about how they understood their audiences and who precisely they were writing for.
These concerns notwithstanding, Nall has written an important book, one that remaps the disciplinary landscape at a crucial period in the history of astronomy, moving us beyond over-simplified frameworks of popularization or anachronistic astronomical identities. Perhaps the most important feature of News from Mars has to do with how it permits us to explain and embrace the astronomical labour of historical actors recalcitrant to current standards. The book is a refreshing and liberating take on a well-trodden subject. Highly recommended.