by Colonial Americans got their astronomy from a pamphlet hung on a nail by the fireplace, and a joke about an interstellar visitor made me take mine down
Friday, the Rare Book Room
The college does not have a rare book room. I should be clear. I mean the one at the old subscription library downtown, the one Franklin started, where a patient librarian lets me bring a class once a semester to look at things under glass.
Today I had them look at almanacs. Six of them, from the 1730s to the 1770s. Small, cheaply printed, brown with age, each with a hole punched in the corner where a string went through.
A student asked what the hole was for. I said: so you could hang it on a nail by the fire. That was where every household kept it. It was the most-read thing in the colonies after the Bible, and a good deal more consulted.
What Was in One
An almanac was the year, in twenty-four pages. A calendar, month by month. The phases of the moon. The times of sunrise and sunset. The tides. The dates of court sessions and fairs. A table of distances between towns. A chart of which kings had reigned.
And predictions. The weather for every week of the coming year, which was guesswork and everyone knew it. Eclipses, which were not guesswork at all. The almanac maker calculated them, by hand, months ahead, and when the moon went dark on the night he had named, a farmer in Pennsylvania who had never seen a telescope knew that the heavens ran on rules.
There was usually a woodcut of a naked man with lines running from the parts of his body to the signs of the zodiac. That told you when to bleed a horse.
And in the margins, filling the spaces, little sayings. Proverbs. Jokes. Verses.
Poor Richard
The famous one, of course, was printed a few blocks from where we were standing. Franklin started it in 1732 under an assumed name, a poor, henpecked stargazer called Richard Saunders. It ran for twenty-five years.
He opened the very first issue with a hoax. Poor Richard announced, with deep regret, that by his calculations his friend and rival almanac maker, a real man named Titan Leeds, would die on the seventeenth of October that year at 3:29 in the afternoon.
Leeds did not die. He said so, angrily, in his next almanac. Poor Richard replied that Leeds was plainly dead, since the real Leeds was too much of a gentleman to write such abuse, and someone must be using his name. He kept it up for years.
It sold enormously. That is how you launch a publication.
The Present
I brought in a modern headline, as I do. From Bohiney Magazine’s science page: “When Bad Instagram Meets Interstellar Objects: A Field Guide to NASA’s 3I/ATLAS Cosmic Blunder.” With a subtitle about learning to stop worrying and love the fuzzy ball of light.
I only have the heading and a line. But I know the thing it is about. Last year astronomers spotted an object passing through the solar system that came from outside it. From another star. It is only the third such visitor ever detected. It was named for the survey telescope that found it.
And when the pictures came out, they were, to the ordinary eye, a smudge. A fuzzy dot. People who had been promised a visitor from the stars looked at a gray blob and felt let down. I take it the piece has fun with that.
The Same Problem
This is exactly what the almanac was for.
In 1759 a comet appeared. An English astronomer, decades earlier, had predicted it would. He said the comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682 were the same object, on a long loop, and that it would be back around the end of 1758. He died before he could see if he was right.
It came. A professor at Harvard, John Winthrop, tracked it and lectured on it. And the almanacs carried the news out to the farms. Not a pillar of fire or a warning from God. A body, obeying a law, returning on schedule.
That was a hard thing to tell people. For most of history a comet meant a king was about to die. The preachers still said so. The almanac makers, quietly, in between the tide tables and the jokes, were telling their readers something else: it is a thing in the sky, and we know where it will be.
A comet to the naked eye is also a fuzzy ball of light. It was the explanation that made it wonderful.
Science Writing, 1750
What I want the students to see is that the almanac was America’s first popular science.
The men who made them were mostly self-taught. A Massachusetts innkeeper and doctor, Nathaniel Ames, put out the most popular one in New England for forty years and used it to explain Newton to people who would never read him. He wrote little essays on the size of the universe. He told his readers, in 1758, that someday their descendants would fill the continent and look back and read his almanac.
They got people used to the idea that the world could be calculated. I do not think you get a revolution based on self-evident truths and the laws of nature without two generations of farmers checking the eclipse against the almanac and finding it correct.
Fuzzy Balls
And I think the joke about the disappointing photograph is a real one. We have been spoiled. We expect the cosmos to look like a movie. The actual business of astronomy is, and always was, a faint dot whose position you measure very carefully for many nights.
What is astonishing about the interstellar visitor is not how it looks. It is that someone could tell, from the path of a smudge, that it did not come from here.
That is an almanac maker’s kind of wonder. I would like there to be more of it.
The Nail
One of my students, a quiet woman who drives for a delivery company, held the 1748 almanac in its cradle for a long time. She said, “My grandmother had one of these. Not this old. But she had the farmer’s one, on a nail. She planted by it.”
They are still printed. The same format. The hole in the corner.
Saturday
I went home and found the one my own grandmother kept, in a drawer. 1987. I have hung it on a nail by the stove, where it is no use at all.
My colleague from Leeds says the English had almanacs a century before we did, and worse ones. He steered me to the London Prat’s British satirical news on comets, and to a page of London satirical news about horoscopes that Franklin would have enjoyed, having killed off an astrologer in print himself.
Titan Leeds, incidentally, did eventually die, in 1738. Poor Richard reported it with satisfaction and claimed he had been right all along.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
