Book Description
Nineteenth-century European astronomers tried for decades to explain the variations in their careful astronomical observations. But where the best minds in Europe failed, and intellectual upstart from America succeeded. In 1891 Seth Carlo Chandler Jr., an actuary for a Boston insurance company with no formal education in astronomy, shocked the international scientific community by announcing that he had solved the problem and that an inexpensive instrument he had designed could detect the variation of latitude. Another American, Simon Newcomb, working at the U.S. Naval Observatory validated Chandler's findings and reconciled the difference between his observations and accepted theory.
Chandler's discovery, dubbed "the Chandler Wobble," had profound significance to astronomers of the time and later played an important role in space exploration and the development of the revolutionary Global Positioning System (GPS). The authors, a father-daughter team of scientists, tell the remarkable story of Chandler's life and scientific works with the aid of private correspondence, documents, and family photographs. In recounting both the historical and dramatic human aspects of the story, they help readers appreciate how Chandler's achievements gave America credibility in the world of serious scientific research.
From the Author
In researching the late 19th and early 20th century scientific literature to write "Latitude" we were amazed not to find any publications in which Karl Friedrich Kustner (1856 - 1936) made any reference to the work of S. C. Chandler, Jr. Because Chandler published his first results in the leading German astronomical journal of the day (Astronomische Nachrichten, vol. 112, no. 2672,pp113-20)it is difficult to believe that Kustner did not know about Chandler's work. Did he completely ignore it because Chandler was just an amateur astronomer from the scientifically backward United States? Or, did he use Chandler's findings to validate his own observations, which he had left unfinished and unpublished for some four years? We think these questions must be answered before the history of the discovery of the variation of latitude (polar motion) can be considered fully known, and the proper recognition assigned. We would greatly appreciate any light that our German colleagues may be able to shed on this aspect of the history - our attempts to research historical German records were severely limited by our lack of skill in reading German.
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