Inset: Stephan Van Cullen White’s observatory is in the center of the lower right quadrant. (It’s a real word!)
I’m a huge fan of science, but by training I’m an historian. Or a historian.
Either way, as it turned out, the closest I came to being a professional historian was working as a researcher/reporter for a regional historical society in the 1970s. For a few months. And that’s another topic.
My background and interests help me appreciate the excitement experienced by a grad student who was focusing on the history of science.
A Scrapbook and the First American Astronomical Society
She’d been (metaphorically) digging through the old Hayden Planetarium library when she found a thick scrapbook: that hadn’t been catalogued.
That is why I prefer having physical access to archives.
Catalogs are handy, and I’m grateful that today’s information tech gives me limited access to a fair number of catalogs. But there’s no substitute for getting into the back stacks and going through everything: including what dropped through the cracks.
Anyway, this scrapbook “was stuffed with newspaper clippings, typed meeting transcripts, draft manuscripts of talks, and letters dated from 1883 to 1890….” (Trudy E. Bell, Sky & Telescope (April 2025))
To historians, a find like this is GOLD.
Trudy E. Bell1 found that scrapbook in 1976.
She figured the odds were good that it wasn’t the only scrapbook documenting the 1883 American Astronomical Society, since “the first volume seemed to end simply because it ran out of pages.” (Trudy E. Bell, Sky & Telescope (April 2025)
Fast-forward to early 1979. Paul W. Luther, an astronomy antiquarian bookseller, called Bell. He said he might have the second scrapbook.
This one showed up in an estate sale. It covered the Brooklyn Institute Astronomical Department’s first six decades: from June 1888 through 1948. That overlaps two years of the first scrapbook. Again: GOLD.
Archives and Attitudes
Finding a record of what someone said someone else said is good.
Finding the record of what someone else said, made by that particular someone else: that’s really good.
I’ve noticed that what ‘some guy said he heard’ doesn’t always line up with ‘what I said’: and both may be at odds with what the ‘what I said’ person wrote down before and after.
Those discrepancies — often, I hope, honest misapprehensions or the same idea approached from a different direction — are one reason I dig into what I can find while writing my more research-intensive posts.
Another reason I do the digging I do — besides my incurable curiosity about pretty much everything — is that articles and summaries leave out details that didn’t matter in that article or summary.
Which is what I’m doing this week — leaving out many details — since this isn’t a particularly research-heavy post. And besides, I’m focusing on something other than the first American Astronomical Society.
“Grandiose” Amateurs With “Considerable Pretensions”?
This isn’t the America, or the world, I grew up in.
I’m not happy about everything that’s changed. But in some ways — many ways — I like living in ‘the future’.
For one thing, science and scientists have become a great deal less stuffy.
Take how serious scientists and historians saw the first American Astronomical Society, for example:
“…Its apparently short-lived existence was known to 20th-century historians but largely dismissed. Richard Berendzen wrote in Physics Today (December 1974), ‘Almost predictably, the effort failed, undoubtedly in large part because it was not led by the only persons who could make it succeed, the professionals…’ In Social Studies of Science (1981), Marc Rothenberg added, ‘The grandiose name obscured the reality that this was simple a local amateur’s [sic] organization with considerable pretensions.’
(“The First ‘American Astronomical Society'”, Trudy E. Bell, Sky & Telescope (April 2025))
Well, some serious scientists and historians have loosened their collars, at any rate.
That said, I can, in a way, see their point.
Resources, Research, and Citizen Scientists
Someone who’s paid to use state-of-the-art equipment that costs more than most folks will see in their lifetime can observe, record, and organize a great deal of data: and make significant contributions to humanity’s knowledge and understanding.
A professional scientist like that will out-perform someone putting in a few hours each weekend with equipment that’s paid for by a household’s left-over cash. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for folks who’ll be curious: even when nobody’s paying them to use their brains.
A flip side to the professional/amateur comparison is that there are many more curious amateurs than more-or-less-well-paid experts.
And many of those amateurs will, arguably, know a great deal more about what’s going on in related fields than the highly-focused professional.
Researching the demographics and history of “citizen science” is more than I’ll try this week: or maybe ever.
I didn’t run into the “citizen science” phrase until a decade or so back, and don’t know how much it’s been studied as a part of humanity’s efforts to figure out how stuff works.
Maybe someone’s dug through paperwork that’s accumulated in archives, found enough scrapbooks, traced citations in the back of science journals — and written a comprehensive history of citizen science.
Some ‘citizen scientists’ are professional scientists who retired and finally have time to do their own research. Others are folks who enjoy paying attention, thinking about what they’ve noticed, and telling others what they’ve seen and what they think about it.
The good news is that today’s tech lets them get in touch with each other more easily. Even better, professional scientists — astronomers, at any rate — are now taking them seriously, and collaborating with them. Openly.
This is not the world I grew up in.
The First American Astronomical Society
I did a little checking: today’s American Astronomical Society (AAS) operates out of Washington DC. It’s been in operation since 1899 — and gets treated as the one and only ‘real’ AAS.
There’s no mention of another AAS. Not, at any rate, in resources I found after an exhaustive Google check: that lasted all of maybe two minutes 😉 — I did, however, find a bit about Stephan Van Cullen White’s observatory.
“…Its original owner was Jacob Campbell, a banker living in Brooklyn Heights, New York, and it was one of the largest privately-owned telescopes in the world. Mr. Campbell built a garden observatory in 1854, where he used the telescope until his death in 1864. The house, observatory and telescope were purchased the next year by Stephen Van Cullen-White, a lawyer. Disappointed with the views produced by the telescope, in 1867 he contracted Alvan Clark & Sons, the premier American telescope makers of the later nineteenth century, to refigure the objective lens. Mr. White became a very successful broker, banker, and U.S. representative, and he made the telescope available to local amateur astronomers and school classes. One teacher taking advantage of Mr. White’s generosity was Miss Sarah Whiting of the Brooklyn Heights Seminary who, in 1879, would come to Wellesley College as a physics professor….”
(“Fitz/Clark 12-in Refractor” , Whitin Observatory, Wellesley College. Wellesley, Massachusetts) [emphasis mine]
I’m mentioning Cullen White’s observatory because he’s one of the thirteen not-real-astronomers who started the American Astronomical Society — the one “with considerable pretensions” — in 1883, 16 years before the other one.
“On Monday evening, January 22, 1833, thirteen men gathered in the Brooklyn Heights mansion of Wall Street stockbroker Stephan Van Cullen White and formed what they called the American Astronomical Society. The Brooklyn group was the first astronomical body in the nation created purely to share knowledge rather than to establish an observatory….”
(“The First ‘American Astronomical Society'”, Trudy E. Bell, Sky & Telescope (April 2025))
According to her, the only known image of Stephan Van Cullen White’s observatory is in that 1879 Currier & Ives panoramic map.
She also said that the American Astronomical Society, the one founded in 1883, kept the name for about five years. Then, in 1888, it became the Astronomical Department of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Time passed, and now it’s the Brooklyn Museum.
When the ‘pretentious’ AAS became the presumably-respectable Astronomical Department of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, its organization didn’t change.
The same not-real-astronomers were running it.
But a whole lot more folks got involved.
Respectability does have advantages, and that’s yet another topic.
Participation and Pigeonholes
I’d been planning on writing about something else this week. Instead, I’ve been participating in a family activity: being slightly sick.
Nobody’s got a high fever, which suits us just fine. I don’t even have that: my temp has been a trifle below normal. I never did do ‘conformity’ particularly well.
And that’s yet again another topic.
The point of this week’s post, if it has one, is that I don’t see folks in any of my culture’s pigeonholes as having a monopoly on brains and curiosity.
And I’ve been glad to see so many folks who did manage to make a career out of being curious loosen up a bit about others who use their brains just for the fun of it.
Which isn’t to say that we’re now living in a perfect world.
I’ve talked about that before, sort of:
- “Surrounded by Beauty and Wonders: T Tauri Stars and Nebulae”
(November 2, 2024) - “Squishy Stars, Science, and Sirach”
(August 24, 2024) - “Science, Religion, and Saying Goodbye to the 19th Century”
(May 25, 2024) - “Doom, Gloom, and Dystopias: But Hope is an Option”
(January 20, 2024) - “Medieval Monkish Medicine: Scientific Before Science was a Thing”
(November 14, 2023)
1 Someone who’s sharing developments in our knowledge of this universe and humanity’s long story:
- Trudy E. Bell, M.A.
Science Writer
Having a specialization isn’t exactly a zero-sum game, no? Maybe Mr. Cullen White wasn’t mainly about astronomy, but he still believed in how much it matters to humanity. Again, I remember when I learned about science fiction and pretty much writing in general requiring knowledge beyond, well…writing. Thank you very much for this, Mr. Gill.
Indeed not! As with so much else in life, seeking and sharing knowledge leaves everyone with more than they started with. Also very true, what you said about writing: storytelling, as well as nonfiction, benefits from knowledge beyond wordcrafting. Finally: my pleasure!