No. 15183 William Cranch Bond
http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/09/william-cranch-bond
Harvard Magazine, September-October, 2015
William Cranch Bond. Brief life of Harvard’s first astronomer: 1789-1859. By Alan Hirshfeld
An 1849 portrait of Bond by Cephas Giovanni Thompson. Portrait courtesy of Harvard University Portrait Collection, H180. Image: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College
Two hundred years ago, during the late summer of 1815, 26-year-old William Cranch Bond unexpectedly spent a night on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Harvard’s emissary to Britain’s astronomers had gone to fetch travel funds from the University’s local agent, only to learn the man was away. But next morning, Bond managed to borrow money and took up his mission: inspecting the kingdom’s observatories and telescopes to help Harvard build a world-class astronomical facility.
Bond was an unlikely embodiment of Harvard’s cosmic aspirations: a grade-school dropout, he had spent workdays in his father’s modest Boston shop, fabricating and repairing timepieces. But at night, he was a skilled amateur astronomer: the first U.S. observer to sight the faint, white blur that swelled into the Great Comet of 1811, a feat that led to his Harvard commission.
The young nation was an astronomical wasteland. President John Quincy Adams, A.B. 1787, complained to Congress in 1825 that Europe had more than 130 observatories, while the United States had none. Harvard had prodded wealthy Bostonians four times to underwrite a research-grade telescope, without success.
Meanwhile, Bond’s clock-making business flourished, its precision chronometers prized by New England shippers and the U.S. Navy. In 1819, his fortunes secure, he married his cousin Selina Cranch and settled into a large clapboard house at 158 East Cottage Street in Dorchester. The family parlor was sacrificed to astronomy, with a multi-ton, granite telescope pier emplaced in the floor and an observing aperture sawed through the ceiling. Smaller telescope-mounting stones dotted the yard, topped by Bond’s growing array of instruments obtained from Europe or lent by Harvard.
By the mid 1830s, his observatory had become the U.S. nexus of precision astronomy. So accurate was his celestial-based determination of his latitude and longitude that the navy’s 1838-1842 South Pacific exploration mission referenced the geographic coordinates of foreign ports not to Washington, D.C., but to Bond’s house.
In 1839, Harvard president Josiah Quincy came calling. Seeking to capitalize on public interest stoked by the recent passage of Halley’s Comet, he invited Bond to move his family into Dana House, on the school’s Cambridge campus (where Lamont Library now stands). Bond was to bring his astronomical equipment, turning the building into Harvard’s de facto observatory, with Bond as “Astronomical Observer.” Quincy offered no salary, later explaining, “It was the day…of pennies, not dollars, in the college treasury.”
Bond agreed. But the site, hard up against buildings and trees, proved far from optimal. Bond had to bore a sighting hole through a nearby barn to align his specialized meridian telescope to a masonry pylon 12 miles south, atop Great Blue Hill in Milton. One Harvard wag described a revolving turret added to the Dana House roof as “a caboose…with a telescope that commands an unobstructed view of all the chambers in the neighborhood.”
Four years into Bond’s appointment, the spectacular Comet of 1843 appeared, brightening until its tail could be seen in broad daylight. In its wake, Bostonians poured $35,000 into Harvard’s coffers to establish an observatory. On Bond’s recommendation, Harvard ordered a top-quality, 15-inch refractor telescope from Germany and acquired acreage for the facility on Summer-House (now Observatory) Hill, northwest of Harvard Yard.
No. 15900 Daguerrotype of the Moon. An 1852 daguerreotype of the moon, taken by John Adams Whipple with Bond’s aid
Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory
In 1844, the 55-year-old Bond transferred his family and his instruments to the bucolic grounds of the new Harvard College Observatory. He continued to work without pay until Harvard learned in 1846 that the Naval Observatory was trying to recruit him. He promptly received an annual salary of $1,500, plus a $640 stipend for his son George, by this time his devoted assistant.
Harvard’s gleaming new telescope lens arrived from Germany soon after and was installed in a sleek, mahogany-faced tube. In June 1847, the instrument was secured to a massive granite pier, sheltered under a 30-foot, copper-clad dome that revolved on eight cannonballs. The crystal-clear views of heavenly bodies exceeded expectations. “The revelation was sublime,” Bond wrote of his first glimpse of the Orion Nebula. “It is delightful to see the stars brought out which have been hid in mysterious light from the human eye, since the creation.” For two decades, the “Great Refractor” reigned as the nation’s largest telescope. Among its discoveries were Saturn’s eighth moon, Hyperion, and that planet’s diaphanous crepe ring.
Equally significant were Bond’s seminal experiments in celestial photography, at the behest of Boston daguerreotypist John Adams Whipple. In 1850, a 90-second exposure of Vega yielded the first photograph of any star other than the sun. The following year, Bond and Whipple’s daguerreotype of the moon created a sensation at the international exhibition held in London’s Crystal Palace.
When Bond died, his son George became director of the observatory, remaining true to his father’s credo: “An astronomical observer to be useful in his vocation should give up the world, he must have a good eye, a delicate touch, and above all, entire devotion to the pursuit.” Today’s Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is the legacy of a Dorchester clockmaker who selflessly strove to make Harvard the hub of scientific exploration of the universe.
Alan Hirshfeld, professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, is an associate of the Harvard College Observatory and the author most recently of Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe.
The following is from notes on the Bond Family for the Huebener Brick Collection at the Dorchester Historical Society
The Bond family traced its lineage back to the time of William the Conqueror in 1066. Thomas Bond, a chemist and surgeon in Plymouth in 1750, married Thomazine Phillips. Of their four children, only one, William, had children of his own. William Bond was born in Plymouth England on October 4, 1754. He married Hannah Cranch of Kingsbridge in 1777, and they came to this country in 1786. William and Hannah settled in Falmouth, Casco Bay (now Portland) in May 1786, bringing with them their two children Thomazine and Thomas. William Cranch Bond, their son who was born in America, said: “The brig John in which they came had been chartered by my father for that and commerical purposes. He was made a free citizen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by special act of the General Court, passed November 23, 1785.”3 William engaged in shipping lumber from Casco Bay to Bristol, England, and he also established a branch station on Frenchman’s Bay. When this venture proved unsuccessful, the family moved to Boston, where he began business as a silversmith and watch and clockmaker, trades he had learned in London in his youth.4 William Bond died in Cambridge in 1848.
William Cranch Bond was born in Portland, Maine, September 9, 1789. It was necessary for the young Bond to do his part towards supporting the family. He early evinced the ingenuity and fertility in mechanical contrivances for which he was subsequently distinguised. At the age of ten (1799) he made a wooden clock, and became famous among his playfellows for his skill in the manufacture of traps, toys, etc. He left the public school at an early age and became an admirable workman. At the age of fifteen (1804) he constructed a satisfactory shop chronometer, and at about the same time a quadrant, which was also a very serviceable instrument. His attention was turned to astronomy by the remarkable total solar eclipse of 1806, when the sun was hidden for no less than five minutes. The comet of 1811 was discovered in Europe, but with no knowledge of that discovery, Bond discovered it independently. He loved science for itself, and cultivated it with a private passion–he had been observing the great comet of 1811 for months before his observations came to the knowledge of Professor Farrar of Harvard and Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch of Boston.
Farrar and Bowditch, who were planning an observatory for Harvard, gave Bond the mission of making examinations of the building at Greenwich when they learned that he was planning a trip abroad in 1815. In 1819 he married for his first wife his cousin Selina Cranch in Kingsbridge, Devonshire. They had six children: William Cranch Bond Jr., Joseph Cranch, George Phillips, Richard Fifield, Elizabeth Lidstone, Selina Cranch. After his wife’s death in 1831, William Cranch Bond married her elder sister Mary Roope Cranch, who left no children.
No. 2001 William Cranch Bond House. Scan of photograph in the collection of the Dorchester Historical Society.
The first house that he owned was in Dorchester. The only parlor was sacrificed to science and converted into an observatory. A huge granite block, some tons in weight, rose in the center of the room, and the ceiling was intersected by a meridian opening. There were stone blocks in the gardens and neighboring fields as well for the tupport of instruments, meridian marks,etc. Life was not easy, and he spent his evenings as a watchmaker to meet the current household expenses. In 1838 when he received an appointment from the United States Government to cooperate with the exploring expedition of Com. Charles Wilkes, although his equipment was amply sufficient, he added new buildings and a new suite of instruments. In a short time a new observatory was erected in Dorchester and was fully equipped for investigation of magnetic and meteorological elements.
Scan of photograph in the collection of the Dorchester Historical Society. Written on back: No. 158 W.C. Bond house showing west end. William Cranch Bond’s grandson was later Dr. William Cranch Bond Fifield of Dorchester.
No. 2003 William Cranch Bond House
Then in 1839 he reluctantly moved to Cambridge to take the position of Director of the Harvard College Observatory, which however afforded no salary until the year 1846. Until then life continued much the same with Bond having to earn his living with jobs outside astronomy. His sons helped out in the Observatory as they had in the Dorchester home. William Cranch Bond, Jr., died an untimely death in 1841, and his father was deprived of an able assistant. George P. Bond helped his father and succeeded him as Director of the Observatory when Bond died in 1859.
No. 5428 Harvard College Observatory. Illustration from Memorials of William Cranch Bond and George Phillips Bond.
George Phillips Bond was born in Dorchester in 1825 and died in Cambridge in 1865. He married Harriet Gardner Harris in 1853, and they had children: Elizabeth Lidstone Bond; Cahterine Harris Bond; Harriet Denny Bond (died in infancy). George attended Harvard College and took over the directorship of the Observatory after his father died. Although the chronometer and clock business of the firm of William Bond & Son was successful, George could not keep up a personal investment in the Observatory to match that of his father, and he always felt guilty about that. Nonetheless he carried on the activities of the Observatory at a high level and made his own discoveries. In 1865 he became the first American to receive a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society for services to science.
- Baker map 1831
- Memorials of William Cranch Bond and George Phillips Bond by Edward S. Holden. San Francisco: C.A. Murdock & Co.; New York: Lemcke & Buechner, 1897.
- Memorials
- Memorials — all information nearly verbatim from this source