The Day The World Discovered The Sun - Plot & Excerpts
Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche had been living at his mountaintop observatory, avoiding contact with the superstitious townsfolk and instead looking to the skies. His lot, he’d surmised, was not to make inroads with the locals but rather, as a fellow French philosophe put it, to make “a communication of flying bridges, as it were, that reunite one continent with another and pursue all the tracks of the Sun.”1 Three days before, Chappe had pointed his nineteen-foot telescope at a solar eclipse, recording in his logbook the exact moment when the eclipse ended. His pendulum clock—which he’d previously set to noon when the sun reached its highest altitude in the sky—read 6:11 AM and 4 seconds. He’d already calculated that the same solar eclipse would be visible in St. Petersburg as well. So when he later returned through Russia’s capital city en route to Paris, Chappe could then compare notes with observers there. Since the eclipse ended at the same instant, whether seen from Tobolsk or St.
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