Simon Newcomb

Canadian-born American astronomer

• Born: March 12, 1835
• Birthplace: Wallace, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Died: July 11, 1909
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

As superintendent of The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac and later as director of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Newcomb undertook a complete revision of the data used for calculating the positions of the planets, and his work led to the adoption of a new set of international standards for astronomical calculations.

Early Life

Simon Newcomb was taught by his father, an itinerant Nova Scotia schoolmaster, but otherwise had no formal education as a child. Nevertheless, he developed an intense interest in learning and felt keenly deprived by the intellectual poverty of the primitive rural area in which he grew up. He later described his childhood as “one of sadness,” likened its primitive conditions to growing up at the time of the American Revolution, and titled the chapter of his autobiography on his childhood “The World of Cold and Darkness.”

At the age of sixteen, Newcomb entered into apprenticeship with an herbalist but soon became disenchanted with the man’s unscientific practices and left Canada. In Maine, he signed aboard a ship that sailed for Salem, Massachusetts, where he rejoined his father, who had moved there previously. The two then moved to Maryland, where Simon taught in rural schools for two years. In 1856, he became a private tutor near Washington, D.C., and took advantage of the location by frequently visiting libraries in the capital city. In that setting, Newcomb finally began to experience the intellectual stimulation that he had craved. During his spare time, he studied such subjects as religion, economics, and astronomy.

In 1857, Newcomb took a job at The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, which was then located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also began studying mathematics and conducting research at Harvard University. One of his first noteworthy achievements was a study of the orbits of the asteroids. His findings showed that it was unlikely that the asteroids had formed from the breakup of a planet, as was then widely supposed. In 1860, he participated in one of the most ill-fated eclipse expeditions in history. The journey required travel by rail, stagecoach, and canoe into remote central Canada and was repeatedly delayed by storms and flooded rivers. Members of the expedition finally reached a site for viewing the eclipse after twenty-four hours of nonstop canoe travel, only to have the eclipse itself hidden from their view by clouds.

Life’s Work

When the U.S. Civil War broke out in 1861, a number of officers at the U.S. Naval Observatory resigned in order to join fighting units, and Newcomb was appointed to fill one of the vacancies. In 1864, he and other observatory staff members were called to active duty for a short time when Confederate forces briefly threatened to attack Washington, D.C.

As Newcomb gained experience in astronomical calculations, it became apparent to him that the best available tables for predicting the positions of the moon were yielding unacceptably large errors. In 1870, he took advantage of an eclipse expedition to Gibraltar to visit most of the major observatories of Europe and to make an extended visit to Paris.

Newcomb’s visit to Paris in May, 1871, came at a remarkably unfortunate time. The Franco-Prussian War had only recently ended, and Paris was under siege and occupied by a revolutionary government, the Commune, which would be violently suppressed not long after Newcomb’s departure. Although Newcomb described Paris in a letter as a “slumbering volcano,” he was nevertheless able to spend six weeks at the Paris Observatory without mishap. During that time, he was delighted to discover many good records of the moon’s position dating back to 1675—three-quarters of a century earlier than previously known historical data. He termed this discovery the greatest find he ever made.

Precise predictions of the motions of the sun, moon, and planets are necessary for accurate navigation and timekeeping. When Newcomb assumed the post of superintendent of The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac in 1877, the almanacs then being issued by various nations differed significantly in the fundamental quantities they used in calculating planetary predictions. To improve the accuracy of the predictions, Newcomb and his assistants had to recalculate the positions of the stars and planets from original observations. They also had to detect, assess, and correct errors in existing almanacs. Of this work, Newcomb said:

One might almost say it involved repeating, in a space of ten or fifteen years, an important part of the world’s work in astronomy for more than a century past.

The work of Newcomb and his collaborators set such a high standard that an international conference in 1896 agreed to use their data compiled as the basis for all astronomical calculations. Despite this recognition of his work, Newcomb once wrote that he had never been able to confine his attention to astronomy “with that exclusiveness which is commonly considered necessary to the highest success in any profession.” This was a remarkable admission from a scientist who achieved the highest success in his profession.

Another of Newcomb’s interests quite separate from astronomy was economics. He first became recognized as an economist with a short book warning of the dangers of debased currency during the Civil War. In 1886, he published Principles of Political Economy , a 550-page book in which he approached economics in a way that might be expected from an astronomer: by stating simple, fundamental laws and then developing the consequences of those laws in greater and greater detail. However, Newcomb was quite aware of the limitations of economics as a science and its weaknesses in deciding policy.

One of Newcomb’s less successful scientific efforts was his analysis of the possibility of powered heavier-than-air flight. He reasoned that the ability of a craft to fly depended on the area of its wings and therefore on the square of its dimensions, but concluded, incorrectly, that the aircraft’s weight would increase as the cube of its dimensions, and therefore any machine large enough to support a human being would be impossibly heavy. What Newcomb failed to anticipate was that future construction methods would employ materials that maintained the necessary strength but reduce weight. More important, he failed to take into account the importance of wing cross-section in generating lift. Newcomb published an analysis of the problem in a news magazine, The Independent, in October, 1903. Less than two months later, two bicycle builders, Wilbur and Orville Wright, successfully flew a heavier-than-air craft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, after making careful studies of lift and wing design.

In 1908, Newcomb was diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. He died on July 11, 1909, in Washington, D.C.

Significance

The awe that Newcomb felt as a young man when he finally came into contact with a world of learning never entirely left him. His autobiography suggests a man interested in almost everything he encountered. He wrote about historically obscure assistants with the same personal attention that he applied to the most illustrious scientists of his day. He spent far more effort describing the events around him and the people he met than he did on the technical details of his own work.

Precise projections of the motions of astronomical bodies are necessary for accurate navigation. After Newcomb assumed the post of superintendent of The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, he developed measurements that served as the international standard for accuracy until 1984. His measurements were superseded only after the development of radar-ranging of planets and spacecraft, electronic computers, and improved mathematical techniques made it possible to achieve even greater accuracy. Nevertheless, in the twenty-first century, numerous astronomical computer programs were still using simplified versions of Newcomb’s original methods.

Newcomb received a large number of scientific honors during his lifetime. In addition, Cape Newcomb, Greenland, was named after him, as was the World War II naval surveying ship the USS Simon Newcomb. Craters on the Moon and Mars bear his name, as does an asteroid named Newcombia. In 1978, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada founded the Simon Newcomb Award to honor achievements in astronomical writing. When the the Astronomical Society of the Pacific awarded him a medal, it stated that Newcomb “has done more than any other American since [Benjamin] Franklin to make American science respected and honoured throughout the entire world.”

Bibliography

Carter, Bill, and Merri Sue Carter. Latitude: How American Astronomers Solved the Mystery of Variation. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002. Careful measurements of the positions of stars show that the earth does not rotate smoothly on its axis but wobbles slightly. Newcomb’s precise determination of star positions were central to the discovery and understanding of this phenomenon.

Dick, Steven J. Sky and Ocean Joined: The U.S. Naval Observatory, 1830-2000. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Newcomb’s directorship of the U.S. Naval Observatory propelled the institution into the front ranks of world astronomical centers and occupies a prominent place in this history of the observatory.

Moyer, Albert E. A Scientist’s Voice in American Culture: Simon Newcomb and the Rhetoric of Scientific Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Biography, focusing on Newcomb’s advocacy of the scientific method, and how his position spurred support for science and raised numerous social, culture, and intellectual issues.

Newcomb, Simon. Principles of Political Economy. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966. A reprint of Newcomb’s book of 1886. Newcomb the economist was strikingly like Newcomb the astronomer, viewing the world as the rational product of predictable forces. However, Newcomb was not a blind believer in economic forces, and he also stressed the limitations of economics in making societal decisions.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Reminiscences of an Astronomer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903. Newcomb’s rambling autobiography is written in somewhat stuffy Victorian prose but beneath the formality, Newcomb’s interest in people and events both great and small shows through.