The serendipitous passage of the moon directly between the sun and the Earth on August 21 has brought eclipse mania to the U.S. Over the past month, we’ve seen countless visualizations of the phenomenon, from interactive websites to 3D fly-throughs. The last time a full eclipse was visible from East to West Coast, it was 1918–and the newspapers of the day applied their own visualization techniques to explain the cosmic event to readers.
The editors of the paper deliberately chose a drawing because, “prints from original negatives unfortunately fail utterly to convey to us any idea of the magnificence of the coronal structure.” The author of the story, Isabel M. Lewis from the United States Naval Observatory, wrote vividly of the eclipse–if this doesn’t make you want to see one, nothing will:
“It must be left to the painter to convey to the mind the superb coloring, the contrasting effect of the blood-red prominences, that were so conspicuous in this eclipse, with the grayish tinged disk of the occulting moon, the orange-tinged chromosphere and the pearly light of the coronal streamers interlaced to form the petals of some flowers gorgeous beyond description or curved into a series of gothic arches enveloping the most conspicuous prominences and towering to a height of more than two hundred thousand miles above the surface of the earth.”
When you see the photographs of eclipses printed from this era, it’s no wonder why the Washington Times chose a drawing. In Richmond, Virginia’s Times Dispatch from 1905, there are two blurry photos that do little to convey the eclipse’s unique emotional power or its scientific value.
“Ancient Astronomers Led Strenuous Lives–Chinese Believed Eclipses Due to Swallowing of the Sun by Dragons, and It Was Up to the Men of Science to Predict the Catastrophe–Two of Them Got Drunk and Overlooked the Coming Event, for Which Frightful Crime They Were Promptly Executed.”
In contrast, the New York Herald was much more measured with its graphical approach in 1875, showing scientific diagrams laying out how the phenomena occurs. The Omaha Daily Bee from 1905 has a full-page illustration showing the sun, the moon, the Earth, and the beam of shadow caused by the eclipse.
