The Day the World Discovered the Sun (2 page)

For a seafaring nation, discovering the distance to the sun meant advancing the frontiers of knowledge intimately connected to national security. As officials from the rival British Royal Society reminded their nation's Admiralty in a 1760 letter, Venus transit voyages required top priority attention because they constituted “the promotion of a science so intimately connected with the art of navigation as well as for the honour of the nation.”
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For reasons that were scientific and geopolitical—if not also theological—Venus transit expeditions had become paramount. Even if they meant traveling to a remote and frigid location like Siberia. Although Russian scientists were already preparing their own expeditions to observe the Venus transit, the French Academy of Sciences had secured Chappe an invitation to make his own competing measurements of the celestial event at Tobolsk. Entrée to the Russian empire, with the empress's blessing no less, spurred Chappe and his party into the Siberian beyond.

For the next eight nights, however, Chappe would enjoy a warm bed in the comfort of one of the great cosmopolitan centers of Europe. His timing was propitious. New Year's Day in imperial Vienna was like a red-carpeted runway, providing the excuse every monied house in the city needed to strut like a peacock in full fan.

On New Year's morning, the entire society—peasants, landed gentry, middle-class burghers, the indigent—all gathered outside the imperial Hofburg palace, where the Royal Bodyguards, ministers of state, and the city's leading aristocratic families paraded through the square in flamboyant dress uniforms and courtly regalia. National identities in this crossroads city jockeyed for placement, with German soldiers marching first in line, followed by Polish soldiers and Hungarian troops in silvery uniforms and holstered sabers that glinted in the late morning sun.
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As a visiting French dignitary, Chappe would have stayed with the French ambassador to Vienna, the Duke de Praslin—or at least enjoyed lodgings arranged by the ambassador.

When Chappe arrived, de Praslin was caught up in a particularly busy time for a diplomat. On New Year's afternoon, families of wealth, power, and prestige gathered throughout Vienna for lavish parties that carried on well into the night. It was prime time, in other words, for a minister of state to ply and expand his network of connections.

As the afternoon shadows lengthened across the snowy streets, opulent carriages approached the city's stately homes and paused as dandified gentlemen and bejeweled ladies alighted. For a well-educated Frenchman staying in a posh part of town, Chappe didn't need a translator to understand the partygoers' chatter. Public conversations in upper-class Vienna were in French, still the language of the refined and courtly set.

Inviting aromas emanating from the kitchens of the well-heeled provided an olfactory tour of Europe: chocolate from Milan, pheasant from Bohemia, fresh oysters from Istria. Enticing music also warmed the air, as Viennese nobles prided themselves in their musical sophistication—hiring some of the finest concert maestros in the world to provide entertainment. At the time, for instance, a twenty-eight-year-old composer named Franz Joseph Haydn (four years younger than Chappe) was practically reinventing the symphony as musical director for Vienna's wealthy Morzin family.
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Once the New Year revels had ended, though, life at court returned to its normal state of angst. Austria was caught up in a brutal war with Prussia—putting her conscripted soldiers through battlefield abattoirs like the battle of Torgau, in which 7,000 Austrians gave their lives in one day. France, Austria's reluctant ally, wanted out of the coffer-draining conflagration, and Chappe's host was already working on his new job for 1761: convince Her Majesty to consider a peace treaty with her hated rival, Prussia's Frederick the Great.

Chappe, on the other hand, carried no such worldly baggage when he paid an invited visit to the empress and her husband, Franz I—that rare emperor who preferred to leave politics and governance to his wife.
Chappe climbed the Hofburg palace stairs to the library, where the royal couple waited to receive their learned guest.

Although Maria Theresa herself had no interest in science, the emperor did. A statesman with his own intellectual passions, Franz I showed his French visitor the biggest and most comprehensive collection of rare minerals, fossils, corals, and shells in all of Europe. The emperor's natural history cabinet—boasting 30,000 specimens collected from across the globe—even included “thunderstones” from Croatia and Bohemia. Today called meteorites, these melted miniature chunks of asteroid were at the time thought to be small pieces of earth superheated by lightning strikes.
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Chappe spent his week in Vienna mingling with the great scientific researchers working there. Gerard van Swieten, personal physician to the empress, for instance, shared the latest Viennese discoveries on the use of “electricity with great success in the [treatment of] rheumatism and other disorders of the like nature,” as Chappe later recorded.
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The prince of Liechtenstein entertained Chappe at Vienna's imperial arsenal. The sixty-four-year-old Austrian military director general—who had overhauled the entire artillery, a redesign that Napoleon's generals later copied—welcomed his French guest at a suite in the military compound. Filled with state-of-the-art cannon but missing the pungent battlefield smells of death and burnt gunpowder, the prince's receiving room also had the air of a mini-mausoleum. Marble statues of Maria Theresa, Franz I, and Liechtenstein himself greeted the French visitor. Liechtenstein's school of artillery science had become one of the best in the world, so Chappe perhaps made polite conversation with his host about matters relevant to the school—explosive propulsion or trajectory calculation, for instance. Chappe also recorded accepting the prince's gift of regional fossils and local geological samples for study at his leisure.
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Chappe faced the bracing January winds on a visit to the rooftop observatory at the University of Vienna. The observatory's director was
Hungarian Jesuit Maximilian Höll, who had Latinized his name as “Hell.” Father Hell showed his guest the telescope that would point at the sun on June 6—the Holy Roman Empire's chief witness of Venus crossing the solar disk.

Hell, a lean and intent man with a piercing gaze, discussed sky and earth with his French visitor, whose pudgier frame and baby-faced visage concealed an overriding pride at least Hell's equal. Both men of God and men of science, Hell and Chappe had as much in common as anyone Chappe would meet in Vienna. And they shared the animating passion of knowing the Creator better by better studying his creation.

Bookshelves around the observatory showcased Hell's greatest accomplishment to date. Under his direction five years before, the observatory had begun turning out its own celestial almanacs—forecasting daily sunrise and sunset times as well as regular positions of the moon, the planets, and the moons of Jupiter. These tools enabled precision navigation anywhere on the planet and inspired great pride, even in an empire that lacked a great navy.

Chappe, whose plain dress may have lost the battle of sartorial rank, retained the upper hand throughout his meeting with Hell. As a lifelong observer of the skies, Hell knew he would find no greater career-advancing opportunity than the two upcoming Venus transits. But all Hell could do this time was go to the roof and log another day. His Viennese data would be all but irrelevant beyond the walls of his own observatory. By contrast, learned men across Europe would be eagerly awaiting posts from Chappe.

The transit's extremes—the places on earth where Venus takes the longest and shortest length of time to cross the disk of the sun—produced some of the most valuable data for calculating the sun's distance. According to his colleague Delisle's all-important
Mappemonde
, Chappe was headed to one of the key stations on earth to observe the 1761 transit: the “Halleyan pole” where Venus would be taking the shortest time to cross the sun. “As the transit of Venus over the sun would not be performed
in less time in this capital of Siberia than in any other part of the globe,” Chappe later recalled, “it could not have been viewed to so much advantage anywhere else.”
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Chappe's observation promised to be one of the most important early measurements of the physical size of the solar system. The prospects of such groundbreaking science tantalized Hell: a single scientific adventure that could secure one's own historical legacy.

The screech of metal sliding over rock announced that the sleigh was stuck. No one was going anywhere. Cacophonous chatter among the Russian sleigh drivers broke the final seal on this otherwise quiet early evening. Stepping onto sled runners that had nothing to glide on, Chappe saw little else but dark. With no moon in the sky, two sources of dim light cast pale shadows on the patchy snow. To the west, the brilliant Milky Way formed a horizon-to-horizon hoop framing Chappe's entire world. And off to the southwest beamed Venus, that tiny beacon. It was setting.

For these travelers, though, the night was just beginning. Chappe's Russian translator, hired sixteen days before in Warsaw, was drunk beyond saving. “We could neither make him listen to reason nor hold his tongue,” Chappe later wrote of his Siberian journey.
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So the scientist was left to deal with the belligerent drivers himself. They quarreled and fumed, although over what Chappe had no idea. The frigid night lent a sense of urgency to an otherwise rather comical situation. Suffering frostbite—or worse—was a real possibility if they did not get help. Chappe fortunately did have a multilingual communicator with him: a single Russian ruble (equivalent to about $75 today). Showing it to his drivers, Chappe conveyed through gestures and whatever words the group had in common that he'd pay one of the drivers to go back to Riga
and get help. Everyone volunteered. Each volunteer took a horse and shot off toward town, leaving Chappe and his babbling translator behind with the abandoned sleighs.

By midnight, torches and townsfolk—plus a false start involving more bribes and torn rope—had finally set the party moving again, back on carriage wheels.

As his carriage bumped along, Chappe caught a little sleep through a turbulent night. The snow grew heavier, though, and before long they wished they were back on sledges again. A morning snow squall left the carriages barely moving forward as the horses stopped every minute. To make matters worse, the baggage carriage overturned into a ditch with a tremendous crash. Earlier in the journey, when traveling by coach from Paris to Strasbourg, his group's baggage cart suffered a similar calamity. In his wreck outside Strasbourg, Chappe had jumped out of his carriage to check on the delicate scientific instruments in the cart. At the moment, though, the road-weary traveler had no impulse to dive into the snowy wreckage. Over an unpleasant din of whinnies, blows, and snorts, horses were settled down and reharnessed, and the carriage was righted. The road widened as the sun sank.

Just outside of Wolmar (today Valmiera, Latvia), the wind, in concert with a hedgerow of trees, had swept out a long line of snow banks. The coachmen carefully drove the horses through the gauntlet. The road beneath remained rocky as before, although the banks' smooth-blown surfaces fleetingly suggested fewer potholes in the road than there actually were. Then everything sank. As suddenly as a musket shot, the startled horses and lead carriage fell into a snowed-over sinkhole. Once Chappe and his companions recovered from the shock, they looked around to see the entire stagecoach had been buried. Only an opening in the vehicle's roof allowed the battered passengers to exit. The horses struggled to keep their heads above the snow, their eyes wide with panic.

The driver of the baggage carriage—which remained outside the sinkhole—jumped down and unhitched his team. The once quiet Russian
roadside now echoed with a brace of shouts, heaves, and misunderstood commands. All hands now worked to rescue the animals and the buried coach from their icy interment using the only horsepower they had available. No bribes (at least none Chappe considered worth recording) passed hands this time as one of the drivers rode to town to get shovels. The group spent the better part of the day excavating the horses, vehicle, and equipment from the snowdrift.

Their cold, wet clothes, icy gear, and shell-shocked steeds made the drivers swear off carriage wheels for good. At the next town, the drivers installed runners on the convertible carriage. And at the next major posting station—the university town of Derpt (present-day Tartu, Estonia)—the travelers traded the converted vehicles for horse-drawn sleighs.

This time the weather cooperated, and no snowless patches conspired to hinder the group's progress. Sobering windchills kept normally exposed cheeks and necklines hidden beneath scarves and collars. But other than the trouble of additional layers, the party's final fortnight toward St. Petersburg was smooth as the ride itself.

As the travelers approached the colossal Russian palace that was their destination on February 13, familiar sounds that Chappe and his servants hadn't heard since Vienna pricked up their ears—conversations in courtly French. Russian empress Elizabeth, although largely uneducated, took pride in importing erudite western European culture into her realm. To her, this meant all things French: language, music, dance, art, and cuisine.
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Elizabeth's Winter Palace—stunning and magnificent like Versailles—offered up French gastronomical delights for the starving travelers. And its halls resounded with French courtly music like the harpsichord variations of Jacques Duphly or clavichord compositions of Johann Schobert.