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In 1874, the public in the Americas and most of Europe could experience the transit of Venus only vicariously through the media of print and lecture. In contrast, the 1882 transit would be seen, at least in part, throughout the United States and the areas of Europe that had missed out in 1874. Public interest ran very high, stimulated by newspapers and periodicals and by a piquant awareness of the rarity of the event, and probably attained to the notoriously high levels associated with the returns of Halley’s Comet (Cottam et al. 2011).

AstrophotographyAlthough experiments with light-sensitive chemicals began in the early 19th century, it was not until the late 1830s that Louis Daguerre Daguerre, Louis in France and Henry Fox Talbot Talbot, Henry Foxin England found ways to indefinitely preserve an image on either glass or paper. Early emulsions required very long exposures, but by 1850 the daguerrotype process had been sufficiently improved for an image of the star Vega to be obtained using the 15-inch refractor at Harvard College Observatory.Harvard College Observatory

“How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steamship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,” wrote Walt Whitman in his paean to Heroes in the poem “Song of Myself.” He was referring to the loss of the steamship S.S. San Francisco bound from New York on its maiden voyage to its namesake port when it encountered a storm while traversing the Gulf Stream three hundred miles from Sandy Hook. San Francisco had been built for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and launched the previous June, promising to be “superior to anything that has yet

On the eve of the 1874 transit of Venus, an educated person, looking back to the last such event in 1769, might well conclude that the intervening 105 years had seen greater changes to the world than in any previous interval of like duration. Some of the period’s events were literally revolutionary: the American Revolution, the French Revolution followed by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Latin American Revolutions, and the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. New nations had arisen in the Americas, including the United States, while in Europe both Italy and Germany had become unified.