The advent of Carleton’s astronomy department and subsequent acclaim for Goodsell Observatory in the late 19th century can be traced almost entirely to one man.
Year round, on the first Friday of every month, visitors from the Northfield community and the Twin Cities line up to gaze at the stars through the telescopes in Goodsell Observatory. It’s a tradition that’s almost as old as the college itself—begun in 1878 by William Wallace Payne, whose passion for astronomy helped put a fledgling college in rural Minnesota on the map.
Astronomy professor William Wallace Payne
First Carleton president James W. Strong
When Payne came to Carleton in September 1871 to teach mathematics and natural philosophy, he joined a faculty of three: President James W. Strong, who was also a professor of mental and moral philosophy; Horace Goodhue, who taught Latin, Greek, and mathematics; and Sarah Dow, who was principal of the “ladies’ department” and teacher of Latin language and literature. A native of Michigan, Payne earned a bachelor’s degree at Hillsdale College and then studied law at the University of Michigan and the Chicago Law School. He arrived in Minnesota in 1868, practiced briefly as an attorney in Mantorville, then wound up as the Dodge County superintendent of schools. From Dodge County he took the mathematics job at Carleton, where he began teaching astronomy as well.
Payne had taken an undergraduate astronomy course at Hillsdale and spent a summer in an astronomy class at Oberlin. But as one of his successors at Carleton later wrote: “His knowledge of astronomy at the time he took up his work at Carleton was very limited.”
Undaunted, Payne learned as he taught. Stargazing was a popular pastime in late-19th-century America as the art of lens making improved and telescopes became more readily available to the public. Payne’s class drew immediate interest, and he boldly decided to lobby President Strong for funds to construct an observatory. Fund-raising was already under way when Payne went off to the Cincinnati Observatory one summer to take deeper instruction in astronomy and the use of astronomical instruments. Erected in 1878 on the ground where Laird Hall stands now, Carleton’s first observatory was a wooden structure that cost $7,000 and housed a state-of-the-art 8.25-inch refractor telescope manufactured by Alvin Clark.
The resulting boon to Carleton’s reputation can be traced to a somewhat unlikely source: the railroads. As train tracks spread throughout the west following the Civil War, the ability to tell time accurately became essential in order to prevent trains from colliding due to unreliable and imprecise calculations of “local” time.
“For the most part, towns set their own time according to when the sun was overhead—that was noon,” says Doug Foxgrover, a communication and training coordinator in Carleton’s information technology department. “If you owned a train company and you wanted your train to leave your station and head west on your track at noon, but noon meant something different to me at my station in a town just down the line, then we had a problem.”
Astronomers also needed precise timekeeping to know exactly where and when heavenly bodies could be viewed through a telescope, so observatories were equipped with the most sophisticated clocks of the day. Carleton’s observatory featured a pair of clocks that had been manufactured by E. Howard & Co. in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Since Carleton’s was the only observatory west of Cincinnati at the time, Payne saw an opportunity. He installed a telegraph line at the observatory and started a time service that soon set time for more than 12,000 miles of tracks—east to Chicago, west to the Pacific coast, and north into Canada. Although the time service was not lucrative—the railroads didn’t pay for it at all until 1887—it was valuable in terms of the publicity it garnered for Carleton.
In 1883 Payne started a time service in St. Paul, where city dwellers could reset their pocket watches every day at noon when a ball dropped down a pole atop the St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance building. Vestiges of this old tradition continue today when the ball drops in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Carleton’s first observatory, ca. 1878
The Dawn of Goodsell Observatory
Citing the poor condition of the original structure and the need for a larger telescope and additional instruments, Payne returned to President Strong in the mid-1880s to request a second observatory. A St. Paul jeweler likely strengthened Payne’s case when he offered to donate $5,000 toward the purchase of a 5-inch Meridian Circle, which would improve the accuracy of Carleton’s time calculations but was too large for the existing structure. (When the jeweler died after the instrument was ordered but before it was paid for, railroad magnate James J. Hill, whose Great Northern Railway benefited from Carleton’s time service, stepped in to cover the cost.)
In 1886 Strong and the trustees agreed to construct a larger observatory with two domes and three telescopes. Although they initially approved a building “not to exceed $15,000,” the amount was quickly deemed insufficient and the stipulation dropped. When construction was completed in 1887, the new observatory had cost a spectacular $50,000.
Carleton’s second observatory was built in 1887 and named in honor of Charles Goodsell (above), one of the college’s founders, three years later.
A striking display of Romanesque Revival architecture, the observatory won national acclaim, including a spread in American Architect and Building News. Payne made sure the equipment inside matched the building’s grandeur. Carleton’s original telescope—the Clark refractor—was moved to the smaller dome. Next came a 3-inch Fauth transit circle, which focuses on stars and planets that follow a prescribed path in the night sky, thus giving a precise reading of sidereal, or star, time. The final telescope, a 16.2-inch Brashear refractor purchased for $15,000 (more than $390,000 in today’s dollars), was made by Pittsburgh’s famed John Brashear Company, arrived in 1890, and was placed beneath the larger dome. The sixth-largest telescope in the United States at that time, it was 22 feet long and weighed 27,000 pounds.
Three years later, in 1891, the building was named in honor of Charles Goodsell, who had been instrumental in founding the college 25 years earlier. Goodsell chaired the Congregational committee that explored the idea of founding a college in Minnesota, pledged both land and funds to make it happen, and was eventually an incorporating trustee of the new college.
In a very real way, Payne put the college on the celestial and terrestrial map. “He built an impressive astronomy department at the college, oversaw the construction of two observatories, established a time service for the western half of the country, started the first weather service in the state, and founded the Sidereal Messenger, one of the country’s first astronomical journals, which ultimately became the most famous astrophysical journal in the world,” says Foxgrover, who continues to collect weather data as curator of Carleton’s Weather Data Project, which has published and collated detailed local weather information continuously since the U.S. Signal Corps placed a weather station at Goodsell Observatory in 1881.
An avid astronomical photographer, Professor Herbert Couper Wilson ’79 likely took the photographs shown behind him.
A New Era for Astronomy
But times were changing. The U.S. Naval Observatory’s nationwide time service, which debuted in the 1870s, was growing more popular and became a serious competitor to Carleton’s time service. Then, in 1892, the University of Chicago assumed the role of publisher of the Sidereal Messenger, steering its contents toward academic rather than popular articles. Although Payne initially agreed to coedit the publication, he quickly soured on the joint venture when subscriptions from amateur astronomers dropped off. In 1893 Payne started a new journal, Popular Astronomy, which was aimed at the amateur audience and soon outpaced the Sidereal Messenger (now named the Astrophysical Journal) in circulation. It remained the best-known astronomical journal in the United States until it folded in 1951, long after Payne’s death.
Most notably, however, the study of astronomy itself had changed. As the century turned and science moved toward the era of Einstein and atomic theory, the physics of astronomy became central. The substance of what was seen through the telescopes grew steadily more important than the transit of stars, and astronomical photography and spectroscopic study became crucial components of the discipline. As academic astronomy became less about mapping the course of stars and keeping time, Payne’s science background—or lack thereof—proved to be a liability. In 1887 Carleton hired Herbert Couper Wilson ’79, who specialized in astrophysics and astronomical research.
Wilson possessed the perfect blend of Carleton culture and academic expertise, having earned a master’s degree in astronomy from the college’s graduate program before completing cutting-edge work in practical and theoretical astronomy at the University of Cincinnati, where he earned a PhD in 1886. An avid astronomical photographer, Wilson organized a highly publicized student trip to California in 1889 to observe and photograph a total solar eclipse, making Carleton one of only 11 U.S. observatories to have astronomers and equipment in the field that year.
Charlotte Willard
Given a booth at the 1893 Columbian Exhibit in Chicago, Carleton advertised itself by highlighting the work being done by the college’s astronomy department and by trumpeting its time services. On display were unique astronomical photographs of planetary passages taken through the lenses of the Goodsell telescopes, 11 bound volumes of the Sidereal Messenger, and celestial illustrations done in pen and ink by graduate student Arakel Sivaslian. (An Armenian subject of the Ottoman Empire, Sivaslian received a PhD from Carleton in 1892, and later was murdered by Turks during World War I.)
The growing department was also attracting women to the college. Joining Wilson and Payne on the faculty was Charlotte Willard, a mathematics and astronomy instructor who ran the time service. Undergraduate Anne Sewell Young, who earned both a bachelor’s degree (in literature in 1892) and a master’s degree from Carleton, was one of the country’s first great female astronomers. For years she directed the observatory and headed the astronomy department at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
Although Wilson’s arrival had eased the pressure on Payne to capitulate to astrophysics, Payne’s illustrious career at Carleton began to wane with the arrival in 1903 of William Henry Sallmon, Carleton’s second president.
As Sallmon set about the hefty challenge of succeeding President Strong’s 33-year career, a sizable portion of the faculty became alarmed by his theological and pedagogical liberalism and his penchant for meddling in faculty affairs. Sallmon appealed to the Board of Trustees to rein in his most vocal critics—including the notoriously conservative Payne and even the newly retired Strong. Ultimately, the rifts grew too deep, and Sallmon resigned after only five years. But some of his opponents—notably, those who had dared to oppose the board’s choice to continue backing Sallmon—were forced to leave, too. Payne was one of them. He retired on a Carnegie Endowment Pension after nearly 40 years of service to Carleton (including three years as dean of the college).
Not one to go quietly into retirement, Payne moved to Illinois, where he built and ran a small observatory and time service for the Elgin Watch Company. Eventually, time healed the wounds of Sallmon’s tenure, and Carleton awarded Payne an honorary doctor of science degree in 1916. He died 12 years later on January 29, 1928.
Arakel Sivaslian (sitting to the L) as a graduate student with astronomy professor Herbert Couper Wilson (standing to the R), mathematics & astronomy instructor Charlotte Willard (sitting to the R), and a fellow student DeLisle Stewart (standing to the L), ca. 1890.
Light Years Away
“The sort of changes that occurred in Carleton’s astronomy department in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were happening all over the academic world,” says Joel Weisberg, Carleton’s Herman and Gertrude Mosier Stark Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the Natural World. “The shift from astronomy to astrophysics begins in this era and continues to describe what the study is all about today. We analyze the light that we get from distant objects and use the laws of physics to figure out what those objects are.
“Astrophysics has advanced our understanding of the universe so much, and of course I consider myself an astrophysicist, but my roots are as an amateur astronomer,” says Weisberg, “which means I began as an observational astronomer. Like a lot of people, I just like looking at the stars.”
Weisberg and Cindy Blaha, professor of physics and astronomy and the Marjorie Crabb Garbisch Professor of the Liberal Arts, continue to open Goodsell to the stargazing public on the first Friday of each month. “We get young families, we get buses from retirement homes, we get Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts,” says Blaha. “And of course we get Carleton students as well.”
The mechanics of the 16-inch Brashear lens continue to be worked by hand, as in Payne’s day. The telescope rests beneath the larger of Goodsell’s two domes, pointing upward to an impressive height. It is guided by hand-cranked cogs and wheels at its base. The dome is likewise operated by hand. Its low-tech functionality is reinforced by a two-by-four with which either Weisberg or Blaha bangs the slit open when it gets sticky.
Beneath the smaller dome on the north side of Goodsell, the Clark telescope is guided through the night sky by a small motor. Weisberg now has some regret about installing the motor because he prefers the hand-cranked instrumentation of the Brashear.
The Fauth transit circle rests nearby, beneath a narrow slit in the roof. This smaller telescope, whose arc follows a single path through the night sky, was the key instrument in determining sidereal time for Carleton’s timekeeping service. While time is now parsed in millionths of a second and counted by means of atomic clocks, a master clock, set to the arc of the transit circle, still functions at Goodsell. And a telegraph station—the final component of the service that the observatory once provided—is there as well, as if it is ready to signal the ball to drop in St. Paul.
Goodsell Observatory might not inspire breathless enthusiasm at a time when an academic “look at the stars” has been supplanted by the study of astrophysics, the best telescopes now drift in space, and the familiar outline of the observatory is more iconic than thrilling. Yet Goodsell remains both a working tool for Carleton students and a testament to the college’s long history.
