"Professor Todd of the Cloudy Eclipses"
Disappointments and the best laid plans
We’re less than a week out from a solar eclipse that will be visible across a large swath of the United States. I’ve been looking forward to this event for awhile. Soon after David accepted his job at Amherst, I realized how close we would be to the path of totality, so I’d say at least a year of anticipation.
The last solar eclipse I experienced was in 2017 in Atlanta, and I wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t try to buy the glasses until too late. I didn’t make any plans to travel to nearby areas that fell in the path of totality.
This year will be different! I have hope in my heart that I might experience this phenomenon and be transformed by it, but I don’t want to count on it because a cloudy day could chase my dreams away.
Consider the precedent set by David Peck Todd, an astronomy professor at Amherst College from 1881-1917. Todd led expeditions across the globe to view the solar eclipse traveling to places like Japan, Indonesia, Angola, Libya, Chile, Brazil, and Russia. These expeditions involved fundraising beforehand, significant travel time, and hauling a lot of scientific equipment across the globe. Almost always, the weather turned out to be cloudy, or as in the case of his 1914 trip to Russia, his research efforts were disrupted by the outbreak of World War I.
This bad luck earned him the nickname “Professor Todd of the Cloudy Eclipses” from a famous British astronomer.
You can read more about David Todd Peck’s life and research challenges in this article, The Star-Crossed Astronomer, by Julie Dobrow which appeared in Amherst Magazine in 2017. His story ends rather sadly as he was put on indefinite leave from the college and spent the last seventeen years of his life in and out of mental institutions.
He did successfully experience the solar eclipse of 1932 with his daughter and son-in-law, after his academic career had ended. His daughter, Millicent, had this reflection on witnessing her father viewing the solar eclipse which had so often eluded him:
“I gained a flash of understanding of his blighted life, which filled my heart with compassion and my eyes with tears…a glimpse of understanding of what a series of cloudy eclipses, failures, meant to my father, who had put all he had into the preparation for success, time after time, betrayed by his own cosmos.”
-Millicent Todd Bingham
David Peck Todd spent his life chasing eclipses, and he’s spending his eternal rest buried under the image of one. I was excited to find when I visited his grave that someone has already dropped off a pair of eclipse glasses for him in preparation for next week.
Wow, that is quite a story! Sad buy at least in the end he has gotten the recognition for his effort!