Читать книгу Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas онлайн

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Near the close of September, 1844, the Observatory was reported to be completed, and on October 1 Maury was ordered to take charge with a staff of line officers and professors of mathematics of the navy, and civilian professors. Lieutenant James M. Gilliss, Maury’s predecessor, had been greatly interested in astronomy, especially that field of the science having to do with navigation, and it was largely through his exertions that the necessary legislation had been passed making possible a building, adapted not merely to the housing of charts and instruments but suitable as well for astronomical observations. He had been sent to Europe to consult about the purchasing of instruments for the new Observatory, and there were those who thought that he should have been made its first superintendent.

However scantily informed Maury may have been in the beginning as to the great advance in astronomical science recently made in Europe, his great energy and native ability soon enabled him to overcome any such handicaps. He assisted with his own hands in the installation of the instruments, in which he took great delight, writing that the Great Refraction Circle was such an exquisite piece of machinery and so beautiful that he would like to wear it round his neck as an ornament. He was constantly endeavoring to secure better and larger instruments, and wrote with pride when the Observatory, as far as equipment was concerned, became the second most important in the world and needed only a larger telescope to make it the very first of all. Maury quickly saw the value of the Electro-Chronograph, invented by John Locke of Cincinnati, in determining longitude with the aid of the magnetic telegraph, seeing that it would practically double the number of observations that one observer could make; and it was largely through him that Congress was persuaded to appropriate the $10,000 necessary for installing the instrument at the Observatory.