- guardian.co.uk,
- Tuesday June 28 1927 14:13 BST
Whether the sun's rise is properly visible tomorrow morning or whether there is only a gradual lightening of darkness, more people will be inspectors of the dawn in England than have ever before been engaged with that occupation on on a single day. ...
The country, and the 'totality belt' in particular, will be paraded all through the night by those who are passionately watching the sun rise because they so passionately want to make it disappear. All that remains to guarantee an orgy of sun worship is weather fair enough to give the vanishing trick a total visibility. As for the weather, we can only have our hopes and be ready to swallow our disappointment. As to the eclipse, there is a quite remarkable willingness to believe that it really will happen and that 'totality' will occur exactly as the doctors of science have ordered. Such unity of faith is a remarkable tribute to the principles and the practitioners of astronomical mathematics. We are all quite confident that we have got this sum right, that the eclipse will be punctual to the second, and that the darkness which is expected at Giggleswick will not go playfully wandering to John O'Groats or Beachy Head. We are agreed, in short, that the sun and moon can have no whims nor even the slightest tendency to skid upon their tracks, and we are convinced that the solar system knows nothing but the law and is so precise in its obedience that we can foretell the incidence of a cosmic shadow down to the last rod, pole, or perch.
The knowledge is comforting. We may confidently assume that this will be the first total eclipse in England which has not struck terror into quite a number of people. Although the Chaldeans had established by the eighth century B.C. a considerable and accurate astronomical science by which some correct calculations of eclipses appear to have been made, there has never been until quite recent times a widespread popular understanding of what was happening when the darkness came.
