Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Jr. Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Jr. (1824-1896), astronomer, was one of two preeminent men of science among the founding members of the Union Club. (The other was Asa Gray, the botanist.) He was the son of Benjamin Apthorp Gould (1787-1859), a man of humble origin who was for fourteen years the principal of the Boston Latin School, to which post he acceded even before his graduation from Harvard.

The younger Gould followed his father through Harvard, was graduated at nineteen, and proceeded to Göttingen, where he studied under Carl Friedrich Gauss and in 1848 obtained a Ph.D. in astronomy, becoming the first American with a doctorate in that field. Determined to improve the quality of American science by introducing German methodology, he established in 1849 the Astronomical Journal, the first American journal of astronomy, and still one of the leading astronomical publications. Gauss arranged for Gould to be offered a professorship at Göttingen in 1851, which would have made him the first American to be appointed a professor at a continental university. Gould at first accepted, then a few days later declined the post in order to commit himself to his self-created mission to improve American science. From 1852 to 1867, he headed the longitude department of the U.S. Coast Survey from an office in Harvard Square, where, concurrent with his other work, he was innovative in applying the telegraph to the determination of differences in longitude between cities. The responsibilities included arduous fieldwork. Owing to his father's successful second career as a merchant in the Calcutta trade, he was able to subsidize his journal and live comfortably in Cambridge, where he had a private observatory at his home, "Cloverden," on Follen Street. After his marriage in 1861 to Mary Apthorp Quincy, daughter of Josiah Quincy, he moved to a house near Cambridge's "Professors' Row."

Gould's earliest work was in planetary dynamics, but throughout his professional life, he devoted most of his efforts in research to astrometry, the measurement of stellar and planetary positions, which necessitates extensive calculation based upon observation. Because of nearsightedness, Gould was not best suited for the latter. He also demonstrated the applicability of astrophotography to astrometry. His was the last generation of astronomers to come of age before the birth of what we now recognize as astrophysics.

Gould's participation in an informal group of eminent scientific reformers who called themselves the "Lazzaroni" led to an invitation, though he was not yet himself of the same stature as the other members, to serve on the Scientific Council of the Dudley Observatory, which was founded in Albany in 1852. In 1855, he became the observatory's unofficial first director, though for much of the ensuing three years of his directorship he worked from home in Cambridge. The observatory was founded by prominent citizens in Albany as an independent astronomical establishment, the first in America to be affiliated with neither the government nor an academic institution. (It still exists, though the original building is long gone, and the observatory formally changed its purpose in 1976 from research to public education.) The Dudley Observatory's trustees established the Scientific Council to give the new institution the highest credentials.

Edward Everett, later to be the first president of the Union Club, delivered the dedicatory discourse, entitled "Uses of Astronomy," at the inauguration of the Dudley Observatory in 1856. At that time, he and Gould were likely little more than acquaintances; Everett's remarks about the director resonate like boilerplate. The printed text of Everett's oration, originally delivered extemporaneously, evidences a broad familiarity with current developments in astronomy as well as more than casual reading in its history in several languages. Gould professed himself "intoxicated…bewitched, and carried away" by Everett's address, though characteristically, he expressed a very unflattering opinion in private. The oration elicits a laugh with an anecdote related to Everett by Sir Paul Strzelecki, the explorer, who, while traveling in the Orient, was asked by the Chinese whether Charles Babbage's calculating engine might be made to fit in a pocket.

Alas, Gould's exalted opinion of himself, combined with an exceptionally single-minded determination to impose German professional standards on the country's scientific establishment, repeatedly frustrated his efforts to advance his own scientific career. Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and fellow member of the Dudley Observatory's Scientific Council, commented that he had "more personal enemies than any person with whom I am acquainted." Gould's arrogance and temperament (recently described by a well-informed historian as consistent with a diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder) precipitated an explosive confrontation between the Dudley's trustees and the Scientific Council over the rights to control the observatory. The dispute reached the presidential cabinet, and Senator Jefferson Davis, in an unaccustomed role, cautiously assisted the scientists in their attempt to assert Federal authority over a state-chartered institution. The Council lost, and Gould was forcibly evicted from the director's residence early in 1859 by a policeman and a "gang of toughs" in the employ of the trustees. This celebrated and furious conflict, though it distracted much of America's scientific community and entertained the country, and was also symptomatic of the growing professionalism of science, had little long-term consequence, but Gould was unable to obtain another institutional position in the United States.

Gould became an original member of the National Academy of Sciences, founded, like the Union Club of Boston, in 1863. He and his confrères were able to ensure that the director of the Harvard College Observatory, whom he intensely disliked, and whose job he coveted, was kept out of the Academy. At this time, Gould was engaged in continuing his late father's mercantile operations.

Gould had long recognized the value of astronomical observations from the Southern Hemisphere; his earliest work with such observations, used to improve the determination of the distance of the earth from the sun, was published in 1856. In 1870, at the invitation of Domingo Sarmiento, the ambassador from Argentina and later president (whose statue stands on Commonwealth Avenue), he set up and became the first director of the Argentine national observatory, in Cordoba. The following years were the most productive of his life, and he and his staff published many volumes of stellar positions and magnitudes for the southern sky. In contrast to the professional success, Gould's personal life was troubled during these years. He lost two children to accidents in Argentina. In 1885, he returned to Kirkland Street in Cambridge, where he died in 1896. - Adam Jared Apt

This account has drawn upon the articles in American National Biography, by Marc Rothenberg, and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, by Brian G. Marsden, and also upon Mary Ann James, Elites in Conflict: The Antebellum Clash over the Dudley Observatory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), as well as upon original research.

Print courtesy of the NOAA Central Library.

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