Page - 303 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

303Observing Venus and Debating the Parallax astronomy [1877]) still believed in von Littrow’s and Encke’s conclusions con- cerning Hell. Though Wolf, like Faye, conceded that the solar parallax probably was somewhat larger than Encke had concluded,157 the main blemish on Hell’s memory, the crime of having manipulated a set of scientific data, remained. Thus, when an article on him was included in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biogra- phie (General German biography, vol. 11 [1880]), the story of his fraudulent al- teration of the Venus transit observation from Vardø was repeated without any reservation.158 Only three years later, Simon Newcomb (1835–1909) published his remark- able demonstration that von Littrow was plainly wrong, a conclusion he fur- ther corroborated in his later works. During a study trip in the early 1880s, New- comb visited the Viennese observatory, where he took the opportunity to investigate the notorious manuscripts of Hell. First, the manuscripts inspected by von Littrow—with one insignificant exception, which he overlooked—in fact contained no additions in a different-colored ink, as he claimed: as New- comb discovered, the young von Littrow had been so blinded by his prejudices against the late Jesuit that he forgot to consider that he himself was in fact colorblind.159 Second, regarding the issue of the parallax, Newcomb could draw upon experience from the transits of Venus in both 1874 and 1882, and his conclusion concerning the solar parallax was virtually identical to the one ad- vocated by Faye in 1869. The datasets from Vardø corroborated this conclu- sion.  Thus, Hell’s Vardø observations turned out to support a parallax of 8.79″ (Newcomb) or 8.80″ (Faye), and have since then been “canonized.”160 New- comb’s demonstration found a reverberant echo among Jesuit apologists. The 157 Rudolf Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Deutschland: Neuer Zeit, Sechzehnter Band (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1877), 645–46. 158 Christian Bruhns in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 11 (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1880), 691–93, here 692. See also Nielsen, “Pater Hell og Venuspassagen 1769,” for more examples. 159 Simon Newcomb, “On Hell’s Alleged Falsification of his Observations of the Transit of Venus in 1769,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 43 (May 1883): 372–81; Newcomb, “Discussion of Observations of the Transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769,” United States Nautical Almanac, Astronomical Papers 2, no. 5 (1890): 259–405. Cf. Newcomb, The Reminiscences of an Astronomer (Teddington: Echo Library, 2006 [1903]), 78–82. For a brief assessment of Newcomb’s career, see William Carter and Merri Sue Carter, “Simon New- comb, America’s First Great Astronomer,” Physics Today 62 (2009): 46–51. 160 Recent advances in electronic measuring have brought the solar parallax to be fixed at 8.794148″. Ian Ridpath, entry on “solar parallax” in A Dictionary of Astronomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 431. The number of decimals could probably have been expanded. To translate it into familiar terms, this means that the Sun, in its mean distance from Earth, “is a couple of meters shy of 149,597,870,700 m[eters]” away. E. Myles Standish, “The Astronomical Unit Now,” in Kurtz, Proceedings, 163–79, here 174.