total solar eclipse in Wyoming was also observed by a Dutch expedition, which produced a detailed drawing of it, which was then printed in several copies (one of which I would purchase almost a century and a half later in Delft, Holland). Thomas Alva Edison decided to participate in the event to test his tasimeter, which measures the heat emitted by the solar corona at the moment of totality. He arrived on July 18th in Rawlins, little more than a row of shops and bars on the main street, and was greeted by “Texas Jack,” a local gunslinger, who shot a flag out the window to demonstrate his skill. The locals reassured him: “Jack’s a good guy, not one of those criminals who roam around town.” Draper was also in town with his telescope. Edison’s tasimeter was a box similar to a camera, with a slit viewer and a smoke-black regulator pressed between two platinum disks connected to a battery, behind a vulcanite disk. An adjacent galvanometer projects a beam of light onto a graduated scale with sensitivity of one millionth of a degree Fahrenheit. He practices the night before on the stars Arcturus and Vega, but on the day of totality, the galvanometer quickly goes off scale, and Edison has no choice but to wait for the end of totality and the disoriented roosters to crow in broad daylight.
