0:21

Hello and welcome. The citation needed.

0:23

The podcast where we choose a subject, read

0:25

a single article about it on Wikipedia and

0:28

pretend we're experts because this is

0:30

the internet. And that's how it works

0:32

now. I'm Eli Boswick and I'll be

0:34

hosting this space exploration extravaganza. But unlike

0:36

the prudes at the planetarium, you can

0:38

listen to this with your pants off. And

0:40

speaking of pants off, I'm joined by the

0:42

three men I can always count on to

0:44

bail me out of jail at the science

0:46

center, Tom, Noah, and Cecil. I mean, I

0:49

guess if you count stuffing singles into your

0:51

single, it is bail. Then yeah, I'm there

0:53

for you, buddy. Yeah,

0:56

I'm only there until we renegotiate our contracts in 2027.

0:58

I knew I should have read the

1:02

book. Now maybe someone's learned their lesson

1:04

about pole dancing on the Tesla coil.

1:08

I thought it would make my pubic hair stand

1:10

out. It was just, I

1:12

just had a heart attack. Anyways, before we

1:15

begin tonight, I'd like to thank our patrons.

1:17

Patrons without you, Noah would have

1:19

to talk about space stuff the old fashioned way

1:22

by forcing it on teenagers who

1:24

were buying acid from him at

1:26

a concert. The world is the

1:28

sweaty half listening teenager to his

1:30

story that dances all across the

1:33

sky. And if you'd like to learn

1:35

how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around

1:37

till the end of the show. And with that out

1:39

of the way, tell us, Cecil, what person, place, thing,

1:41

concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

1:43

Today, we're going to be talking about the 1769 transit

1:45

of Venus. Ooh,

1:49

and Noah, you were actually around for this story. Are

1:51

you ready to give us your firsthand

1:53

expertise? You're jealous

1:55

because I saw Halley's comment and you didn't.

1:58

That's fair. So what is? is

2:00

the transit of Venus. It's

2:03

like a tiny little eclipse that happens

2:05

when Venus passes directly between the Earth and

2:07

the Sun. And when that occurs,

2:09

provided you have the right instruments and shit, you

2:11

can actually watch the tiny little dot of

2:13

Venus as it slowly traverses the Sun. But

2:16

because Earth and Venus orbit on different

2:18

planes, it's a really rare phenomenon. Transits

2:21

happen in pairs eight years apart with more than

2:23

a century in between. So the last pair of

2:25

transits happened in 2004 and 2012, the next pair

2:27

will happen in 2117

2:30

and 2125. All

2:34

right. Well, unless they make that kidney shot for

2:36

cats for humans, I have a hunch I'm going

2:38

to miss that one. What's important about the one

2:40

in 1769? Well, that

2:43

was the one we used to measure the size of

2:45

the universe. So the first

2:47

person to ever predict a transit of

2:49

Venus was famed German astronomer Johannes Kepler

2:52

using observations from Tycho Brahe, see episode

2:54

20 of this show. Kepler was able

2:56

to predict the transit of Venus in

2:58

November of 1631, though he

3:01

would die before he could confirm

3:03

that prediction. But other astronomers took up

3:05

his work. And though nobody actually saw

3:07

that one, they did catch the second one, the

3:09

1639 one, which is the other one in the

3:11

pair. And for the first

3:14

time, scientists were able to look through fog

3:16

glass telescopes and see the tiny dot of

3:18

Venus meandering across the great disk of the

3:20

Sun. And then they had to look away

3:22

and frantically blink the bright spots out of

3:25

their vision. And I well,

3:27

I either saw Venus pass

3:29

in front of the Sun, or possibly

3:32

was a small bug crawling across

3:34

my telescope glass. Either way, I'm

3:36

blind. So worth it. Yeah,

3:39

the last thing I saw was a good thing, at least. Yeah,

3:41

so but but Kepler gave us a lot more than

3:43

a sweet date for some unique sun gazing. He

3:46

also gave us his laws of planetary motion.

3:48

And using those, we were able to determine

3:50

the relative distance of all the known planets

3:52

in the solar system. So a

3:54

bunch of number guys did exactly that. And they'd

3:56

measure out the whole solar system in terms of

3:59

astronomical units AU. That is

4:01

the distance between the Earth

4:03

and the Sun. Right? So like we

4:05

knew that Jupiter was five times as

4:07

far from the Sun as Earth or 5

4:10

AU. We knew that Saturn was nine and

4:12

a half AU from the Sun. We knew

4:14

therefore that Jupiter's orbit was four and

4:16

a half AU from Saturn's all that kind

4:19

of shit. What we didn't know was how

4:21

long an AU was. I mean it

4:23

depends is it all man or all shit.

4:27

I'm sorry I'm useless this episode. I'm

4:29

really just gonna chime in with garbage like that. You

4:31

don't even know what the unit of measurement is that

4:37

you're using to... This feels like cheating

4:39

at measuring stuff. Right?

4:41

And I'm taking notes. I'm gonna

4:43

take notes. So

4:45

okay so fast forward to early

4:48

in the 1700s and we get

4:50

famed comet namesake Edmund Halley. He

4:52

realized that one could theoretically use the

4:55

transit of Venus as a way to measure the

4:57

astronomical unit. So the

4:59

idea is to use the parallax method. So

5:02

you know how you're like you'll be laying in bed

5:04

and if you close one eye the pillow is really

5:06

low and you can see the whole lamp but

5:08

then you switch eyes and the pillow is way the fuck up there

5:10

and you can only see the top of the lamp. Well

5:13

if you're numbery enough and you know the

5:15

distance between your two eyes you can actually

5:17

use the difference in height of the pillow

5:19

between the two of them to calculate the

5:21

distance to both the pillow and the lamp.

5:24

In this instance Venus is the pillow,

5:26

the Sun is the lamp and the

5:28

eyeballs would be astronomers positioned at various

5:30

points across the globe. Noah can I

5:33

just say as the resident stupid person

5:35

on the podcast that's the closest I

5:37

was ever going to get to understanding

5:39

the parallax method. Well done. Well done.

5:42

Thank you. I forgot it. This

5:47

would not be easy to do. Right

5:49

so first of all you can't just take

5:51

the measurements from any old ware to get

5:53

accurate measurements you have to get your eyeballs

5:55

as far apart as possible. A thousand astronomers

5:58

in Europe all you know taken extremely accurate

6:00

measurements, that wouldn't be enough. You need

6:02

your observers in the far-frozen north and

6:04

for Edmund Halley at the time anyway,

6:06

the much farther and largely unexplored by

6:08

Europeans south. And to get the

6:10

measurements you'd need, the observer would have to be in

6:13

a place where you can observe the whole transit. That's

6:15

an event that takes upwards of six hours,

6:18

right? And the important measurements here are the instant

6:20

Venus enters the Sun's disk and the instant it

6:22

leaves. And so of course, you know, the Sun

6:24

with its bad habit of being on the other

6:26

side of the planet half the time isn't going

6:28

to cooperate wherever you are. So you got to

6:30

find spots where the Sun would be up and

6:32

preferably high in the sky during

6:34

that whole six-hour period. This

6:37

is the science equivalent of like when

6:39

some Mormon missionaries get sent to Hawaii

6:41

and some get sent to Uganda, isn't

6:43

it? I'm

6:46

sorry, no, this is complicated and dumb. I just googled

6:48

it. It came right up. I don't know, why didn't

6:50

they just Google it? They

6:54

hadn't even heard of you two. They're

6:56

dumb. It's

6:59

worse than just that because this is

7:01

the 17th fucking hundreds and you can't

7:04

exactly hop aboard a plane or a

7:06

cruise ship and have them drop you

7:08

and your many hundreds of pounds of

7:10

delicate scientific equipment on such and such

7:12

beach, right? And you also can't

7:14

show up day of because you need

7:17

to make a pretty healthy number of

7:19

astronomical observations beforehand just to know precisely

7:21

where on the planet you are. That

7:23

seems easy nowadays but that was actually pretty

7:25

hard to nail down in the pre-GPS days

7:27

and to know for sure precisely you generally

7:30

have to observe something like a lunar eclipse

7:32

or a transit of Mercury from that location.

7:34

No, no, seriously, we should have

7:36

invented Google first. That's what we did.

7:38

We should have invented all this tedious shit. Everyone

7:42

is stupid but me, vote MAGA. If

7:45

we had invented TV first radio would

7:47

have been much easier. Yes, I get

7:49

it. So, okay, so what

7:52

you need then is observers in the

7:54

remotest parts of the known and unknown

7:56

world with incredibly expensive and precise equipment

7:58

for at least several weeks and And

8:00

you need to make this all happen at a time when

8:02

it takes three months to get a letter from Philadelphia to

8:04

London. And of course, you'd need lots

8:06

of observers at all the various latitudes, because

8:08

as anybody who's ever tried to observe a

8:10

fucking eclipse with me knows, all it takes

8:12

is one inconvenient cloud to fuck up your

8:14

trip and leave you in a spot where

8:16

you went to some backwater hell a hole

8:18

like illa goddamn noi for nothing. Think

8:22

of how fucking boring your story would

8:24

be if you actually saw that eclipse.

8:26

There you go. Go, huh? Cecil, I

8:28

know the answer. It's 17

8:30

EUs or Etruscan units, I believe they're

8:32

called. Okay. Etruscan unit, by the way,

8:35

that's measured as a distance between one

8:37

Etruscan reference and the door to our

8:39

studio. I

8:42

was going to say it's been a long time, but I

8:44

brought up Tuscany in the last episode. Yeah. I really went

8:46

out of my way to hug you. Sure, it ends up

8:48

there. So in 1716, Halley publishes

8:51

a paper explaining his idea. He

8:54

calculated that the next pair of transits would be in 1761 and 1769,

8:56

more than 40 years hence

8:59

and Halley at this point is like 60 years old. So

9:01

no in hell he's going to be around to see it,

9:04

but he implores the scientific community not to waste

9:06

the opportunity and to work together to try to

9:08

make these observations and finally measure

9:10

the universe. He closes the

9:12

paper saying, quote, I recommend

9:14

it therefore again and again to those

9:16

curious astronomers who when I am dead

9:18

will have an opportunity of observing these

9:20

things that they remember my admonition

9:23

and diligently apply themselves with

9:25

all imaginable success in the

9:27

first place that they may not by the

9:29

unreasonable obscurity of a cloudy sky be deprived

9:31

of this most desirable sight. Jesus Christ, Halley,

9:33

why don't you twist the fucking knife? And

9:37

that having ascertained with more exactness

9:39

the magnitudes of the planetary orbits,

9:41

it might round to their

9:43

immortal glory, end quote. But as long

9:45

as you can have a stake, I

9:47

guess it's all worth it. Am I

9:49

right? Yeah,

9:53

I don't think by rid down to

9:56

their immortal glory, he meant

9:58

get your own episode citation

10:00

needed but that is technically he

10:02

was right. Or

10:05

someone could invent a laser telescope and make

10:07

getting malaria in the exact center of the

10:09

jungle totally meaningless. Luckily that won't

10:11

happen. Keep building shit in the wrong order. In

10:15

the utopian days of scientific cooperation that

10:18

gave us shit like the International Space

10:20

Station, the episode 286, or

10:22

the Large Hadron Collider, the episode 247,

10:26

it's easy to underestimate what

10:28

Halley was suggesting here. There

10:30

was literally no possible way to do

10:33

this without it being an international effort

10:35

and there was no such goddamn thing

10:37

as an international effort at that

10:39

point. If two or more nations were getting

10:41

together on something, it was crushing some other

10:43

smaller country. But the very concept

10:46

of an international scientific expedition was

10:48

unheard of back then but that's

10:50

what Halley was suggesting. And

10:52

when he suggested it, he presented his paper in

10:54

Latin in order to make sure that the most

10:56

possible international scientists could

10:58

read it. So now

11:00

ultimately despite all the obstacles, major scientific

11:02

organizations of the day, most notably the

11:04

French Academy of Sciences and the Royal

11:06

Society in London, they set out

11:09

to make good on Halley's suggestion. They even

11:11

laid the groundwork for some joint ventures and

11:13

information sharing which matters a lot because one

11:16

of the things that makes this such a cooperative effort

11:18

is that no one observation is worth

11:20

a damn thing without all the others.

11:23

So as the years slowly tick ahead,

11:25

there are increasingly concrete plans for French

11:27

and British astronomers to cooperate

11:29

in observing the transit of 1761. And

11:33

then war breaks out between France and England. Ah,

11:36

a lot of scientific correspondence

11:39

starting with hey, but hey.

11:44

So now this would be the Seven Years War or as it's

11:46

better known in America, the French and Indian War. This

11:48

is basically a conflict between two of the world's

11:50

largest colonial powers about who could have the last

11:53

18 acres of arable land

11:55

that wasn't already colonized. And the war played

11:57

out in those colonies and on the high

11:59

seas. precisely the two

12:01

places that any scientific expedition to

12:04

remote location kind of needed to

12:06

peacefully pass through. Needless

12:08

to say, cooperation didn't turn out

12:10

to be great. Now the one

12:12

thing that scientists really had going for

12:15

them was funding. So this

12:17

whole ordeal was going to be incredibly expensive

12:19

but governments were by and large willing to

12:21

pay for it. One reason

12:23

was sort of the space race type of

12:25

pride associated with it, right? Most countries wanted

12:27

to be able to say that they were

12:29

pivotal in advancing human knowledge. I didn't sit

12:31

around and let some other motherfuckers soak up

12:33

all that citation needed episode glory. The

12:35

other and far more motivating

12:38

reason was for commerce. The

12:40

world wasn't very well mapped at the

12:42

time. Part of what the astronomers

12:44

would need to do is figure out exactly

12:46

where they were in the world. They'd have

12:49

to survey multiple areas and make extremely accurate

12:51

measurements along the way. They'd have

12:53

to, in other words, improve the hell out of the

12:55

maps used by countries increasingly dependent

12:58

on seaborne trade. So

13:00

both the British and the French government were happy

13:02

to pour money into the deal. But

13:04

as easy as the funding was to find, far

13:06

harder to find were the astronomers. See,

13:09

at this point in history, astronomers

13:11

are pretty much exclusively landed gentry that

13:13

wanted an excuse not to wake

13:15

up before noon. We're talking about people

13:17

who are by and large fat and

13:19

pampered and these motherfuckers are being asked

13:21

to go on the high seas for

13:24

weeks or even months at a time,

13:26

then set up shop in remote areas

13:28

with very few creature comforts, and then

13:30

live for weeks or months in either the

13:32

frozen north or the malarial south.

13:34

So the Royal Society and the

13:36

Academy weren't exactly flooded with qualified

13:38

applicants. But eventually, through

13:41

an incredible effort, both organizations as well as

13:43

a few other countries eager to get in

13:45

on all the scientific citation needed episode glory,

13:48

were able to mount several expeditions.

13:51

Hundreds of astronomers were dispatched to dozens of

13:53

exotic locales to measure the transit of 1761

13:55

and given that the episode

13:58

is named after the transit of... 1769

14:01

you kind of already have an idea what

14:03

a great job they did. Alright,

14:06

well, knowing the failures of space nerds,

14:08

we're about to hear about them slamming

14:10

their telescopes into the surface of Mars.

14:12

But before we do, we'll take a

14:14

quick break for what we call Appo

14:16

of Nothing. Professor

14:30

Wiggin? Hello? Yes, yes,

14:34

I'm down here in the archive. Yes,

14:37

I'm, I'm about to be Hornsworth from the... One

14:40

second, I'll be right there. Just, here we go. One

14:42

second. Let's just

14:44

get... Okay. Yes. Alright.

14:48

Okay, help. Right, yes, you see, I'm

14:50

about to be Hornsworth. See, from

14:52

the University. Are you alright?

14:57

Stop the little winded, the little winded from

14:59

the staff. Right, right. Winded from the staff.

15:01

Yeah, see that, yes. Um, anyways, we were

15:03

hoping, see, that you might... Sorry, little

15:06

light-handed, do you mind if I sit down? No, no,

15:08

no, of course not, by all means. Would you,

15:10

I'm sorry, would you be so tired? Just

15:13

hand me just a water glass

15:15

and the jug behind you. Yeah, of course, of course. Thank

15:17

you, oh my God. Oh!

15:23

Oh, oh, I drank too fast. No,

15:27

no, I'm fine. I am

15:29

fine. Is this perhaps a bad time?

15:31

No, no, I'm good, it's just that. Oh,

15:34

that's a lot of stairs. Six, seven,

15:37

seven stairs. How

15:39

can I help? Oh, yes, you see, I

15:41

was wondering if you wanted to go to the

15:43

jungle, you see, for a couple of months to look

15:45

through a telescope in the jungle. Hmm,

15:50

are there any stairs? I

15:52

mean, no, that's... Nice,

15:55

then I shall do it! Up from the VL, I'm

15:57

going to faint now. I see. And

16:16

we're back. When we left off, Noah was suggesting

16:19

we all go for a hike before the live

16:21

show. What happened? It would be lovely. Alright, so

16:23

obviously there are dozens of different expeditions going on

16:25

here, so we can't talk about all of them,

16:28

but there are a few that I thought I

16:30

could highlight to give you an idea of the

16:32

difficulties that all of the scientists were facing. Yeah,

16:35

the whole expedition is astronomers though. Who's

16:37

going to dump their books? It

16:41

turns out the people who are driving

16:44

the boats mostly, yeah. So

16:46

one of my favorites is

16:48

French astronomer Jean-Baptiste Dideroche, who

16:51

was sent to the Russian town of Tobolsk on

16:53

an overland journey to the far north. He had

16:55

to go in the dead a winter. His

16:57

caravan actually traveled on frozen rivers most of

16:59

the time because that was the easiest way

17:02

to avoid being ambushed by wolves. Holy shit!

17:04

What? Right? And

17:06

Dideroche was a spoiled fucking cat, so

17:08

he's doing science the whole way and

17:10

he's writing about in his journals, but

17:12

he's miserable and bitchy about everything. And

17:15

included in his observations like local flora

17:17

and fauna, he also recorded information on

17:19

the average hemlines of peasant women and

17:21

his personal assessment of how hot they

17:23

were. Oh man, I love

17:25

no matter how far we advance as a

17:27

society, this one horny, gross guy is going

17:29

to forever have burned a smash

17:32

or pass into the science of

17:34

the record, right? I knew Zuck

17:36

stole a whole hot or not thing, but I

17:38

had no idea that Facebook's prequel was this

17:40

much of a deep cut. Right?

17:43

And a birth of science type shit. Anyway,

17:45

so he pushes through this treacherous journey, barely

17:48

makes it through to where he's going before

17:50

the rivers thaw and make the whole area

17:52

unreachable. He sets up shop, he starts building

17:54

his observatory, and there's an

17:56

unusually high amount of flooding that spring,

17:58

which A, makes it through to it

18:00

really hard to build a fucking observatory

18:02

in the middle of nowhere. But more

18:04

importantly, B, makes the local peasants suspect

18:06

that this strange foreigner who just showed

18:08

up with strange equipment was actually an

18:10

evil wizard who had cursed the area

18:13

with foul weather. And they got so

18:15

mad that the Czar had to post

18:17

a contingent of Cossack soldiers

18:20

there to protect Diderotianist telescopes.

18:23

Okay, but you're right. If he's not demogrifying

18:25

people, then how come he keeps saying, who

18:27

is a hottie and who is a naughty?

18:31

And honestly, if you were making a movie

18:34

about the endeavor, I feel like the expedition

18:36

that you'd use as your comic relief would

18:38

be Royal Society astronomers Jeremiah Dixon and Charles

18:41

Mason. Yes, that Jeremiah Dixon

18:43

and Charles Mason. They

18:45

were tasked by the Royal Society with observing

18:47

the eclipse from Sumatra. So they set off

18:49

from England, and less than 24 hours

18:51

after they left port, their ship is attacked

18:53

and boarded by the French. The

18:56

astronomers hunkered down deep in the bowels of the

18:58

ship and ultimately the British won the battle, drove

19:00

the French off. But not before 11

19:02

British sailors died and 37 were

19:05

wounded. So the ship has to

19:07

go to port to get repaired and shit. So

19:09

these two immediately send a letter back to the Royal

19:11

Society going, actually, you

19:14

know, where would be an even better spot to

19:16

observe the eclipse than Sumatra would be wherever the

19:18

fuck it is we just wound up. They

19:22

get a letter back that says, sorry, guys, we're

19:24

ending the work from home program. You're expected back

19:26

at the office. They did see so they

19:28

got so they wanted to stay put to

19:30

the point where the Royal Society had to

19:32

threaten to sue them for breach of contract.

19:34

They made it

19:37

as far as Cape Town, South Africa, which was a

19:40

Dutch colony at the time. And they

19:42

sent an email like another maybe this is part

19:44

of kind of a letter. I love

19:49

this so fucking much. They timed it such that if

19:51

the Royal Society wrote them back, the message wouldn't

19:53

get there in time for them to

19:56

show that Sumatra so

19:58

they ended up just that ended up being their

20:00

destination. Hey, I

20:02

know we calculated precisely where we would

20:04

need to stand and shit, take our

20:07

super-duper precise nerd measurements, but turns

20:10

out there's no holiday in express at

20:12

the Sumatra yet, so I'm just

20:14

going to not carry the four and decide

20:16

we arrived at our destination. That's

20:20

exactly it. Now, incidentally,

20:22

despite accusations that powered us at

20:25

the time and all this shit, of

20:27

all the various British expeditions that they

20:29

sent out, theirs were the most accurate

20:31

and the best recorded measurements. Like,

20:33

the 1761 expedition as a whole was a failure,

20:36

but they actually crushed it. The

20:38

Royal Society was so impressed with their work

20:41

that when a fight broke out between two

20:43

of their American colonies about where their shared

20:45

border should be, they'd send Mason and Dixon

20:47

to settle the dispute, establishing

20:49

the Mason-Dixon line that would later

20:51

separate free from slave states. Oh,

20:53

you're going to name the border of racism,

20:56

Kathross. Wow, that was an

20:59

honor. That is so

21:01

great. Do you know what else is great,

21:03

though, is those little trophies on one? If

21:07

you believe this, we would

21:10

love one of them

21:13

instead. But the most

21:15

famous of the 1761 expeditions

21:17

was that of French

21:19

astronomer Guillaume Joseph Hyacinth

21:22

Jean-Baptiste Legendille de la Gallus.

21:24

Sure. Yeah. I was like, go

21:26

again? I'm kidding. Okay, catch it. Yeah,

21:28

no. I didn't hear that. You can't hear it a little

21:30

bit. No, no. I was like,

21:32

he's like, no. It went no. That's how it went no.

21:34

You can hit the back 30 seconds button all you want,

21:37

man. This is recorded. Oh,

21:39

but the Swedish volcano, you'll learn. I

21:41

get it. A of the Leocitole?

21:43

Yeah, no, that one. That one I'll take

21:45

care of. So, Legendille was a

21:50

colonial port on the east coast

21:52

of India. But when he got there, it turned out that

21:54

the British had laid siege to it because there's a war

21:56

going on. Now, eventually the port would fall to

21:58

the British. He would have to hop. from ship to ship

22:00

to ship, trying to find somewhere that he could

22:03

go to make his observations. Ultimately, he'd have to

22:05

make those observations from a ship bobbing up and

22:07

down on some unknown point in the Indian

22:09

Ocean. We'll put a

22:11

pin in history, but suffice to say,

22:13

it doesn't get easier on him from

22:15

there. Look, buddy, I realize you were

22:17

standing on two buoys in the middle

22:20

of the ocean, but somewhere up there

22:22

isn't a measurement, okay? Not a measurement.

22:25

And we really appreciate your extensive journaling to let

22:27

us know that you had diarrhea 100% of the

22:29

time, but

22:32

we don't need all these papers. Like,

22:34

I can just... Yeah,

22:37

suffice to say, once all these observations

22:39

were put together, the final result was

22:41

disappointing. I mean, some of the

22:43

ventures got decent measurements, but a lot of

22:45

them didn't, and there was more wrong with

22:47

the observations than just them not being consistent.

22:50

See, unbeknownst to the astronomers of the day,

22:52

Venus has an atmosphere, and

22:54

what that means is that the transition into the

22:56

Sun's disk isn't as discrete

22:58

as Edmund Halley had envisioned. There's

23:01

this thing that's since been named the Black Drop

23:03

Effect, where it kind of looks like the Sun

23:05

reaches out a bit and grabs the planet

23:07

once you're lensing through the atmosphere, and as

23:10

the atmosphere drags along, it looks like the edge

23:12

of the Sun sort of gets sucked into Venus.

23:14

Got to end it. Well,

23:17

yeah, no, the Venus and the Sun. But

23:20

the end result is that the measurements which

23:22

needed to be precise within a couple

23:24

of seconds weren't. In several

23:26

instances, astronomers who were observing from

23:28

two telescopes in the same room

23:31

recorded times that were 20 or even 30 seconds

23:34

different for the entry and exit times

23:36

of Venus. There were also

23:38

other hilarious problems, like the fact that

23:41

the French and the British teams couldn't

23:43

agree on one prime meridian. He's the

23:45

biggest transformer. No, he's a tenderest cut

23:47

estate. You're both wrong, it's Amazon Central

23:50

Warehouse, guys. Pay attention. Well, but

23:53

the thing is, the distance

23:55

between Greenwich and Paris wasn't

23:57

precisely known, so they couldn't correlate.

24:00

all of the data. Okay, all right. Look,

24:02

maybe before trying to figure out how far away

24:04

the goddamn sun is, maybe we nailed down Greenwich

24:06

to Paris first, okay? Baby

24:09

steps, guys. Baby steps. Let's do

24:11

baby steps instead. Right. How far

24:13

is your house, Sam? I don't know. Well,

24:15

it's a fun problem. It's a fun problem.

24:17

You get Jupiter. But regardless of how it

24:19

happened, the end result is a bunch of

24:22

data that are yielding wildly different answers for

24:24

the distance of the AU. So despite millions

24:26

of dollars of investment and months and months

24:28

of effort from experts, the end result was

24:31

a question mark with ever so slightly smaller

24:33

error bars than before. But

24:35

they were going to get a second bite of this

24:37

apple because remember, transits of Venus come in pairs. So

24:40

in what might be the latest the subject

24:42

in the title has ever shown up in

24:44

a citation-needed essay, scientists

24:47

started gearing up for a second go

24:49

at that transit in 1769. Now

24:52

in some ways, this one would

24:54

be much easier than the 1761 attempt. For

24:58

one thing, the Seven Years' War was over. It was

25:00

a seven-year war. It's eight years between them, so it

25:02

doesn't matter what it started. For

25:04

another, they had the experience of the previous

25:06

expedition and they knew about stuff like the

25:09

Black Drop Effect, so they could at least

25:11

somewhat account for that. But there

25:13

were a few new challenges as well. One

25:16

of the biggest was that the area where

25:18

they needed, where you'd need to go to

25:20

see it was a lot less forgiving in

25:22

terms of where existing towns and ports were.

25:25

Like for the southernmost observation, there was

25:27

just like a mostly unexplored part of

25:29

the Pacific Ocean where they had to

25:31

be like, I'm sure we'll find an

25:33

island here somewhere and plan an expedition

25:35

for that island. I

25:38

don't even go to this store without a list,

25:40

man. Right? Yeah,

25:42

I mean, if you blindfold me and spin me around

25:45

in my own front yard without a GPS, I

25:47

will dive exposure within sight of my front

25:49

door. That's true. Yeah, that's true.

25:52

Right. So it would be

25:54

that particular expedition to like somewhere

25:56

in this blue part of

25:58

the map here that would end up probably be

26:00

in the most famous trip of either transit. This

26:03

one was led by then-Lieutenant later

26:05

Captain James Cook, and

26:07

they were taking the ship called the

26:10

HMS Endeavour to this newly discovered island

26:12

called Tahiti that was right about

26:14

the longitudinal attitude they were looking for. And

26:16

by all accounts, they spent the whole time

26:19

in Tahiti just liberally fucking the natives while

26:21

desperately trying to stop them from stealing all

26:23

their telescopes and shit. That

26:25

same expedition would go on to some

26:27

famous explorations of Australia and New Zealand,

26:30

but the astronomer who made the transit

26:32

measurements would die of dysentery before they

26:34

made it home. Cook is hanging out

26:37

with the guy with 10 names who

26:39

went to India, and then I said,

26:41

another threesome? Well, I suppose, why are

26:43

you crying, man? I'm crying. And you're

26:46

crying loud. Like loud. Well,

26:49

but this wasn't the only person who would give

26:52

his life to this effort. One of the expeditions

26:54

was sent to Southern California, which was especially difficult

26:56

because that was Spanish territory at the time,

26:58

and the Spanish refused to believe this had anything

27:00

at all to do with measuring the distance to

27:03

the fucking sun and assumed it was spying. The

27:06

Spanish government eventually gave permission to a British astronomer

27:08

to observe from California, but he'd have to take

27:10

a Spanish ship and he'd have to be accompanied

27:12

by Spanish soldiers the whole time. So

27:15

this dude, Chappie, he leads this expedition

27:17

and they're running behind because they're crossing from

27:19

the Atlantic to the Pacific way fucking harder

27:21

back then. And of course, the

27:23

transit of Venus isn't going to wait for him.

27:26

So when they finally get to a spot where

27:28

they can come ashore and they find a Spanish

27:30

mission that's, you know, at approximately the correct place

27:32

for the observation, Chappie doesn't want to hear

27:34

any of his escorts naysaying about

27:36

how everybody at that mission is

27:38

actively dying of typhus. Well, in his

27:41

defense, it was May, though. And you

27:43

know, in theory, when it gets a

27:45

little warmer, typhus miraculously goes away. It

27:48

does. If you're all gone, you'll never have heard

27:50

of it. I believe he said a quote, it's

27:52

going to disappear one day. It's like a miracle

27:54

that will disappear. And from our shores, we, you

27:57

know, it could get worse before it gets better.

27:59

It could maybe go away. We'll see what happens.

28:01

Nobody really knows Actually

28:04

the guy who got everybody killed here was a

28:06

better decision maker Recommendations

28:12

of literally everyone chappy forced the party

28:14

to spend weeks at this mission where

28:17

he made his observations And

28:19

of course they all died of fucking typist. It's fucking

28:21

type is so this is a horrible way

28:23

to die So yeah, yeah, exactly So

28:27

chappy was able to make his observations while dying

28:29

of typist He had to like crawl back and

28:31

forth to his telescope and shit But

28:34

but 26 of the 28 men in this

28:36

party would ultimately die for those calculations

28:38

One of the remaining two took his data and

28:41

ultimately did make it back to Europe to get

28:43

it tallied with everybody else's But I think like

28:45

we can all agree we didn't

28:47

care about the distance That

28:49

bad guy hands in these spotted

28:51

blood dappled papers Oh, you know

28:53

what? We just found out there's

28:56

this thing called the front drop

28:58

effect But

29:03

my favorite story though is that of

29:06

legend teal who after failing to

29:08

get any useful data in 1761

29:10

elected to just stick around in the Indian Ocean and

29:13

wait for the next one So

29:15

he spent eight years Improvising maps and

29:17

charting islands and shit and as the date

29:19

ticked ever closer to 1769 He

29:22

boarded a Spanish warship headed to the Philippines where

29:24

he was gonna make his observations. So he gets

29:26

all set up He does all his preliminary observations

29:28

and shit figures out exactly where in the world

29:30

he is Then he gets

29:32

word that the Academy wants him back in

29:34

Pondicherry The very place that he

29:36

couldn't land back in 1761, but

29:39

it's French again, so they all get him to

29:41

go over there So he gets over there. He

29:43

sets up shop again. He calibrates his equipment again.

29:46

He does his preliminary observations again He gets set

29:48

for the big day and then he wakes up

29:50

and it's fucking cloudy Because

29:53

he's got exactly my luck with astronomical events

29:55

and and just in case there was no

29:57

like insult to go with this injury Observers

30:00

in Manila where he just left got a great

30:02

view of the transit not a cloud in the

30:04

fucking sky Legend

30:07

deal he heads home, but along the way he gets

30:09

really sick He almost dies he has to convalesce in

30:11

Africa for months and while he's convalescing

30:13

his heirs have him declared dead and

30:15

then they did Fun

30:19

fact this nine years was the longest

30:21

consecutive playing of the Benny Hill theme

30:26

And to be fair Heath and I did do the same

30:28

thing when Noah had his heart attack last year Awkward

30:30

Christmas he had to tell us what we got to

30:32

keep instead of giving us 11

30:40

years after he left Legend

30:42

Hill eventually makes it back to France He has

30:44

to sue everybody to get like his house and

30:47

shit and presumably at this point somebody

30:49

comes up to him and they go Hey,

30:51

man, we did figure out the AU while you were gone

30:53

It's about 93 million miles and then though

30:55

this part doesn't make it into the historical

30:57

record He no doubt beat that person to

30:59

death with a telescope And

31:03

if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence

31:05

no illusions, what would it be? No

31:08

matter what happens in April at least somebody has

31:10

worse astronomy luck than me You

31:13

say that now. All right. Are you ready for the

31:15

quiz? I am all

31:17

right Noah. I Already knew the

31:19

Sun was 93 million miles

31:21

away. How is this affected my life?

31:24

Okay When I

31:26

hear that they might be giant song about the

31:28

Sun I think to myself. Oh, I knew

31:31

that Be I

31:33

usually turn off that song Okay,

31:35

really answers see space exploration

31:38

is very important Secret

31:42

answer. All right,

31:44

Noah What other measurements did the

31:46

lost lonely spaceographers invent while they

31:48

were not calculating how big leave

31:50

the Sun was away? Hey, the

31:52

world's first homesickness scale which ranges from

31:55

slumber party to college dorm the

31:57

the Latin lateral ization factor

32:00

or how much the one Latin-based language

32:02

you learned in school helps you speak

32:04

in a country that doesn't speak that

32:06

language, or C, the measure of

32:08

how bad your dysentery is, which of course

32:10

is in Bosnics. Obviously,

32:14

you went easy on me, it is obviously

32:16

C. That's true, that's true. Claim to fame.

32:20

Alright Noah, the astronomer with dysentery did

32:22

discover one important thing before he passed

32:24

away, what was it? A,

32:26

the coprolite ear, D,

32:31

an excretion disk,

32:33

C, a star

32:35

shart, or D, an seloduce. Alright,

32:43

as a space nerd and a poop

32:45

fan, I guess an seloduce is maybe

32:47

the best thing I've ever heard, sort

32:49

of because D is seloduce. I also

32:51

understood that. I understood that. It is,

32:53

and seloduce, absolutely, yes. Alright,

32:56

well Noah, you understood all the jokes

32:58

about space just now, so you win.

33:02

Alright, well for that, for seloduce alone,

33:04

I think next week's essayist should be

33:06

Cecil. Alright, well for

33:08

Noah, Tom, and Cecil, I'm Eli Bostic,

33:10

thanking you for hanging out with us

33:12

today. We'll be back next week, and by then,

33:15

Cecil will be an expert on something

33:17

else. Between now and then, you can

33:19

listen to Tom and Cecil on their

33:21

brand new podcast talk and ship and

33:23

lawful assembly. Or, you can relax

33:25

into the loving podcasts that have always been

33:27

there for you through thick and thin that

33:29

Noah and I make. I wanna choose, that's

33:31

fine, just, you know, we've been around for

33:33

like seven years, no big deal. And

33:36

if you'd like to help keep

33:38

this show going, you can make

33:41

a per episode donation at patreon.com/citationpod,

33:43

or, leave us a five star review everywhere

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you can. And if you'd like to get

33:47

in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with

33:49

us on social media, or check the show notes, be

33:51

sure to check out citationpod.com. We're

33:55

here, sir. The

34:00

exact spot the British Academy has signed

34:02

for us is just up that hill.

34:05

Ugh. Hill, you say? Yes,

34:08

just up that rise there, about ten feet up. How

34:12

long till the transit? Two weeks,

34:14

sir. Alright.

34:17

Well, if we hurry, we might

34:19

just make it. Might?

34:21

I said hurry!