Amherst College - Olio Yearbook (Amherst, MA)

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VOLUME LV, 1912 3 Professor David Todd ' ROFESSOR DAVID TODD was born at Lake Ridge, near Ithaca, New York, March 19, 1855. At the age of five he moved with his parents to Auburn, and at ten to Brooklyn. KC 5 px Developing an early interest in astronomy, he made himself a little telescope when he was twelve, with which he got his first glimpse of the four moons of Jupiter. He entered Columbia with the class of 1874, spending there freshman and sophomore years. As Columbia had no observatory, he entered Amherst College as a junior, graduating CPhi Beta Kappaj with the class of 1875. While still an undergraduate, he was accorded all the facilities of the old observatory, where he finished a series of valuable observations of Jupiter's satellites, which immediately attracted the atten- tion of the government astronomers, and led to his appointment in VVash- ington, at once after graduation, at the U. S. Naval Observatory. Here he spent three years. Subsequently made chief assistant in the office of the American Ephcmcris and Nauiical Almanac, he was in 1881 recalled to Amherst as Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Observatory. He was also Professor of Astronomy and Higher Mathematics at Smith College for five years, and designed and built the observatory there. Professor Todd made his first astronomical expedition under the auspices of tl1e U. S. Navy Department in 1878, to view a total eclipse of the sun in Texas, subsequently to which in 1880 he published a research on the sun' s distance and parallax, which he found almost exactly the same in amount as the most accurate values of the present day. His second expedition was to Mount Hamilton in California, where at the Lick Observatory he took charge of the observations of the transit of Venus in 1882. This was the first important astronomical research undertaken at that now famous observatory, and was a most fruitful expedition. The 145 photographs of the planet in the various stages of its transit are the finest ever obtained-an Amherst supremacy which will last for several generations, as no transit of Venus occurs again until the year 2004. In 1887 Professor Todd was appointed by the National Academy of Sciences chief of an expedition to Japan for a total eclipse of the sun. 'zii r 'Q. iSQE..gndf