Past its Prime - Full Meridian of Glory - page 136

Fig. 36 John Couch Adams, as he appeared at the time of the Washington Conference
( Fig. 36 ) of Cambridge Observatories, both of them distinguished scientists backed
up by governmental delegates.
The United States started the Conference in 1884 by tabling a motion that identi-
fied Greenwich as the Prime Meridian. France started by saying that it regarded the
Conference as one in which the principle would be examined but that a Prime
Meridian would not be decided. The United States disagreed, saying that it had
called the Conference, in the words of an Act of Congress of 1882 “for the purpose
of fixing a meridian proper to be employed as a common zero of longitude and
standard of time reckoning throughout the globe.” However the Conference agreed
to discuss the issues in successive stages, the first on the decision of principle. It
proposed that there should be a Prime Meridian and for the USA this was a fore-
gone conclusion. The practical confusion was obvious, as there had been extensive
earlier discussion and the recommendations at the conferences in Antwerp and
Rome. The Conference agreed unanimously, and having made the decision that
they should identify a Prime Meridian, the delegates then discussed which meridian
it should be. The United States said that it was not competing to have the Prime
Meridian in America, and the Americans proposed the Greenwich Meridian as their
practical choice.
People Pierre Jules César Janssen (1824-1907)
Born in Paris, Janssen became the head of the Astrophysical Observatory of Paris at
Meudon (1876) and spent his career there studying the solar spectrum. He identified some
of the dark lines observed in the solar spectrum as due to water vapor in the Earth's atmos-
phere. While observing a solar eclipse in India in 1868, he suggested that some of the