CHARLES GREELEY ABBOT was the second director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the fifth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was the second and last person to hold both posts simultaneously and is remembered today for his skill as an instrumentalist and his unshakable belief that the Sun is a variable star and that its variations had a measurable effect on the Earth's weather. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1915 and served as its home secretary from 1919 to 1923 under President Charles Doolittle Walcott, who was Abbot's predecessor as Smithsonian Secretary.
Abbot was born in May 1872 in Wilton, New Hampshire, the son and grandson of farmers. The youngest of four children of Harris and Caroline Ann (Greeley) Abbot, Charles Greeley attended public schools, but finished at Phillips Andover Academy. He then attended MIT, where he graduated in 1894 with a thesis in chemical physics. He expected to teach, but remained at MIT, studying osmotic pressure and earning an M.Sc. in 1895.
Skilled at laboratory work, he came to the attention of Samuel Pierpont Langley, who was looking for an assistant at the Smithsonian's Astrophysical Observatory (APO). Abbot soon was hired, though he lacked any experience in astronomy when he arrived in Washington in June 1895. Langley, however, was not a traditional astronomer and Abbot was just the type of assistant he wanted to aid his mapping of the infrared spectrum of the Sun, adapting bolometers for photographic recording and determining dispersion standards for rock-salt and fluorite prisms to measure fundamental wavelengths in the infrared region of the solar spectrum.
Under Langley, Abbot flourished as a creative designer and builder of delicate devices for measuring solar radiation. As Langley focussed more and more on his aeronautical experiments, Abbot, working with F. E. Fowle, became responsible for maintaining the observatory's solar program, including an expedition to observe the 1900 solar eclipse in Wadesboro, N.C., where Abbot applied a vastly improved bolometer to take readings of the Sun's inner corona. He was also a leading member of the American eclipse expedition to Sumatra in 1901. He proved to be a reliable observer and impressed many astronomers who encountered him at these places.
Certainly the idea that solar radiation governed the Earth's fate as an abode for life was not original with Langley. The key to Langley's mission, however, was to make the amount and character of that radiation "predictable" and thereby useful for planning strategies for agricultural management and control. Langley believed that solar radiation varied in a cyclic manner. As Smithsonian Secretary, however, Langley had other interests, but what may have been promotional rhetoric for him became a permanent and passionate conviction for his able, dutiful assistant.
Within a few weeks of Langley's death in February 1906, Abbot was made acting director of the APO, becoming its second director in 1907 under Secretary Charles Walcott. Astrophysical operations continued unabated, with Walcott providing advice and support that allowed Abbot to extend Langley's mission in two ways: first, by developing refined techniques for the specific determination of the solar constant; and second, by applying these techniques in a standardized manner to build a synoptic monitoring program that would search for solar variations. As under Langley, Abbot found Walcott wholly attuned to the progressive notion of useful science. Before he became the Smithsonian's fourth Secretary, Walcott was head of the U.S. Geological Survey, and campaigned for practical research in publicly supported agencies.
When Abbot became APO director in 1907, American astronomy's most significant strengths and potential lay in vast cataloguing projects centered at a few major observatories, including Harvard, Yerkes, and Lick. American astronomy was in the throes of organizing itself as a profession, and its standards and modes of conduct were in flux. Celestial mechanics and mathematical astronomy were still the strengths of the discipline, but now the photographic plate and the spectroscope were available for assessing the physical nature of the Sun and stars. Langley had practiced the new astronomy. Primarily an engineer, he had created an astrophysical program at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh, defining it by the use of new types of instruments, the bolometer and spectrobolometer, and brought both these instruments and their practice to the Smithsonian to establish the first and only federally funded astrophysical observatory in the United States.
When Abbot retired as APO director and as Smithsonian Secretary in 1944, setting a precedent as the first Smithsonian Secretary not to die in office, most but not all of the great cataloguing projects were gone and the discipline was undergoing profound change. Problem-oriented research, informed by modern physical theory, dominated the discipline.
Yet the Smithsonian's Astrophysical Observatory pursued its single mission all along, elaborating on its purpose not by a broadening of its astronomical base but by refining its instrumentation and technique, searching for evidence that Earth's meteorology and biology were intimately connected to variations in the Sun's output of energy. Although he eschewed physical theory, Abbot was thoroughly modern in his problem-oriented approach to research. Thus, his failure to broaden the astrophysical scope of the APO during his long tenure has to be appreciated as due to a complex set of factors centered on his singular sense of mission, which transcended disciplinary lines between astronomy, geophysics, meteorology, and biology.