Joseph Wharton - Science

Science

Wharton was a scientist interested in the natural world, and wrote scientific papers on a variety of topics including astronomy and metallurgy, presenting several to the American Philosophical Society. In the winter of 1883–1884 there was a period of several months when sunsets were extraordinarily red worldwide. Some imagined that the red color was from dust dispersed in the atmosphere worldwide by the volcano Krakatoa which had recently erupted. Others imagined that the reddish hue might come from iron and steel furnaces because they were known to create a reddish-brown dust. Wharton was curious, and one morning when a light snow was falling, collected some from a field near his house, melted and evaporated it, studying the remaining particles under a microscope which he had on hand for metallurgy. The particles looked like "irregular, flattish, blobby" glass particles. He visited a ship that had come to port in Philadelphia, having sailed from Manila, a course that had taken it a few hundred miles from Krakatoa. It had been slowed by a huge amount of pumice floating in the ocean, evidently spewed out by Krakatoa. Wharton obtained some pumice from one of the ship's crew, compared it with the dust he had collected, and found almost identical particles. In 1893 he presented a paper about the dust to the 150th anniversary meeting of the American Philosophical Society. Wharton also wrote a paper about the use of the Doppler effect on the color of light emitted by binary stars to determine their distance from Earth, and made the analogy to a train whistle which changes tone as it passes. Wharton was one of the most accomplished metallurgists in America during his lifetime, certainly the most widely known.