The name of Charles Burckhalter might ring a bell for Oaklanders: Burckhalter Elementary School, in East Oakland on Burckhalter Avenue, is named for him. I visit nearby Burckhalter Park, whenever I’m walking in the area, for its water fountain and its view of the former Leona Quarry.

^{Burckhalter Park, 2018}

Astronomers remember him, and asteroid 3447 Burckhalter is named for him. He’s an important figure in our city’s history who has a little-noted geological connection.

Charles L. Burckhalter (1849-1923) was a farm kid from Ohio who came to work at his brother’s general store in Truckee in the late 1860s. There he spent evenings with a local attorney who stargazed with a five-inch* telescope — imagine how the night skies looked up there back then — and found a passion for astronomy.

After his marriage to Mary Catherine Nash in 1878, he moved to Oakland and took a job at a San Francisco insurance company. He built a 4½-inch telescope, mounted it in his Chester Street back yard on a stout brick foundation under a steerable canvas dome, and had himself a genuine observatory. By 1883 he’d upgraded to a 10½-incher, a very large instrument for an amateur, and made observations worthy of publication in the scientific journals.

At this point the city hired Burckhalter to teach geography and astronomy at the high school, at 12th and Market Streets, and help out at the new public observatory that Anthony Chabot had built in Lafayette Square for the citizens of Oakland in 1883. His star had really begun to rise.

^{Plaque at Lafayette Square on 11th Street}

He was named Director of the Chabot Observatory in 1887 and served for thirty-five years, the rest of his life. He started the tradition of giving lectures on cloudy nights, using lantern slides to show audiences the wonders of the sky. He never got a college degree, but the papers often called the beloved teacher “Professor Burckhalter.”

Burckhalter’s interests went beyond the sky to the air and the Earth. His weather observations were a monthly feature in the newspapers, and he took note of earthquakes too (see an example from 4 January 1906). He installed a seismograph at Chabot Observatory in the 1880s, at the time a newfangled contraption. Astronomers were some of the earliest users of seismographs because large telescopes are precision instruments that notice even tiny disturbances. Lick Observatory, newly built in the mountains east of San Jose, had one too. Later that year, in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake, he took part in forming the Seismological Society of America and served on its founding board of directors.

1906 was a special year for Burkhalter that began routinely. He announced a lunar eclipse for the night of February 8-9. That night, the Tribune reported, he turned off the doorbell and “trained his telescope on the surface of the diminishing disk to discover, if possible, [whether] frost forms around the lunar volcano Linne.” On the last night of March he was in Berkeley at the annual meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, an organization formed by his enthusiastic inspiration.

Eighteen days later, the San Francisco earthquake came as dawn began. Burckhalter counted 19 aftershocks over the next 13 hours. Over the next few days, the papers reported him assuring the public that there would be no “tidal wave” coming and that because earthquakes cannot be predicted (still true today), “the rumors that several more are en route should not be accepted.” Within the week, he was enlisted in the California Earthquake Investigation Commission, headed by UC Berkeley professor Andrew Lawson, along with several other prominent astronomers.

Astronomers were key people for two reasons. Their seismographs were one, but the other was that they were habitual, precise observers of time who were always awake at night and had clocks that were accurate to the second. Burckhalter and Armin Leuschner were assigned to collect as many reports as they could of the time the earthquake started, whether it was human observations or stopped clocks. When commission member Harry Reid set out to use these arrival times to determine the epicenter, only a handful of observations passed muster, but they yielded an epicenter at Olema in Marin County. It was good work considering the crude data. Today we put the epicenter a couple miles off Ocean Beach, about 30 kilometers south.

Unfortunately, Chabot Observatory didn’t yield suitable data. Its two clocks stopped at different times, and its seismograph recorded a useless scribble — but so did everyone else’s. Its instrument was a Ewing duplex pendulum seismograph that suspended a stylus over a disk of smoked glass, useful for small, simple events but overwhelmed by the 1906 quake, which shook strongly for about a full minute.

^{From the Lawson report, volume 3 atlas, Rumsey collection}

The earthquake closed the Chabot Observatory for four months, but there was little damage and the telescopes were unharmed. Burckhalter resumed his weather reports, after skipping April, and went on in his distinguished career. As light pollution increased in downtown Oakland, he raised the money and political support to move the observatory to Leona Heights in 1915, where it remained for the next eighty-plus years. The observatory’s mission has followed Burckhalter’s educational program faithfully through directors like the memorable Kingsley Wightman and today’s leaders at the Chabot Space & Science Center.

More reading

OakWiki entry

A 1961 Tribune biography

Obituary by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

^{* The inch size of a telescope refers to the diameter of its light-gathering mirror or lens.}

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