“The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when
photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa
and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe….
“In 1905, a 26-year-old German Jew, Albert Einstein,
had published a paper which became known as the Special Theory of Relativity….
“Einstein's theory, and [Cambridge Professor Arthur]
Eddington's much publicized expedition to test it [during the eclipse], aroused
enormous interest throughout the world in 1919. No exercise in scientific
verification, before or since, has ever attracted so many headlines or become a
topic of universal conversation.”—English historian and journalist Paul
Johnson, Modern Times, Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (2001)
