National Geographic Special Collections: Archives & Film Preservation Blog

Canton Island Eclipse Expedition (1937)

To celebrate Preservation Week, I’m sharing a preservation story about the film and audio that document the 1937 National Geographic Society - U.S. Navy Solar Eclipse Expedition in Canton Island.  (Canton Island, also called Abariringa, is an uninhabited atoll in the Phoenix Islands, or Rawaki, and is located in the South Pacific about halfway between Hawaii and Fiji.)

“This particular 1937 eclipse is memorable for several reasons: it is the longest one to remain in a state of totality in 1,200 years (since 699 A.D.), it began on June 9 and ended on June 8 (due to its path arcing eastward across the international date line), and it was the first to be described and broadcast live to the outside world.” Weeks were spent setting up cameras and other scientific equipment to gather data on the sun’s atmosphere, corona, and the gases shooting from the sun’s surface.  (https://nglibrary.ngs.org/geopedia/1937-canton-island)

National Geographic Society staff photographer, Richard Stewart, also joined the expedition to document it in photos and motion picture film, and NBC was present to broadcast live over the radio the events as they unfolded.  This was quite a historic moment for the world and for audiovisual history, and thus important for us to preserve.

Once we had digitized the film reels and the audio recordings, we could try and sync the audio with the motion picture film.  However, this wasn’t an easy task as the radio broadcast was live, and the film was not all shot synchronously.  Although, we could not do a shot for shot sync with the film and audio, aligning them as much as possible has added valuable context to the footage and provided additional information about the expedition that we wouldn’t know without the recording. It also helps us to relive the exciting moment of the eclipse as it occurred on that day in June 1937.

For more information on the Canton Island Eclipse expedition please read “Crusoes of Canton Island:   Life on a Tiny Pacific Atoll that Has Flashed Into World Importance” by Irving C. Gardner in the June 1938 issue of the National Geographic Magazine.