I wrote the below e-mail to our lecturer in "Philosophy of Science" just because I felt like it. I later put it on this site for the same reason.
There are a number of links that are associated with the text. One that gives an overall perspective is this one: Heliocentricism
But on that site they cite Struve's observation as "the third". In the following presentation of the actual book: Resolute and Undertaking Characters: The Lives of Wilhelm and Otto Struve, they say simultaneous, and that seem more appropriate considering how slowly things could be communicated around the globe in those days.
This is the original Struve observatory; The Old Observatory in Estonia, the country my mother was born. As regards to Pulkovo it's of course mentioned often, like in  Sunset on Pulkovo. One page I find interesting that has it as a setting is this: Svetlana.
The Vatican seems to have changed their site since I first saw it in -97 (who hasn't?). Their modern view of the achievements of Ptolemy can be seen here: the exhibition "Seeing the Classics" .
(23/4/98) 
 
 

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 20:40:30 +0000 (GMT)
From: Patricks BA <aa253@city.ac.uk>
X-Sender: aa253@paddington
To: D.Friesner@kcl.ac.uk
Subject: Antecedence
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970212185845.5844A-100000@paddington>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Status: RO
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Dear Daniel,

I don't have 75000 words I must write, and I started to practice typing at
13, partly because my father said computers will be important in the
future (this was in 1978). So I can write longish email without that much
of an effort. I hope you don't mind reading them.

Last week I read Kuhn's:
'Again, at a level which is not so obviously theoretical, Lavoisier's discovery
of oxygen (though perhaps not Scheele's and surely not Priestly's) was
revolutionary, for it was inseparable from a new theory of combustion and
acidity.' (CatGoK - p.251)
Without your lecture this wouldn't have made much sense to me.

The good thing with Sheele was that he was a statue on top of a little
hill of a nearby park - I remember being lifted up on the base by the
nanny so I could play around by his feet. Of course the statue is still
there, but the odd thing is that it was blown to smithereens in 1992, the
same week I was back in Sweden for the first time in more than 3 years,
and at an hour were I happened to be in a nearby restaurant. I didn't hear
anything though. (It can't have been smithereens, it looked too authentic
when I saw it some time ago.)
But I don't know enough to know how little Sheele deserves priority. In
Sweden, for sure, nobody mentions any difficult-to-pronounce foreign name in
connection with the discovery of Oxygen. Swedes are quite chauvinistic in
that regard, so that doesn't mean much. (I overheard a Swede in SCOOB
book-shop asking for 'Polhem - the Father of Mechanics'! He meant 'father
of engineering', but anyway.)

In 1841 Sir John Herschel said this:
'I congratulate you and myself that we have lived to see the great and
hitherto impassable barrier to our excursions into the sidereal universe;
that barrier which we have so long and so vainly (aestuantes angusto
limite mundi) almost simultaneously overleaped at three different points.
It is the greatest and most glorious triumph which practical astronomy has
ever witnessed. Perhaps I ought not to speak so strongly -- perhaps I
should hold some reserve in favour of the bare possibility that it may all
be an illusion - and that further researches, as they have repeatedly
before, so may now fail to substantiate this noble result. But I confess
myself unequal to such prudence under such excitement. Let us rather
accept the joyful omens of the time, and trust that, as the barrier has
begun to yield, it will be effectually prostrated. Such results are among
the fairest flowers of our civilization.'
 
One of those three 'overleapers' was a distant relative of mine, but he
had the distinction of being the first one to publish his observation, and it
has turned out to be correct. But,
'If Wilhelm (Struve) had claimed his 1837 results to be definitive, he
would have been promptly criticized by his contemporaries on the grounds
of its large probable error. They could not know, as we do now, the the
result is "right". If we ignore the large probable error, we have no way
of ruling out even earlier claims, by others, that they had measured
parallaxes that we now consider to be false.'
((Alan H. Batten 'The Lives of Wilhelm and Otto Struve' (D. Reidel 1987))
Batten continues, 'It is beyond dispute that Wilhelm made real
contributions to the determination of stellar parallax before Bessel's
successful work on 61 Cygni and that his arguments and observations, and
especially the result published in 1837, helped to stimulate Bessel to his
success.' But Batten lets a great-grandson have the last word:
'It is of some historic interest that, among the memories transmitted to
me by my family, the brightest was the high recognition accorded to Bessel
by my great-grandfather, Wilhelm Struve. There was never any quarrel
between these two astronomers, and they maintained the closest bonds of
friendship until the death of Bessel in 1846. W. Struve never made any
claims other than those I have quoted, and I believe some of the more
recent claims on his behalf by others are exaggerated. It is difficult to
find fault with those accounts that attribute to Bessel the first
determination of a fully convincing stellar parallax.'
And this is what you knew all along, isn't it! It surely was what I had
known all along until my mother found the name Struve on a photocopy I had
sent home, and told me of this book my grandmother had, which I've quoted
here. It turned out that a relative, whom I met in the mid-80s, had helped
the author with sources, and grandma had obtained it for this reason
alone.
She probably didn't understand much of what the book contained. But she
was happy to give to me for my birthday in 1993, and I could thank her
over the phone a few days before she died.

Did you know that it was around the time Bessel got his gold medal from
Herschel that the catholic church finally gave in, and acknowledged that
the earth does revolve around the sun? Since I don't know any details it
is an open question for me if the Pope actually was influenced by the
discovery of the parallax. That had after all been a debating point for
Copernicus et al. But it's difficult to know how much effort one should
make in that direction. The Vatican should be quite secretive. And if you
find their web site you'll see how proud they still are about their
effort for Ptolemy.

Did you notice I said more in Monday's class than previously. Too bad it
was much nonsense. Like I was just lucky that I got de Broglie's name
right.

Yours, Bjorn