Building 2

Building 2 housed the U.S. Naval Observatory from 1844 to 1893, where Navy scientists helped make it one of the world’s finest astronomical laboratories. There, Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, the superintendent, wrote the first textbook on oceanography, published the Wind and Current Charts that transformed ocean travel, and mapped the under-ocean route for the first transatlantic telegraph cable. In 1877, astronomer Asaph Hall used the world’s largest telescope there to discover Mars’s two moons, Deimos and Phobos, during the Observatory’s Golden Age. During the 1870s and 1880s, teams of astronomers traveled around the world to observe solar eclipses and transits of Venus, and the U.S. Naval Observatory’s master clock, calibrated by celestial observations, became the nation’s time standard. After the Observatory moved to Massachusetts Avenue in 1893, the building housed the Naval Museum of Hygiene in 1895 and the Naval Medical School in 1902, and since 1942 it has been occupied by offices of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States