Gravity's Rainbow

Connections to Pynchon's wide-spread yet remarkably hidden family history are scattered throughout this masterwork. Well known author, bag man, and urban legend Thomas Ruggles Pynchon the Fifth comes from a long line that begins with William Pynchon, founder of the town of Springfield, Massachusetts. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon the Third is more than a footnote to Nathaniel Hawthorne. This Pynchon Timetable comes from the Vheissu website:

Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes The House of the Seven Gables. Rev. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (1823-1904) writes the author a letter, complaining about the 'abuse' of the 'Pyncheon' name. This rev. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon will become the ninth president of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn, where he teaches science and religion. In 1881 he publishes an Introduction to Chemical Physics. His brother William is the great-grandfather of author Thomas Pynchon.

The use of language in his 'Introduction to Chemical Physics' is reminiscent of his younger namesake:

"The name Chemistry, is said to be derived from the Arabic word Kimia, something hidden or concealed, and from this, to have been converted into Xyueia*, a word first used by the Greeks about the eleventh century, and meaning the art of making gold and silver. Between the fifth century and the taking of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, says Dr. Thomson, in his History of Chemistry, the Greeks believed in the possibility of making god and silver artificially; and the art which professed to teach the processes was called by them, Chemistry. This idea, however, has long since been thoroughly discarded, and is now no longer heard of."

Like the author we are discussing, The Thomas Pynchon of Trinity College, Hartford Connicut, was a daunting polymath. If you open 'Introduction to Chemical Physics', one of the first things you will see is are Rainbow's, the rainbows of a chemical Spectrometer:

When a material is heated to incandescence it emits light that is characteristic of the atomic makeup of the material. Particular light frequencies give rise to sharply defined bands on the scale which can be thought of as fingerprints. For example, the element sodium has a very characteristic double yellow band known as the Sodium D-lines at 588.9950 and 589.5924 nanometers, the colour of which will be familiar to anyone who has seen a low pressure sodium vapor lamp.