  The 1919 Eclipse Expedition to test the light-bending prediction of General
Relativity remains one of the most famous physics experiments of the 20th
century. However, in recent decades it has been increasingly often alleged that
the data-analysis of the expedition's leaders was faulty and biased in favor of
Einstein's theory. Arthur Stanley Eddington is particularly alleged to have
been prejudiced in favor of general relativity. Specifically it is claimed that
some of the data, which would have favored the so-called Newtonian prediction,
was thrown out on dubious grounds. This paper argues that a close examination
of the views of the expedition's organizers, and of their data analysis,
suggests that they had good grounds for acting as they did, and that the key
people involved, in particular the astronomer Frank Watson Dyson, were not
biased in favor of Einstein. It also draws attention to a modern re-analysis of
the most important eclipse plates which, though overlooked until now, tends to
strongly support the thesis of this paper.
