The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars. Дава Собел
Elements of Astronomy,” she told Pickering, “after reading in a newspaper that it was adapted to the humblest capacity—Well there is in ‘every lowest depth a lower deep’ and I fear to fall into it.
“Young calls the vast spaces between the stars a vacuum,” Miss Bruce continued, while another book she read by philosopher John Fiske “speaks of it as the luminiferous ether. I shall hold on to Young.” Pickering obligingly provided her with all the Harvard Observatory’s publications, from volumes of the Annals to offprints of his research reports. “Your paper on Variable Stars of Long Periods,” she said in a thank-you note, “I at once read and with admiration— not of the Tables but of the simple goodness of heart shown in the detailed directions to unskilled amateurs how to become useful aids to Science.”
Since his initial 1882 open invitation to amateurs, especially ladies, to observe the changing brightness of variable stars, Pickering had repeated the request with relevant instructions, and also rewarded the volunteers by publishing several summaries of their results in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He recommended that amateurs follow only those variables that cycled slowly through their brightness changes over periods of days or weeks, and leave the more rapid or erratic examples to study by professionals. No amount of amateur assistance, however, relieved Pickering of the need to repeat his exhortations for additional funding in every annual report of observatory activities.
Upon hearing that certain millionaires had failed to open their pocketbooks in response to a worthy appeal, Miss Bruce reminded Pickering that “some generalship is required” in dealing with rich gentlemen: “They must not be attacked directly and squarely but in flank or rear.” For her part, she volunteered to lend further assistance, not just to Harvard, but to astronomers everywhere, if Pickering would agree to help her choose the most deserving cases. With her promise of $6,000 to start, he announced a call for aid applications in July 1890. He also sent letters to individual researchers at observatories all over the world, asking whether they could put $500 to immediate good use—say, to hire an assistant, repair an instrument, or publish a backlog of data. Nearly one hundred responses met the October deadline. Pickering evaluated the proposals and Miss Bruce approved his recommendations in time for a November selection of the winners. Simon Newcomb, author of the article that had aroused Miss Bruce’s indignation, became one of the first five scientists in the United States to receive her support. Another ten awards went overseas to astronomers working in England, Norway, Russia, India, and Africa.
“The same sky overarches us all,” Pickering avowed when he submitted the list of awardees to the Scientific American Supplement. As usual, he hoped that word of one donor’s generosity would spur others to follow suit. But no one proved more motivated by the outcome than Miss Bruce herself. She felt a particular obligation to astronomers whose plans had arrived too late for consideration.
“My dear Professor,” she wrote Pickering on February 10, 1891, “I am sorry that so lately as the date of your letter, Jan. 10th, applications still came in, and to see clearly that mixed with some good we have done some harm, for these are disappointed persons, even in some cases mortified—though in fact without cause.” She urged Pickering to assess a new crop of astronomers whose projects she could assist.
All this time, Miss Bruce’s lavish gift to Harvard still lay in the bank unused, awaiting the arrival of the lens disks from Paris. Pickering’s queries to the glassmaker, Mantois, went unanswered, as did letters and cablegrams sent from the Clarks. After eighteen months, Miss Bruce denounced “that miserable laggard Mantois,” and wished she could confront him in person, confident that her command of French was “probably at least as good as his.”
In the spring of 1891, nearly two years after Pickering placed the lens order, he discovered to his distress that Mantois had not even begun to form the glass.
“I shall be only less glad than you when the disc arrives and Clark finds it satisfactory,” Miss Bruce sympathized on April 9. “Let your patience hold out a little longer—another two years or so—and what are two years in the calculations of an astronomer?”
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WILLIAM H. PICKERING, the designated first director of Harvard’s southern observatory, reached Arequipa in January 1891. He viewed his arrival as the foundation of a dynasty. His brother already ruled the familiar realm of the northern skies from Cambridge, while here below the equator William would explore the lesser known heavens and establish his own reputation. True, he supervised only two astronomical assistants for the moment, but he presumed the need for a larger staff in Peru would become apparent as soon as the rainy season ended and observations commenced.
William first had to lease or buy land in the area the Bailey brothers had scouted. Solon and Ruth Bailey were packing to go home, vacating their rented house in Arequipa so the Pickerings could move into it. William had come accompanied by his wife, Anne; their two toddlers, Willie and Esther; Anne’s widowed mother, Eliza Butts of Rhode Island; plus a nurse. To accommodate his family in accord with his sense of mission, he treated the $500 sum he had been allotted for land acquisition as merely the down payment on an expensive property. There he began construction of several permanent buildings for the telescopes, and also a commodious hacienda, complete with servants’ quarters and stable. In February, after only a few weeks in residence, William cabled Edward, “Send four thousand more.”
By Western Union and stern letters in longhand, Edward tried to make William hew to a stricter economy. In addition, the older brother repeatedly pressed the younger to get busy taking pictures. The Henry Draper Memorial hungered for more photographs of southern stellar spectra. Why did William not make use of the Bache telescope already set up on-site, even as he oversaw the erection of shelters for the three additional telescopes he had brought to Peru? (Over a comparable period during the first expedition in 1889, Bailey had returned some four hundred plates.) In April, William finally obeyed, but still delayed sending the photographs to Cambridge. By August, Edward complained in exasperation, “I am very glad that you have 500 plates but very sorry that they are not here. I am very anxious lest some mistake regarding instructions may make them worthless.”
William had never been happier, never enjoyed better seeing—the astronomer’s term for atmospheric conditions. He loved the clear, still mountain air of the Andes that enabled him to resolve unprecedented fine detail on the surfaces of the Moon and planets. Although the solar system was not the focus of any Harvard program planned for Peru, the planets now absorbed William’s attention almost to the exclusion of photometry and spectroscopy. Despite his early devotion to photographic technique, William backslid into visual observing at Arequipa. The 13-inch Boyden telescope, with which he photographed the eclipse in California, had suffered some damage to its clock drive on the journey south, rendering it temporarily unfit for long-exposure photography. Until new parts were in place, William felt free to savor the view through the instrument. It had a reversible lens that rendered it equally fit for the eye or the camera. Even after the needed repairs to the 13-inch were completed, and it stood ready to photograph the spectra of the brightest southern stars, William preferred to peer through its eyepiece and sketch the landscape of Mars.
While William neglected his duty in Peru, Mantois in Paris honored other lens orders ahead of Harvard’s. Miss Bruce deputized J. Cleaves Dodge, an old family friend living in France, to visit the glazier in the hope of rousing him to action on her telescope.
“We are not in luck,” Miss Bruce told Pickering on October 1, 1891, “decidedly not— Accept my condolences. Here is another cause of delay— Before you see all those discs you will have discovered your first grey hair and I! I shall be in cool repose in Greenwood [Cemetery]. But read Mr. Dodge’s letter.”
The enclosure described a cordial, half-hour conversation in which M. Mantois explained to Mr. Dodge “the mysteries of Crown and Flint glass, which to manufacture and to manipulate, as he seems to do, one must be a real alchemist.” This was hardly an exaggeration. Telescope lenses required glass made from the highest-quality materials, mixed according to secret recipes, and heated for weeks at temperatures above one thousand degrees in guarded foundries. The terms “crown” and “flint” distinguished the two basic types of glass by the added quantities of lead in the latter. Used