The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars. Дава Собел
lens to take at least six months of long days on the Clarks’ steam-powered lathe. First the glasses would be abraded with rough sand, then by ever-finer rouge powders, until they assumed the desired curvature.
While that process was under way, Pickering drew plans for a freestanding structure in which to assemble and try out the finished instrument. The Bruce telescope must pass his own stringent tests before he could ship it to Arequipa. And Arequipa, in turn, must be readied to receive it. On May 29 he notified William, who had disappointed him, that his term as southern director would expire at the end of the year, at which time Solon Bailey would replace him. William could return in future to observe at the site, if he liked, but he would no longer be in charge.
William recoiled at the insult. “Without being boastful, I think I’ve accomplished a pretty big thing,” he argued on June 27, 1892, “and if the authorities [the president and fellows of the Harvard Corporation] could see it they would say I had got them a great deal for their money.” The idea of subservience to Bailey particularly rankled William: “As to our coming down here again to Peru and living in a small hut, while the Baileys occupy the Director’s house, it is out of the question. I planned and built that house, and while I am in Peru I expect to live in it. I don’t choose to live in a shanty while one of my subordinates occupies the house I built.”
All through the summer of 1892, William soothed himself by studying Mars during its close approach. As he reported in Astronomy and Astro-Physics, he observed and drew the red planet every night save one from July 9 to September 24. He collected “considerable data” on the Martian polar caps, the shaded areas “of greenish tint,” and the two large, dark regions that, under favorable conditions, turned blue “presumably due to water.” He referred to these as “seas.” He corroborated the numerous Martian “canals” originally discovered by Giovanni Schiaparelli of Italy, and noted that many of them intersected one another—at junctions he dubbed “lakes.” William communicated these same findings to the editors of the New York Herald, who printed them to sensational effect. An exasperated Edward Pickering complained to William on August 24 that the waters of Mars had generated a “flood” of forty-nine newspaper cuttings in one morning. He admonished William to restrict himself “more distinctly to the facts.”
Meanwhile Edward and Lizzie Pickering were looking to remodel the “dwelling house” in the observatory’s east wing. Although they had no children, nor any personal need for extra space, they expanded the observatory apartments, at their own expense, to accommodate and entertain visiting astronomers. Pickering was content to have the college continue docking his $4,000 annual salary for amounts considered rent, but he asked that henceforth the monthly sums be allocated solely for the observatory’s use, instead of for Harvard at large, as had been customary. Despite frequent gifts from active donors and the receipt of important new bequests, the director feared it might take years for the budget to recover from William’s profligacy in Peru.
Miss Bruce, unaware of William’s indiscretions, followed his publications in the astronomy literature. “The two articles in the May number of AstroPhysics from the pen of your brother,” she wrote Pickering in August, “have given me great pleasure and caused me to reflect on the happiness that you must have in working thus into each other’s hands.” She imagined Edward and William to be as close to each other as she was with her sister Matilda, ten years younger, who lived with her and helped her in a hundred ways.
The following month gave both Pickering and Miss Bruce genuine cause for shared happiness. “I hold out my hand to grasp yours,” she effused on September 9, when she heard that the lenses for the large photographic telescope had passed their first examination. “Let us rejoice.”
In October, as though in atonement, William resumed photography at Arequipa for the Henry Draper Memorial. By the end of December 1892 he had shipped two thousand plates to Cambridge.
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ALMOST FROM THE MOMENT stars began amassing on Harvard’s glass photographic plates, the director developed a dread of their destruction by fire. The larger the collection grew, the more devastating the contemplation of its loss, should the wooden observatory building ignite. Virtually everyone of Pickering’s acquaintance had lost something of value to a conflagration. Mrs. Draper’s family, for one, owned a theater in Union Square that burned to the ground in 1888, and its reconstruction continued to cause her grief. Consequently she had become something of an expert on fireproof paint, periodically urging its application to the observatory.
Pickering favored an alternate solution. In 1893 he announced the completion of a two-story “fire-proof building,” made entirely of brick, for the safe storage of glass plates and manuscripts of yet-to-be published results. The Brick Building, as everyone soon came to call it, crowned Pickering’s fifteen years of site improvements, from the numerous telescope domes and sheds to the neighboring house on Madison Street that had been transformed into a photography workshop and darkroom. In the words of journalist Daniel Baker, whom Miss Bruce commissioned to write up the observatory’s history, the hilltop once dominated by a single edifice had become a “little city of science.”
Mrs. Fleming oversaw the packing of the thirty thousand plates into three hundred crates. On March 2, 1893, workers rigged a block and tackle from the roof of the observatory’s west wing to a window of the new repository. Then they slid the approximately eight tons of plates down the rope skyway at the rapid clip of a crate per minute. Despite the precarious flight, not one piece of glass cracked or shattered.
Naturally Mrs. Fleming and most of the computers followed the plates into the new space, to remain close to them. They traveled at ground level by a wooden walkway over the muddy intervening ditch. When Miss Maury returned to join them in the spring, Pickering asked for her promise to complete her classification before the end of the year or turn over the work to someone else, and she signed a statement saying that she would.
There were now seventeen women computing at the observatory. In other words, nearly half of the observatory’s forty assistants were female—a fact Mrs. Fleming intended to emphasize in her invited remarks for the upcoming Congress of Astronomy and Astro-Physics in Chicago.
The name of the congress called attention to astronomy’s increasing emphasis on the physical nature of the stars through spectroscopy. Some self-styled astro-physicists were already distancing themselves from the more traditional observers who concentrated on stellar positions or cometary orbits. George Ellery Hale trumpeted the new trend. He had been briefly associated with Harvard while a student at MIT, before establishing his own Kenwood Observatory in his native Chicago in 1890. It was Hale who prevailed upon the editor of the Sidereal Messenger to change the publication’s name to Astronomy and Astro-Physics in 1892. And it was again Hale who organized the August 1893 Congress of Astronomy and Astro-Physics. By timing the meeting to coincide with the Chicago World’s Fair, or Columbian Exposition, he added incentive for astronomers from either coast and other continents to undertake the journey.
Hale invited Pickering to present the opening address to fellow scientists at the conference, as well as a broader, less technical talk to inform the fair-going public about the fabric of the stars. Hale also requested an exhibit’s worth of photographs documenting the work of the Harvard College Observatory and its physical plants in Cambridge and Arequipa. Pickering included photographs of the women at work in the new Brick Building.
Pickering began preparing the text for his popular address well in advance. “Our only knowledge of the constitution of the stars,” it began, “is derived from a study of their spectra.”
Mrs. Fleming also prepared an invited paper for the Astronomy and Astro-Physics congress. The previous summer in Chicago had seen the two women’s rights federations merged into one “National American Woman Suffrage Association.” This year, soon after the Exposition opened in May 1893, suffragettes Julia Ward Howe and Susan B. Anthony had made impassioned presentations. Though Mrs. Fleming fully affirmed the principle of equality, she was not an American citizen, and the feminist struggle for the right to vote was not her fight. The cause she championed was equality for women in astronomy: “While we cannot maintain that in everything woman is man’s equal,” Mrs. Fleming averred in her Chicago contribution, “yet in many things