The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars. Дава Собел
of the instruments stolen.
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“DEAR UNCLE DAN,” ANTONIA MAURY wrote to Daniel Draper, the Central Park meteorologist, on September 2, 1894, from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, “I have been having a good time here and have got well rested in the last three weeks. I am still however too lazy to be able to make any plans for the winter. I have to be in Cambridge for about two weeks to finish up some odds and ends. Then Mrs. Fleming is going to attend to the printing of the work, so I shall be free. I think a little of going with Carlotta [her sister] to study at Cornell, but may decide to study by myself in Boston where I can have excellent library advantages.”
She had missed the agreed-upon deadline of December 1, 1893, for completing her work at the observatory, but felt close to finishing now. Unfortunately, the remaining “odds and ends” overwhelmed her, especially as she also resumed her teaching duties for the semester. Her father, the Reverend Mytton Maury, whose lack of a permanent posting no doubt added to his daughter’s stress, expressed his concerns to Pickering on November 12. “I wish you would try to give Miss Maury every assistance in finishing up the work in hand,” he wrote. “It is most important that she should go away. She is growing so nervous that she often wakes long before daybreak & can’t get to sleep again.” Along with the increase in her anxiety from September to November, her winter plans had taken the shape of a trip to Europe. “She and her brother are to sail on the 5th of Dec.,” Reverend Maury said with emphasis. “You will see therefore that a conclusion must be reached. As to the Orion lines please assume that labor yourself & so relieve her. That at least seems to be one point in which her responsibility can be lightened. I do not know that there is anything else that can be done by others—but if there is, please do me the favor to have it done.”
The Orion lines, as the reverend must have known from his daughter’s description, were particularly conspicuous spectral lines in some stars of the constellation Orion, the Hunter. Orion lines were separate from the twenty known hydrogen lines, distinct also from the calcium lines, and not to be confused with the hundreds of “solar lines” typical of the Sun’s spectrum. In short, it was not yet clear what substance or condition the Orion lines represented, but they figured importantly in the first five stellar spectra categories of Miss Maury’s classification system.
“It is very desirable to have the work done of course,” Reverend Maury continued, “but not at the expense of injured health.” In a postscript, he asked Pickering to provide a letter of introduction to foreign astronomers for Miss Maury’s use in Europe. Pickering did as he was asked.
“Many thanks for the letter of introduction,” Reverend Maury wrote again on December 1. “It was just the thing. … Thanks too for your efforts to facilitate the work on those perplexing Orion lines. I hope now things will be left in such a shape that there will be no perturbations in the mind of ‘the Astronomer,’ as we call her.”
Over the next several weeks, as the day of her departure was delayed and Miss Maury continued working at the observatory, she took offense at some remark of the director’s, so that Reverend Maury felt it necessary on December 19 to remind Pickering that his daughter “is a lady and has the feelings and rights of one.”
In an effort to excuse her father’s intervention, Miss Maury sent her own agitated note to Pickering on December 21: “The fact is that my father was excited because I often came home tired and nervous and sometimes complained as people are apt to do about their work. It is true I have often said that your criticisms had from the beginning so shaken my faith in my own ability to work with accuracy that I had been struggling against a great weight of discouragement from the start. But although I several times before have taken offense at things you have said to me I have always decided in the end that the only trouble was that I, being naturally unsystematic, was not able to understand what you wanted and that you also, not having examined minutely with all the details, did not see that the natural relations I was in search of could not easily be arrived at by any cast iron system.”
She drafted one last letter while riding the train to New York on January 8. “I am very sorry I did not see you to say goodbye,” she began. The last week had passed in such a rush. Her steamer was leaving the next day. “I felt the more sorry as I wanted to tell you that I appreciate your kindness to me all along and understand entirely many things that I did not always [understand] in times past. And that I should have done differently had I seen more clearly. I am sorry I have been so long about the work, but partly on account of my inexperience and partly because the facts developed gradually, I am not sure that I could have done any better what I have done in the past year and six months, at any earlier time.” She hoped he would have no trouble reading her manuscript, and promised to send Mrs. Fleming an address in Europe where she could receive mail.
“I sail tomorrow at 2 pm—at least I believe so though I am not sure whether or not I am dreaming, so confused is everything in my mind. I hope that although my work at the observatory is at an end I may still keep your friendly regard and confidence which I value very greatly.”
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ASTRONOMERS WHO HAD DOUBTED William Pickering’s impressions of Mars were scandalized at what Percival Lowell saw there—not just watery surface features, but a fully developed network of irrigation canals engineered by intelligent Martians. William would not go so far. By November 1894 he had made up his mind to leave Lowell and return to the Harvard fold. The choice proved wise, as the weather in Flagstaff that winter destroyed the quality of the seeing.
In Peru, where the seasons were reversed, Solon and Ruth Bailey spent a few overcast January days in 1895 tending to a problem at an auxiliary meteorology station in Mollendo. On their way back to Arequipa, a crowd of armed men surrounded their train and rushed aboard. “The car was at once filled with cries of ‘Jesus Maria’ and ‘Por Dios,’ by the ladies and children,” Bailey wrote Pickering on January 14. “I advised Mrs. Bailey and Irving to keep quiet and there would be no harm done and so it turned out. The revolutionists behaved with great moderation and offered us no indignity whatever. We were sent back to Mollendo however while the men followed us in another train which they had captured. When near the town they left us locked in the car and forming in line marched in and took the place in a few minutes. Mollendo is said to have a population of about 3000 but there were only 15 soldiers and they surrendered after about a hundred shots were fired.”
The Baileys and scores of other temporarily displaced passengers found shelter for the night at the home of the steamship agent. The next day, when the rebels left and troops loyal to President Cáceres reclaimed Mollendo, the Baileys again boarded the train for Arequipa. At home they found that Hinman Bailey had removed the lenses from the several telescopes—not to use the tubes as cannon, as Solon had quipped, but to bury the glass for safekeeping. The Bruce photographic telescope, with its 24-inch lens, was still undergoing tests in Cambridge, and for once the delay in its delivery seemed providential.
Within a fortnight of the train incident, Arequipa came under heavy attack. Rebels cut the telegraph line and Bailey reburied the recently retrieved telescope lenses. In the diary-like letter he composed during the siege, which lasted from January 27 to February 12, he recorded daily events, the din of nearby rifle fire, and his relief that the battle coincided with the cloudy season, “as otherwise it would sadly interfere with our night work.”
By March the victorious rebels had ousted Cáceres and installed a provisional government. New elections planned for August seemed likely to elect the rebel leader, Arequipa native Nicolás de Piérola. The Baileys had reported hearing shouts of “Viva Piérola!” punctuating their January ride on the hijacked train. Now they invited the old warhorse to tour the observatory station, and treated his entourage to a reception with refreshments. “The expense was moderate,” Bailey assured Pickering on April 15, “about twenty dollars, and as Pierola is sure to be the next president, if he lives, I think it was a wise act.”
With good weather and nightly observations restored, Bailey resumed his contemplation of the gorgeous globular clusters. Four of them contained such astonishing numbers of variable stars that he took to calling them “variable star clusters.” With Ruth’s help, he kept count of their contents as he searched for additional