The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars. Дава Собел
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Picture Section
Some Highlights in the History of the Harvard College Observatory
A Catalogue of Harvard Astronomers, Assistants, and Associates
Also by Dava Sobel
About the Author
About the Publisher
A LITTLE PIECE OF HEAVEN. That was one way to look at the sheet of glass propped up in front of her. It measured about the same dimensions as a picture frame, eight inches by ten, and no thicker than a windowpane. It was coated on one side with a fine layer of photographic emulsion, which now held several thousand stars fixed in place, like tiny insects trapped in amber. One of the men had stood outside all night, guiding the telescope to capture this image, along with another dozen in the pile of glass plates that awaited her when she reached the observatory at 9 a.m. Warm and dry indoors in her long woolen dress, she threaded her way among the stars. She ascertained their positions on the dome of the sky, gauged their relative brightness, studied their light for changes over time, extracted clues to their chemical content, and occasionally made a discovery that got touted in the press. Seated all around her, another twenty women did the same.
The unique employment opportunity that the Harvard Observatory afforded ladies, beginning in the late nineteenth century, was unusual for a scientific institution, and perhaps even more so in the male bastion of Harvard University. However, the director’s farsighted hiring practices, coupled with his commitment to systematically photographing the night sky over a period of decades, created a field for women’s work in a glass universe. The funding for these projects came primarily from two heiresses with abiding interests in astronomy, Anna Palmer Draper and Catherine Wolfe Bruce.
The large female staff, sometimes derisively referred to as a harem, consisted of women young and old. They were good at math, or devoted stargazers, or both. Some were alumnae of the newly founded women’s colleges, though others brought only a high school education and their own native ability. Even before they won the right to vote, several of them made contributions of such significance that their names gained honored places in the history of astronomy: Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, and Cecilia Payne. This book is their story.
I swept around for comets about an hour, and then I amused myself with noticing the varieties of color. I wonder that I have so long been insensible to this charm in the skies, the tints of the different stars are so delicate in their variety. … What a pity that some of our manufacturers shouldn’t be able to steal the secret of dyestuffs from the stars.
—Maria Mitchell (1818–1889)
Professor of Astronomy, Vassar College
The white mares of the moon rush along the sky
Beating their golden hoofs upon the glass heavens
—Amy Lowell (1874–1925)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
THE DRAPER MANSION, uptown on Madison Avenue at Fortieth Street, exuded the new glow of electric light on the festive night of November 15, 1882. The National Academy of Sciences was meeting that week in New York City, and Dr. and Mrs. Henry Draper had invited some forty of its members to dinner. While the usual gaslight illuminated the home’s exterior, novel Edison incandescent lamps burned within—some afloat in bowls of water—for the amusement of the guests at table.
Thomas Edison himself sat among them. He had met the Drapers years ago, on a camping trip in the Wyoming Territory to witness the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878. During that memorable interlude of midday darkness, as Mr. Edison and Dr. Draper executed their planned observations, Mrs. Draper had dutifully called out the seconds of totality (165 in all) for the benefit of the entire expedition party, from inside a tent, where she remained secluded, blind to the spectacle, lest the sight of it unnerve her and cause her to lose count.
The red-haired Mrs. Draper, an heiress and a renowned hostess, surveyed her electrified salon with satisfaction. Not even Chester Arthur in the White House lighted his dinner parties with electricity. Nor could the president attract a more impressive assembly of science’s luminaries. Here she welcomed the well-known zoologists Alexander Agassiz, down from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Spencer Baird, up from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. She introduced her family friend Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune to Asaph Hall, world famous for his discovery of Mars’s two moons, and to solar expert Samuel Langley, as well as to the directors of every prominent observatory on the Eastern Seaboard. No astronomer in the country could refuse an invitation to the home of Henry Draper.
It was her home, in fact—her childhood home, built by her late father, the railroad and real estate magnate Cortlandt Palmer, long before the neighborhood became fashionable. Now she made certain the house suited Henry as perfectly as she did, with its entire third floor converted into his machine workshop, and the loft over the stable repurposed as his chemical laboratory, which he reached via a covered walkway connected to the dwelling.
She had barely heeded the stars before meeting Henry, any more than she regarded grains of sand at the shore. He was the one who pointed out to her their subtle colors and differences in brightness, even as he whispered his dream of abjuring medicine for astronomy. If she feigned interest at first to please him, she had long since found her own passion, and proved a willing partner in observation as