Dava Sobel - The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016

First published in the USA by Viking Books in 2016

Copyright 2016 John Harrison and Daughter, Ltd.

The right of Dava Sobel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover images Harvard University Archives, UAV 630.271 (D3091) (olvwork432332) / Harvard College Observatory (Harvard Women Computers, c. 1925)

Frontispiece image courtesy of Harvard University Archives

Insert page 1, bottom: Angelo Secchi, Le soleil, 18751877; page 2, top: Courtesy of Carbon County Museum, Rawlins, Wyoming; page 3, bottom: UAV 630.271 (E4116), Harvard University Archives; page 4, top: Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory; page 5, top: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; page 5, bottom: Courtesy of Hastings Historical Society, New York; page 6, top: Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory; page 6, bottom: Lindsay Smith, used with permission; page 7, top: HUGFP 125.82p, Box 2, Harvard University Archives; page 7, bottom: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; page 8, top: HUPSF Observatory (14), olvwork360662, Harvard University Archives; pages 89, bottom: UAV 630.271 (391), olvwork432043, Harvard University Archives; page 9, top: Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory; page 10, top: HUGFP 125.82p, Box 2, Harvard University Archives; page 10, bottom: Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory; page 11, top: HUGFP 125.36 F, Box 1, Harvard University Archives; page 11, bottom: HUGFP 125.36 F, Box 1, Harvard University Archives; page 12, bottom left and right: Courtesy of Katherine Haramundanis; page 13, top: Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives; page 13, bottom: Courtesy of Charles Reynes; page 14: Chart 1, Volume 105, Harvard College Observatory Annals; page 15, top: Courtesy of Hastings Historical Society, New York; page 15, bottom: Courtesy of Katherine Haramundanis; page 16, top: Lia Halloran, used with permission; page 16, bottom: Richard E. Schmidt, used with permission

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Source ISBN: 9780007548200

Ebook Edition November 2017 ISBN: 9780007548194

Version: 2017-09-14

To the ladies who sustain me:

Diane Ackerman, Jane Allen,

KC Cole, Mary Giaquinto, Sara James, Joanne Julian,

Zo Klein, Celia Michaels, Lois Morris,

Chiara Peacock, Sarah Pillow,

Rita Reiswig, Lydia Salant, Amanda Sobel,

Margaret Thompson, and Wendy Zomparelli,

with love and thanks

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 directors farsighted hiring practices, coupled with his commitment to systematically photographing the night sky over a period of decades, created a field for womens 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 womens 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 shouldnt be able to steal the secret of dyestuffs from the stars.

Maria Mitchell (18181889)
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 (18741925)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

T HE D RAPER 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 homes exterior, novel Edison incandescent lamps burned withinsome afloat in bowls of waterfor 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 sciences 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 Marss 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.