19th-century stargazers broke the ‘Glass’ ceiling
Dava Sobel writes of female Harvard ‘computers’ who developed standards still used today
It’s a welcome coincidence that Dava Sobel’s new book, The Glass Universe, comes in the wake of another recent book — and forthcoming movie — Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures. Shetterly tells the little-known story of the African-American women who worked as mathematicians for NASA in the 1960s, computing the rocket trajectories that would launch the late John Glenn into orbit and solidify America’s space program.
It’s a history rich in social and feminist relevance, given that Shetterly’s heroines worked under the segregationist Jim Crow laws of the day.
Set almost a century earlier, The Glass Universe ( Viking, 266 pp., out of four) eeeg is Sobel’s unintended prequel and parallel to Shetterly’s tale. Both books address the conquest of outer space from the perspective of the unsung women who helped make it possible in a white man’s world.
Sobel’s heroines are the privileged yet cloistered 19th-century women who also toiled as “computers” — that was the word for them in the mid-1800s as well as in the 1960s — at the Harvard College Observatory. There they were employed to interpret the glass photographic plates of stars made by telescope each night. This glass universe of some half a million plates was the basis for important scientific discoveries, many of them made by the unsung women Sobel introduces. Gifted and dili- gent, they developed classification systems for the stars, along with spectroscopic analyses of starlight — in all its constituent colors — that revealed key truths about the composition of heavenly bodies. They also helped to establish a scale for measuring distances across space, laying a foundation for the calculations of space travel.
Sobel — a former New York Times science reporter, and the author of several books on astronomy — traces a remarkable line in American female achievement, beginning with a New York heiress, Anna Palmer Draper, who helped her husband, Henry Draper, pioneer the pursuit of astrophotography. After his death in 1882, she brought his scientific legacy, many of his glass plates, and financial support to Professor Edward Pickering of the Harvard observatory.
Constrained by budgets and a shortage of available male workers, Pickering had hired and encouraged a young staff of female enthusiasts and students. “Was it usual, Mrs. Draper wondered, to employ women as computers? No, Pickering told her, as far as he knew the practice was unique to Harvard. … While it would be unseemly, Pickering conceded, to subject a lady to the fatigue, not to mention the cold in winter, of telescope observing, women with a knack for figures could be accommodated in the computing room…”
While Sobel is prone to scientific description that may confuse the less attentive reader, she captures the stalwart spirit of Pickering ’s female finds — especially standouts such as Annie Jump Cannon, who perfected Henry Draper’s star classification (it’s still in regular use), and Antonia Maury, who discerned the patterns of close-together stars.
They established a tradition that would culminate in 1956, when Dr. Cecilia Payne became the first female professor of Astronomy at Harvard. Inspired by her sisters in science, she broke the glass ceiling while reaching for the stars.