The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars

by Dava Sobel

Paperback, 2017

Status

Available

Call number

QB34 .S63

Genres

Publication

Penguin Books (2017), Edition: Illustrated, 336 pages

Description

History. Science. Nonfiction. HTML:From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science FridayNominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A joy to read.�?� �??The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or �??human computers,�?� to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges�??Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The �??glass universe�?� of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades�??through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography�??enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard�??and Harvard�??s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the sta… (more)

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LibraryThing member LisCarey

In the mid-19th century, the Harvard Observatory began employing women as computers, to do the calculations that were the necessary next step after observations were made and recorded. It was considered inappropriate to subject women to the rigors of nighttime observation work, but there was no

reason they couldn't do the essential mathematics. Initially, these women were often family members of the director or other astronomers, introduced to the field by their husbands, brothers, or fathers. As time went on and the demand for good computers grew, though, it became a field of science unusually open to women who were increasingly able to pursue formal scientific education.

That need grew in part because another woman, Mrs. Anna Draper, heiress to the Draper fortune, wanted to support her late husband's dedication to photographic study of the stars. Through her support, Harvard amassed half a million glass photographic plates, which could be studied in far more detail and precision than hand-drawn records that preceded them.

The women of the Harvard Observatory, whether wives, sisters, and daughters at the outset, or later, graduates of the women's colleges of Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley, or even, in one case, a former maid, Williamina Fleming, recruited by the observatory director, made major discoveries. Fleming discovered ten novae and over three hundred variable stars. Annie Jump Cannon developed the stellar classification system still in use today. Dr. Cecelia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin became not just Harvard's first female professor of astronomy, but also its first female department head.

They weren't just doing the boring, tedious stuff, as sometimes assumed now. They were doing ground-breaking scientific work, collaborating in what might now seem surprising equality with the men of the observatory.

These are fascinating stories, and well told by Sobel and well read by Campbell. In addition, this audiobook does include the sources, glossary, and other after-matter that are an essential part of the book, making pursuit of further information about any of the subjects that much easier.

Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

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LibraryThing member rosalita

The science of astronomy had existed for hundreds — thousands — of years, but much was still unknown in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Around the world, astronomers were doing their best to decode the mysteries of the stellar world using direct observation through telescopes. And

a very few began using a new technique: long-exposure photographs on glass negatives. The photographs had the advantage of being perusable repeatedly and in daylight, and the images they captured through a prism-and-camera system attached to telescopes revealed the spectra of individual stars in ways that were baffling at first but came to make more and more sense as they were studied.

Among the people studying these fragile negatives for clues to the composition and location of the stars were a group of women at the Harvard College Observatory. Originally brought together as literal human computers — performing mathematical calculations on the glass negatives that helped the observatory's male director create a map of what stars stood where in the sky — over time a few of the women took on much larger roles. The director, Edward Pickering, gave the women the freedom to not only perform calculations to his specifications, but to examine the negatives and do independent classification work on the types, sizes, and locations of the stars pictured. Women including Willamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, and Henrietta Leavitt made crucial discoveries that helped to advance science's understanding of stars, as well as creating the classification systems that allowed astronomers to share data and research about specific stars, and to better understand (literally) what stars were made of. Those systems are still in use today, with some modern refinements.

One of the most surprising and pleasing aspects of learning about the work these women did is how much respect they were given by their male colleagues. The discoveries and research that they did was freely credited to them in research journals, and they were elected to various professional societies and given research prizes. (Not all was sunshine and lollipops, though; women wrote their own research papers but then had to rely on a man to deliver them at conferences, since speaking in front of large audiences was not considered appropriate woman's work. Sigh.) Pickering in particular, and his successors at Harvard, Solon Bailey and Harlow Shapley, were generous in their encouragement of the independent research and discoveries that the women made.

Sobel does her usual fine job of making an exceedingly complex subject understandable to even a decidedly unscientific layperson like myself. And she skillfully explores not only the professional lives of the women she profiles but also their personal circumstances in an effort to understand what drove them to do the work they did.

All in all, this was a deeply satisfying exploration of what was to me a little-known aspect of women in science. I would venture that anyone who enjoyed [Hidden Figures] would find this book compelling in its subject matter as well.

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LibraryThing member CassandraT

What started as mild amusement at the underrepresentation of women in this book, turned into boredom (this books puts me, a professor in engineering, to sleep), and then ended in plain anger. I waffle between 1-2 stars. After getting to Cecilia Payne, and finally realizing that all of these women

are called Miss instead of doctor or just by their name (as the men are) and are constantly othered and that the incredible contribution of Dr. Payne was (IMO) so poorly communicated and the story of how she was led to doubt even herself... it's preposterous to call this a book about women in science. it's a book that has women. furthermore, I don't think the explanations of the science and their meaning or import are adequate.

I found the narrative to be much too chronological. I didn't feel that it maintained the threads of the scientific endeavor or the personalities. After reading reviews with Dava Sobel, it seems that she had a very hard time trying to put all the material together. I can definitely appreciate the book a lot more from that perspective, but I suspect there was a publishing push due to Hidden Figures that left the book unpolished. Also, I am aggravated by the fact that so much of the book is about men (esp first half) and that all the women are Miss or Mrs. or otherwise designated by their relationships to men .

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here are my prior thoughts:

As a PhD in engineering, I thought this would be inspiring. It's not, it's frustrating and boring. So many science and history books end up like a jumble or chronological list of facts and anecdotes. This book is no exception, in my opinion. I understand the desire to stay close to the material.... but I don't think it's achieved.

it seems the author wrote the book with mostly information created by men (journals, letters) and so we end up with four pages about men for every page about women.

the discoveries are jumbled with financing. the chronological organization doesn't really aid the reader, it just confuses since most of the astronomy seems to be described in generic terms and there no real theme to the chapters.

this book is neither about women in science or astronomy. it's about the director of the Harvard Observatory, a bunch of other dudes, and the choice of letters for classification of stars and financing of the Observatory by women.

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LibraryThing member LynnB

This book looks at the role women played, especially but not exclusively, at Harvard in mapping the stars and in developing an understanding of their characteristics -- size, brightness, composition -- often developing formulae that remain useful today. Their dedication and achievements are

inspirational. It is nice that they got some recognition for their contributions, although not always as much as they deserved.

Overall, the book was a bit dry. I know about the work these women did, but not much about them. Maybe there isn't a lot of information available? There is a story in the book about Mr. Shapley becoming distracted by ants as he's setting up a telescope and how he goes on to study them in his spare time. The story shows the inherent curiosity of scientists and I would have liked more of that kind of thing.

I like the title. Made me think that these women broke the "glass ceiling" by being hired for scientific work and were now focused on making their mark on the "glass universe".

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LibraryThing member DarthDeverell

In The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, Dava Sobel examines the spectroscopy work performed at Harvard under the auspices of the Henry Draper Memorial. She seeks to counter the prevailing view of the female computers at Harvard as "underpaid,

undervalued victims of a factory system" (pg. 262). Sobel's narrative begins with the work of Draper, who took spectroscopic photographs of the stars through a telescope, but died before having the opportunity to examine them. His widow, wishing to see the work completed, endowed the Harvard Observatory with a grant to catalogue the images and make further photographic and spectroscopic examinations, leading to the discovery of the chemical nature of the stars.
Sobel's work examines the lives and work of the women who worked as computers, counting the Fraunhofer lines on the stellar spectra and creating a system to interpret it. Most interesting of all, despite working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a field dominated by men, the ladies and their contributions were recognized both in the United States and abroad. Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming, who worked as a maid before establishing a system to classify the stars, and Annie Jump Cannon, a Wellesley graduate, both stand out in this narrative for their dedication and exactitude in their work as well as their lasting contributions to science. Their names should be spoken in the same breath as Isaac Newton and Einstein for how they changed our view of the cosmos.
The history Sobel examines is fundamental to our understanding of the universe and so has appeared before, in Cosmos and Alan Hirshfeld's Starlight Detectives, but her examination brings an unprecedented level of detail that demonstrates the significance of the women of the Harvard Observatory in their own time along with the challenges they faced, often working on a shoestring budget or without pay. Beyond her subjects' research, Sobel explores the nature of academia and academic funding in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how research that would easily receive university and financial support in the twenty-first century struggled at times in the era on which she focuses.
Sobel's title refers to the massive collection of glass photographic plates accumulated in the Harvard collection as a result of their research (pg. 203). The research and writing are everything readers expect of Sobel and a delight to delve into, sharing in her narrative. Though unrelated to Sobel's work, the appearance of the book is rather lovely as well.

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LibraryThing member thornton37814

Sobel discusses the admission of women to the Harvard Observatory even in the day when Harvard's student population consisted of males only. The women cataloged and observed the stars, making important contributions to the field of astronomy. While it is nice to see women play an important role

beginning in the late nineteenth century, the book suffers from a dry narrative which takes us mainly through the end of the World War II with the main subjects. The book discusses astronomy prizes in the women's honors which continues their legacy to the near present. Although a handful of footnotes pepper its pages, the book mainly includes two sections of narrative notes for each chapter. It also includes a glossary of astronomic terms, short biographies of persons who worked at the Harvard Observatory, both male and female, and a timeline. It also included a section of photographs. Perhaps the saddest photograph shows the now idle observatory refractor. The city's expansion means it never grows dark enough in the evening to make observations. The author includes an extensive bibliography, but the lack of documentation throughout the book limits its academic appeal. The dry narrative will not engage a popular audience. Only those with a genuine interest in astronomy will likely complete their attempted read of this one.

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LibraryThing member cburnett5

The Glass Universe meticulously delineates the previously little-known story about the contributions of a group of women hired by the Harvard College Observatory as “human computers” beginning in the mid-1800’s. While Dava Sobel at times employs incredible scientific detail while relaying

these women’s stories, overall The Glass Universe is a fascinating tale of the impact of a multitude of female astronomers on the field of astronomy. As the story develops, photography begins revolutionizing the field of astronomy creating a new field called spectrophotography. Accordingly, a number of these women begin studying the thousands of glass photographic plates created nightly at the observatory in Cambridge and at times from other areas including Peru and South Africa. The images created via photography magnified the views of the cosmos to degrees far beyond what the naked eye could see even with a telescope. As a result, the women (and some men too) discovered thousands of new stars, learned what stars are composed of, and characterized stars into groupings with similar traits. Sobel also pays tribute to the individuals who funded much of this research including Anna Draper whose husband was on the forefront of spectrophotography and sadly died young, Andrew Carnegie and Catherine Bruce, a wealthy New York socialite who came to love astronomy late in life.

Because so many women participated in the development of a new understanding of the cosmos, there are a tremendous number of characters in The Glass Universe. Repeatedly while reading, I kept wishing that there was a character listing at the front of the book to help me keep track of them all. When I finished the book, I was happy to ascertain that Sovel had compiled a lengthy Catalogue of Harvard Astronomers, Assistants, and Associates at the end of the book. While it was helpful to peruse this after finishing The Glass Universe, I feel it would have been more useful at the front of the book instead of after I was finished reading. At the end of the book, Sobel also includes a timeline with the highlights of the Harvard College Observatory which places many of the developments and discoveries into a coherent, satisfying format.

Sobel’s story is uplifting, and I loved reading about the recognition these women received at a time when women working was highly uncommon. Not only did their fellow workers at Harvard Observatory acknowledge the success and importance of these individuals, but astronomers worldwide respected and recognized the contributions made by them. I highly recommend The Glass Universe. Thanks to Viking Books and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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LibraryThing member marysneedle

I had no idea that human women computers went back so far as the 1870s. This is a great book with lots of period historical information about the women computers for the Harvard Observatory and their vital contributions to the science of Astronomy.

LibraryThing member St.CroixSue

”The little-known true story of the women’s landmark contributions to astronomy.” One of the best books of the year by NPR. Women were originally hired in this field to do complex mathematical problems and were called ‘computers.’ When photography came into use for astronomical purposes,

the women who had been doing the computing studied all the glass plates and discovered most everything that was discoverable at the time. An eye-opener regarding the contribution by many women in this field and the inequity in pay and acknowledgment. The book is very detailed and long – a good read for those interested in the history of astronomy.

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LibraryThing member jamespurcell

A good look at some little known history when women went allowed to work in the science world received little recognition, and low salaries if any It also demonstrates the difficulties of early astronomical data collection, collation and reporting. The computers, mostly educated and volunteers were

primarily young women who dedicated years to the tedious and exacting work. Excellent title and good insights into the early days of Astronomy and the role played by women, known as computers, provided for the Harvard Observatory. Frequently volunteers and always underpaid, these women were participants and often key factors in the seminal work to map and document the universe. The "Glass Universe" was a resource nonpareil for many fruitful years of exploration, analysis and expanding man's knowledge.

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LibraryThing member quondame

The view of the Harvard College Observatory under the directors Edward Pickering and Harlow Shapely and the women calculators and astronomers who worked and build reputations there is almost all pretty high level more a discussion of a not quite accidental group of women who made substantial

contributions to astronomy and astrophysics. There is almost no hint of what the community life or individual life of the dedicated women was like, and lacking any real villain beyond a crushing paternalistic system, the only hint of scandal Pickering's somewhat profligate and decidedly glory hound of a brother was always geographically distant, and unwillingness of Harvard's President Lowell to accept women as officially associated with Harvard is not dissected as to whether it had to do with astronomy or women and he was hardly an exception if the latter. So this isn't quite the interesting tale of [Longitude], but it is a painless discussion of late 19th and early 20th century astronomical advances.

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LibraryThing member steller0707

The Harvard Observatory pioneered observations of the heavenly bodies by photography and spectroscopy (as opposed to physical observations) in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time Edward Pickering was the Observatory’s Director. He and his successors hired

professional staff and student assistants, among them a good proportion of women, who made significant contributions to astronomy, in particular to the study and cataloging of the Stars. The women pursued graduate degrees, both Masters and PhDs, wrote catalogs, articles and books, and won international acclaim. This is their story.

At times the detail is overwhelming, but there is a Glossary, time table and list of “characters” at the back of the book.

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LibraryThing member themulhern

A complement to "Miss Leavitt's Stars" which I am also currently reading. This book takes a wider view, and covers a longer period. It manages to give more background to "Miss Leavitt's Stars", which was a help to me. I plan to read it in physical form, having only listened to it in audio so

far.

It's funny how Pickering managed to be an ardent feminist while simultaneously routinely and deliberately underpaying his female employees.

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LibraryThing member cindywho

Great local history about the Center for Astrophysics and the women who cataloged the stars and made amazing discoveries.

LibraryThing member rakerman

Unabridged audiobook:
Competent reading, but some odd tonality, inflection and pacing within her words.

LibraryThing member cbl_tn

Edward Pickering, the fourth director of the Harvard College Observatory, was its longest-serving director. During his tenure, he employed numerous female assistants as “computers” to record and organize notes and make calculations from astronomical observations and from photographic plates.

Sobel picks up her story with the premature death of amateur astronomer Henry Draper and his widow’s subsequent funding of Pickering’s research in her husband’s memory.

The Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra and its successors were the result of methodical analysis and classification of the photographic images of the stars. Most of this work was carried out by women such as Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, and Annie Jump Cannon. These women had an incredible opportunity to contribute to the science of astronomy, yet they were underpaid and under-rewarded for their achievements. These women were known among the community of astronomers, yet the awards for their contributions primarily went to Pickering and his successors. It’s ironic that even Sobel, in writing a book about the ladies of Harvard Observatory, gives more attention to Pickering than to any of the many women who worked with him.

Although Sobel writes for a popular audience, I found parts of the book hard going with no background in astronomy. I was more interested in other aspects of the book, such as the personal lives of the astronomers, Pickering’s cultivation of donors for the work, the politics of academia, and the problems of organization and storage of the rapidly growing library of photographic plates. All of these aspects are more relatable to me.

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LibraryThing member MrsLee

Enjoyed it very much! I don't even love astronomy, and thinking too much about the extent of our universe gives me the willies, but this was very personal with many excerpts from people's letters and diaries. As much or more about the people involved as the discoveries they made. I will be keeping

an eye out for some of her other books.

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LibraryThing member nbmars

This non-fiction account, subtitled “How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars,” is a history of the Harvard College Observatory and the women who both funded the scientific program there and performed a great deal of the research.

The women workers functioned as

“computers” at a time when the machines we today call computers were not yet in existence. Many of the women came to the observatory when young and spent the rest of their lives doing astronomical work. There were six of them at first, later expanding to 14. They toiled for hours over glass plates of the stars made by astronomers in both the northern hemisphere at Harvard, and at Harvard's southern outpost in Arequipa, Peru.

The women subdivided the sky and examined the plates from each stellar region. They analyzed and recorded the brightness of each star with respect to the others on the plates, and looked for oddities - especially new and/or variable stars. They also identified the spectra of all of the stars. (Prisms inside the telescopes split the light of each star, revealing barcode-like lines indicating properties of stars such as chemical composition and temperature.)

The glass universe that grew in size year by year paralleled the one revealed above astronomers' heads with ever stronger telescopes.

Right from the outset, the author tries to disabuse readers of the commonly held notion that the female workers at the Harvard Observatory were underpaid and undervalued because they were women. Yes, they were paid pittance wages, but so was everyone else at the observatory; money for research was scarce. And they were far from undervalued. In fact, Edward Pickering, head of the Harvard Observatory for over 40 years - from 1877 to 1919, did all that he could to give credit to the women’s findings and to advance their positions. His successor, Harlow Shapley (Director from 1921 to 1952), did even more.

The most significant finding derived from the glass plates, one in some ways as earth-shaking as the findings of Galileo, was made by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, one of the “computers” at the observatory. She discovered that a certain type of pulsating star, called a Cepheid Variable, always exhibited a direct relationship between brightness and its period of alterations in brightness. The brighter the magnitude, the longer the period - always. So if one Cepheid Variable was not as bright as another but had the same period, it must be farther away, and that distance could be calculated mathematically. Cepheid variables became the markers of distance in space. Her discovery not only enabled astronomers to calculate distances in space, but showed that the Milky War was not the only galaxy in the universe, a truly revolutionary finding. Later, it helped demonstrate that the universe was expanding.

As a Nasa website points out,

"This method works up to 13 million light-years when Earth-bound telescopes are used. . . . Recently, space-based telescopes such as the Hubble Telescope, have used these stars to much farther distances. Looking at a galaxy in the Virgo cluster called M100, astronomers used the Cepheid variables observed there to determine its distance - 56 million light-years."

Although one purpose of this history is to highlight the achievements of the women at the observatory, Pickering plays a central role. He worked tirelessly to get whatever funds he could to operate the observatory and to reward budding astronomers. He helped usher in a new era that employed photography and spectroscopy to take astronomical findings to the next level. He ensured that the library of the glass plate universe was expanded, protected, and made available to any wishing to study the stars.

Astronomers no longer use glass plates, since everything is done digitally. But this does not mean the glass universe is without value. On the contrary, as the author observes:

“ . . . no matter how broadly or deeply modern sky surveys probe outer space, they cannot see what the heavens looked like on any given date between 1885 and 1992. The record preserved in the Harvard plate collection of one hundred years of starry nights remains unique, invaluable, and irreplaceable.”

Today, astronomers regularly consult the plates (over 500,000 of them!) to enrich and interpret their latest findings: “Celestial denizens undreamed of at the start of Pickering’s sky patrol - pulsars, quasars, black holes, supernovae, X-ray binaries - nevertheless left their marks on the plates.”

Evaluation: This tribute to tireless scientists including a small dedicated circle of women is well worth reading for an appreciation of the enormity of the effort of many people over many years behind scientific discoveries. Sobel also makes the point that while the men were generally assisted by wives, the women scientists who worked so long and so hard, also had homes and families to take care of, and they did it all.

A Few Notes on the Audio Production:

This book was narrated admirably by Cassandra Campbell, who makes even the introduction of chapter numbers sound beautiful. She seamlessly takes on the pronunciation of different places in different languages, and it was a pleasure to listen to her.

Addenda: Harvard University is working to digitize and transcribe notebooks from some of Harvard College Observatory's most famous women computers, including Henrietta Leavitt and Annie Jump Cannon. They are looking for volunteers to help from home! You can read more about this and find out how to get involved here.

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LibraryThing member terran

This is a history of the role of the women who analyzed photographic plates of stars produced at the Harvard College Observatory from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Ironically, the work of making the observations themselves at night on telescopes in Harvard and observatories elsewhere was

deemed too difficult for women to undertake. Originally the women who did the compilations were wives, sisters and daughters of astronomers, but eventually graduates of women's colleges were hired to continue the work. It is amazing to learn how many of the computations and discoveries were made by women in a scientific field usually dominated by men. The approach was rather dry, but I enjoyed listening to it.

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