Library's review
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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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)