The Glass Universe

by Dava Sobel

  It took two weeks for the ship to reach Mollendo, the nearest port to Arequipa, via the Panama Canal. Miss Cannon marveled at the Gatun and Miraflores locks, and even more at the sights above. “Epsilon and Iota Carinae, Kappa and Delta Velorum. How eagerly I gazed upon these stars, for my very first astronomical investigation concerned the spectra of bright southern stars never before visible to my eye.”

  Progress had altered the port of Mollendo since the perilous off-loading of the Bruce telescope in 1896. Miss Cannon was forced to bid the ship’s company “a hasty farewell, for a novel method of landing passengers is customary at that port. A chair swung out from shore by a steam crane is let down into the tender, and seating himself, the passenger is quickly transferred to the Mollendo dock. After that, one expected novelties at every turn. And they came. Still 104 miles were we from Arequipa, with wonders all along the way.” They traversed the desert and beheld the Andes. At the Arequipa railway station, a motorcar awaited to take them the final two miles to the observatory. “Such a drive through colorful Arequipa, the Cairo of South America, over the Chile River and into the town of Yanahuara, where streets are so narrow that pedestrians crowded against the walls of houses to avoid being run down.”

  The Arequipa station had been shuttered in November 1918, when the then supervisor, L. C. Blanchard, covered the telescope lenses and left to enlist in the armed forces. Even before the United States entered the war, decreased financial support had diminished the site’s productivity, and the risks of shipping glass plates through war-troubled waters had grown prohibitive. Juan E. Muñiz, the longtime caretaker, watched over the locked, deserted station until peace reopened it. Frank E. Hinkley, a veteran of two previous Arequipa assistantships, took charge of the place in 1919, aided by the faithful Muñiz. Since Hinkley’s departure in September 1921, Muñiz had single-handedly managed the building and equipment maintenance, the meteorological observations, and the taking of more than one thousand new pictures of the sky.

  Observing in the transparent air at Arequipa revealed so much depth and detail that Miss Cannon had the sense she was gazing up into a live, long-exposure photograph. She learned to take her own plates with the various instruments, including “the unwieldy 24-inch Bruce Telescope. Each plate I secured was to me very precious. After developing and drying, I examined them as soon as possible, searching for new or unusual objects.” One such object proved to be a new long-period variable; another, a nova.

  “I expect to be an athlete when I return to Old Cambridge,” she wrote Shapley, “for the running of the 13-inch requires turning a heavy dome, mounting ladders big and little, and all sorts of things, which Mr. Muñiz declared I could not do, for it was not ‘woman’s work.’ I can do it all, however, except get good plates of faint spectra.” A spry fifty-eight, she often walked the five miles to and from Arequipa “over the worst roads you ever saw” in the afternoon, and then worked five or more hours at the telescopes. “But it is great fun and does not tire me at all. Indeed it has been on clear nights so beautiful at mid-night that I hated to go to bed.”

  In addition to the pleasure of these pursuits, Miss Cannon enjoyed seeing a side of Bailey “in ‘simpatica’ Arequipa” that he rarely revealed in Cambridge. “A certain New England reserve and shyness,” she noticed, “melted away under the tropical Peruvian sky.”

  Early in May, while the Baileys and Miss Cannon were thus occupied, most other astronomers reunited in Rome for the first general assembly of the new International Astronomical Union, the postwar incarnation of George Ellery Hale’s old Solar Union. The meeting planned for 1916 had been scuttled by the conflict, but in 1919 scientists from many fields and twelve countries met in Brussels to forge new partnerships. The IAU emerged as one of the first of these forward-looking groups, and was personally welcomed into the world by King Albert of Belgium.

  Although thousands of miles from the 1922 gathering, Miss Cannon was well represented in Rome. Henry Norris Russell, the chairman of the current Committee on Stellar Classification, had invited her participation early in 1919, and she had kept up a steady exchange of ideas with her fellow members since that time. Russell’s formal report showed that Miss Cannon’s system survived the discussions intact, strengthened by several additions useful to specialists in spectroscopy. For example, an S category had been introduced for a new class of red stars (thus lengthening the entrenched mnemonic to “Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now, Sweetheart”). Also, the prefix of a lowercase c, a remnant from Miss Maury’s more elaborate classification system, could now legitimately be placed before any capital letter to identify a star with markedly narrow, sharp lines. The c had proven its usefulness and won its rightful place in the stellar nomenclature. Similarly, the passage of ten years had underscored the importance of distinguishing between giant stars and dwarf stars, allowing the admission of g or d prefixes where appropriate.

  Solon Bailey, as chairman of the IAU Committee on Variable Stars, had written the committee’s report, but requested that Shapley read it for him at Rome. The report outlined a cooperative future: France, Italy, and other countries would henceforth coordinate observations, following the successful model of amateurs and professionals working together in the American Association of Variable Star Observers.

  Harlow and Martha Shapley had vacillated through the early months of 1922 as to whether they could make the trip to Rome. Both their boys, Willis and Alan, fell dangerously ill that winter with pneumonia, and for a while the parents feared Willis would not pull through. When the crisis passed, Shapley still questioned the wisdom of a long absence from his new duties. Once he and Martha decided to go, however, he influenced the travel plans of other attending astronomers, and made sure to sail aboard the same ship as the Russells. He even convinced Arthur Stanley Eddington to move up the Royal Astronomical Society’s centenary celebration from June to May, for the convenience of American foreign associates already abroad. Between the ending of the IAU meeting on May 10 and the start of the RAS events in London on the twenty-ninth, Shapley gave talks in the Netherlands on galactic structure and visited German observatories in Potsdam, Munich, Bergedorf, and Babelsberg.

  In mid-June, seated once again at Pickering’s revolving desk in the observatory, Shapley bragged to George Agassiz and the Visiting Committee of the trip’s successes: “At the centenary of the RAS I talked about the work now being done at Harvard, and also made the principal address at a special meeting of the British Astronomical Association. At the Rome International meeting the Harvard Observatory astronomers were elected to 11 memberships on 8 of the 26 commissions, a recognition exceeded only by Mount Wilson among the American observatories, and my personal memberships naturally exceed those of any other American astronomer, because of the wide range of interest at Harvard, and were equaled only by those of the Astronomer Royal.”

  In other words, Agassiz should forget he ever doubted Shapley’s competence to direct the Harvard College Observatory.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Miss Payne’s Thesis

  ONE MIGHT HAVE EXPECTED HARLOW SHAPLEY to regret leaving the giant telescopes and ideal viewing conditions of Mount Wilson for life in a cloudy East Coast metropolis. Once settled in Cambridge, however, Shapley found he preferred his new role as observatory director to the rigors of making observations. “Observing was always very hard work for me,” he conceded in his memoir. “I ‘suffered’ quite a bit those long cold nights. I suppose I didn’t get as much sleep in the daytime as I needed, for I was running around observing ants in the bushes.”

  At Harvard he befriended his longtime correspondent, myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler, to whom he had mailed many vials of ants for expert identification. In the faculty dining club, Shapley, who had inherited Pickering’s title as the Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy, hobnobbed with professors from other fields and honed his ideas about astronomy education. Although senior observatory staff members Solon Bailey, Edward King
, and Willard Gerrish all went by the title of professor, they neither held doctoral degrees nor taught Harvard courses. The one man who did teach elementary astronomy at the university, Robert Wheeler Willson, did not associate himself with the observatory. Indeed, as Shapley pointed out, “the Observatory was not involved in instruction but in the production of knowledge.” He determined to expand its mission to include the training of graduate students. Had a graduate astronomy program been in place at Harvard, Shapley said, President Lowell would not have needed to import “a Missourian fresh from California” as Pickering’s successor.

  Shapley well knew, from his own years as Henry Norris Russell’s mentee at Princeton, that graduate students required graduate-student fellowships in order to survive. The only fellowship money on hand at the Harvard Observatory was the Edward C. Pickering Astronomical Fellowship for Women. Ergo, Shapley looked to the women’s colleges as his sources of graduate students. In late January 1923, after much searching, he welcomed Adelaide Ames as his first recruit.

  Miss Ames had attained graduation with honors, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Vassar College the previous June. An army officer’s daughter, she had lived in the Philippines and traveled through China, India, Egypt, and Italy before attending high school in Washington, D.C. At Vassar, she had taken courses in integral calculus, molecular physics and heat, and physical optics and spectroscopy, which she documented by taping the catalogue descriptions into her Harvard application letter. She had also reported and edited for the Vassar Miscellany News, hoping to parlay that experience into a career. For months in the summer and fall of 1922, Miss Ames had tried but failed to land a job as a journalist. Now she was turning to astronomy as her second choice. Shapley had followed a similar path. Already a seasoned newspaperman when he entered college in 1907, he had chosen the University of Missouri on account of its much-touted new school of journalism. At enrollment, however, when he learned that the journalism school’s opening had been delayed a year, he signed up instead for astronomy, physics, and classics courses. Despite his proficiency in Latin, he soon abandoned the classics for the activities and instruments of the campus observatory.

  In the absence of a Pickering Fellow for 1921–1922, bank interest had accrued on the fund, enabling Shapley to increase the dollar amount of the award. He offered Miss Ames $650 to see her through two semesters of computation and research based on the glass plates, plus credit toward a Radcliffe graduate degree. He also agreed, now that she had made up her mind to become an astronomer, to let her start her academic year immediately, in the spring term, rather than make her wait until fall. When she arrived, he put her to work on one aspect of his pet problem—the distance and distribution of the stars in the Milky Way. Using plates from Arequipa, Miss Ames assessed and reassessed the apparent brightness of some two hundred southern stars. She also estimated their true—or “absolute”—magnitude from the intensity of selected lines in their spectra. Then she computed the differences between the apparent and absolute luminosity, with allowance for probable errors, to establish the stars’ distances.

  “Miss Ames, the new Pickering Fellow, is hard at it on Absolute Magnitudes,” Miss Cannon noted in her diary on Monday, February 12. Later that week she reiterated, “Miss Ames, the new Fellow, is taking hold very well.” In March, Miss Cannon mentioned in a letter to Caroline Furness at Vassar, the newcomer’s former professor, that “Miss Ames is proving efficient and industrious and appears greatly interested in the problem of absolute magnitudes.” By May a Harvard Circular reported the “Distances of Two Hundred and Thirty-three Southern Stars,” under the joint authorship of Harlow Shapley and Adelaide Ames. With this new form of acknowledgment, Shapley out-Pickeringed Pickering. The late director had written virtually all the circulars himself, always giving credit to others in the text, but signing off at the end in his own name. Shapley made the researchers’ bylines prominent on the first page, right under the announcement’s title.

  A new graduate student classmate for Miss Ames, Cecilia Helena Payne, came to Cambridge in the autumn of 1923, all the way from Cambridge, England. Miss Payne traced her interest in astronomy to the 1919 eclipse in Príncipe that had proved Einstein right. Although not a participant in the expedition, she had heard its leader, Arthur Stanley Eddington, lecture about it during her first year at Newnham, a women-only college of Cambridge University, where she was studying botany, physics, and chemistry. She experienced his talk as a “thunderclap,” she said. He so inspired her that she returned to her dormitory room and wrote down his every word from memory, after which feat, and feeling her world transformed, she did not sleep for three nights. When she met the great Eddington during an open house at the university observatory, she avowed her desire to become an astronomer. He encouraged her by saying he could see “no insuperable objection.” Other professors predicted at best an amateur status in the field for any Englishwoman, coupled with a paid position as a schoolmarm. Still Miss Payne persevered. She added courses in astronomy to her curriculum, studied the professional journals, learned how to compute orbits, reopened Newnham’s long unused observatory, and with its small telescope began to explore the sky.

  In 1922 a classmate took Miss Payne to London to hear Harlow Shapley address the Royal Astronomical Society. She already knew Shapley’s name from papers he had written at Mount Wilson about globular clusters, but in person his youth and style surprised her. “He spoke with extraordinary directness,” Miss Payne recorded, “conveyed the reality of the cosmic picture in masterly strokes. Here was a man who walked with the stars and spoke of them as familiar friends.” Upon being introduced afterward to the speaker, she told him she wished to work for him in America, and Shapley humored her with his reply: “When Miss Cannon retires, you can succeed her.” Surely he was joking, but Miss Payne seized the comment as reason to hope. She completed her college courses the following year and then, egged on by Shapley’s promise of a Pickering Fellowship, she rounded up other prizes and grants to finance her move abroad.

  Shapley stationed Miss Payne on the second floor of the Brick Building at Henrietta Leavitt’s old desk. There Miss Payne, free at last from the Victorian strictures that had bound her since childhood, spent her new American-style independence on overwork. She arrived early at the observatory, stayed late, and sometimes failed to quit the place for days at a stretch. Rumor soon had it that the ghost of Miss Leavitt haunted the plate stacks and caused her lamp to burn through the night, but it was only Miss Payne, toiling till all hours.

  “She is a healthy, but not really strong person,” Miss Payne’s widowed mother appealed to Shapley by letter from London, “and lives largely on her enthusiasms, and while I delight to think of her doing the work she loves, I cannot help being anxious at times lest she should not allow herself the necessary rest.” Miss Payne’s adoptive mother hens at Harvard, Annie Cannon and Antonia Maury, shared Emma Pertz Payne’s concerns, and vowed to protect her daughter. Nor were they alone in doting on Miss Payne. Professor Edward King, still the master of Harvard’s photography, taught her the idiosyncrasies of the several telescopes. The night assistant, Frank Bowie, helped her develop her plates, and also informed her that the coordinates of any new comet—its right ascension and declination—might pay off handsomely if played in the local underworld’s numbers game.

  The tall, shy, ungainly Miss Payne and the lovely, engaging Miss Ames became fast, inseparable friends—also bridge partners at cards with Miss Cannon and her sister. Their closeness caused people to call the two students “the Heavenly twins.” Between themselves, they affectionately referred to Shapley as “the Dear Director,” or simply “the D.D.” They liked the way he took the stairs two at a time, and the casual cheerfulness with which he heartened the underpaid female employees, often saying, “I think I could do this, so I’m sure you can.” Miss Payne admitted to Miss Ames that she fairly worshipped the D.D.—that she might even be willing to die for him. Nevertheless, when Sha
pley suggested that Miss Payne carry on Miss Leavitt’s work in photometry, she demurred. She preferred, she said, to pursue her own research agenda, applying the new theories of atomic structure and quantum physics to the analysis of stellar spectra.

  No one at the Harvard Observatory had yet attempted such an investigation. No one possessed the background to undertake it. But Miss Payne hailed from Newnham College and the famed Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University, a place peopled with pioneers in these nascent fields. The Cavendish was home to Sir J. J. Thomson, recipient of the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the electron. Thomson’s disciple Ernest Rutherford, whom Miss Payne described as “a towering blond giant with a booming voice,” was the discoverer and first explorer of the atomic nucleus, and also the 1908 Nobel laureate in chemistry. During Miss Payne’s student days at the Cavendish, she had learned the complex architecture of the “Bohr atom” directly from Niels Bohr, the 1922 Nobelist in physics. Although none of Bohr’s lectures, which he delivered in a heavy Danish accent, ever lodged in Miss Payne’s memory the way Eddington’s relativity talk had stuck, she took good notes and saved them for later reference.

  Shapley gave Miss Payne permission to do as she pleased, with unfettered access to the glass plate collection. Suddenly fearful of handling the precious materials, she worried aloud, “What if I should break one of the plates?” In that case, he assured her with his typical lightness, she could keep the pieces.

  • • •

  SOLON AND RUTH BAILEY HAD RETURNED to Peru in March 1922 with every expectation of remaining at the southern observatory for a period of several years. Their plans changed of necessity, however, when, within weeks of Miss Cannon’s October departure, Mrs. Bailey suffered a stroke. It affected the left side of her brain, disturbing her speech and causing a partial paralysis on her right side. The dutiful Bailey tended to her with advice from local physicians and the help of a maidservant. He sent reports of Ruth’s convalescence north, along with the plates he continued making of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Shapley, sympathetic to the couple’s plight, sought to relieve them of responsibility at Arequipa, and looked to Edward King and his wife, Kate, as possible replacements. King, sixty-two years old, was Bailey’s lifelong friend, eminently skilled and altogether willing, but doctors at the Harvard Medical School deemed him unfit for hard work at high altitude.