Дава Собел – The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars (страница 3)

“Whatever may be your final arrangements regarding the great work you have undertaken,” Pickering said in closing, “pray recollect that if I can in any way advise or aid you, I shall be doing but little to repay Dr. Draper for a friendship which I shall always value, but which can never be replaced.”

Mrs. Draper rushed to reply just a few days later, January 17, 1883, on notepaper edged in black.

“My dear Prof. Pickering:

“Thanks so very much for your kind and encouraging letter. The only interest I can now take in life will be in having Henry’s work continued, yet I feel so very incompetent for the task that my courage sometimes completely fails me— I understand Henry’s plans and his manner of working, perhaps better than anyone else, but I could not get along without an assistant and my main difficulty is to find a person sufficiently acquainted with physics, chemistry, and astronomy to carry on the various researches. I will probably find it necessary to have two assistants, one for the Observatory and one for the laboratory work, for it is not likely that I will find any one person with the varied scientific knowledge that was peculiar to Henry.”

She was prepared to pay good salaries in order to draw the most qualified men as assistants. She and her two brothers had inherited their father’s vast real estate holdings, and Henry had managed her share of the fortune to excellent effect.

“It is so hard that he should be taken away just as he had arranged all his affairs to have time to do the work he really enjoyed, and in which he could have accomplished so much. I cannot be reconciled to it in any way.” Nevertheless she hoped to get the work running as soon as possible under her own direction, and “then, when I can buy the place at Hastings where the Observatory is, to do so.”

Henry had built the facility on the grounds of a country retreat owned by his father, Dr. John William Draper. The elder Dr. Draper, the first physician in the family to mix medicine with active research in chemistry and astronomy, had died a widower the previous January. His will bequeathed his entire estate to his beloved spinster sister, Dorothy Catherine Draper, who had founded and run a girls’ school in her youth to finance his education. It was not yet clear whether Henry’s widow would win control of the Hastings property as she wished, and move Henry’s Madison Avenue laboratory there, and endow the site as an institution for original research, to be named the Henry Draper Astronomical and Physical Observatory.

“As long as I could I should keep the direction of the institution myself,” she told Pickering. “It seems the only suitable memorial I can erect to Henry, and the only way to perpetuate his name and his work.”

At the end she entreated Pickering’s counsel. “I am so unusually alone in the world, that without feeling that those friends who were interested in Henry’s work would advise me, I could not do anything.”

Pickering encouraged her to publish her husband’s findings to date, since it might take her a long time to add to them. Once again he extended his offer to examine the glass photographic plates on the measuring machine at Harvard, if she would be so good as to send him some.

Mrs. Draper agreed but thought it best to deliver the plates in person. They were small objects, only about an inch square each.

“I may be obliged to go to Boston in the course of the next ten days to attend to some business matters with one of my brothers,” she wrote on January 25. “If so I could take the negatives with me and by going to Cambridge for part of a day, if it was convenient for you, could look over the pictures with you, and see what you think of them.”

As arranged, she reached Summerhouse Hill above Harvard Yard on Friday morning, February 9, accompanied by her husband’s close friend and colleague George F. Barker of the University of Pennsylvania. Barker, who was preparing a biographical memoir of Henry, had been the Drapers’ houseguest at the time of the Academy dinner. Late that night, when Henry was seized with a violent chill while bathing, it was Barker who helped lift him from the tub and carry him to the bedroom. Then he bid the Drapers’ neighbor and physician Dr. Metcalfe, another dinner guest, to return to the house immediately. Dr. Metcalfe diagnosed double pleurisy. Although Henry of course received the most tender nursing—and showed some brief promise of improvement—the infection spread to his heart. On Sunday the doctor noted the signs of pericarditis, which precipitated Henry’s death at about four o’clock Monday morning, the twentieth of November.

• • •

MRS. DRAPER HAD VISITED OBSERVATORIES with her husband in Europe and the States, but she had not set foot inside one in months. At Harvard, the large domed building that housed the several telescopes doubled as the director’s residence. Both Professor and Mrs. Pickering ushered her into the pleasant rooms and made her feel welcome.

Mrs. Pickering, née Lizzie Wadsworth Sparks, daughter of former Harvard president Jared Sparks, did not aid her husband in his observations, as Mrs. Draper had done, but acted as the institution’s vivacious and charming hostess.

An exaggerated though genuine politeness characterized the directorial style of Edward Charles Pickering. If the observatory’s financial straits constrained him to pay his eager young assistants meager wages, nothing prevented his addressing them respectfully as Mr. Wendell or Mr. Cutler. He called the senior astronomers Professor Rogers and Professor Searle, and all but doffed his hat and bowed to the ladies—Miss Saunders, Mrs. Fleming, Miss Farrar, and the rest—who arrived each morning to perform the necessary calculations upon the nighttime observations.

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, which currently retained six female computers. 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, where they did credit to the profession. Selina Bond, for example, was the daughter of the observatory’s revered first director, William Cranch Bond, and also the sister of his equally revered successor, George Phillips Bond. She was currently assisting Professor William Rogers in fixing the exact positions (in the celestial equivalents of latitude and longitude) for the several thousand stars in Harvard’s zone of the heavens, as part of a worldwide stellar mapping project administered by the Astronomische Gesellschaft in Germany. Professor Rogers spent every clear night at the large transit instrument, noting the times individual stars crossed the spider threads in the eyepiece. Since air—even clear air—bent the paths of light waves, shifting the stars’ apparent positions, Miss Bond applied the mathematical formula that corrected Professor Rogers’s notations for atmospheric effects. She used additional formulas and tables to account for other influential factors, such as Earth’s progress in its annual orbit, the direction of its travel, and the wobble of its axis.

Anna Winlock, like Miss Bond, had grown up at the observatory. She was the eldest child of its inventive third director, Joseph Winlock, Pickering’s immediate predecessor. Winlock had died of a sudden illness in June 1875, the week of Anna’s graduation from Cambridge High School. She went to work soon afterward as a computer to help support her mother and younger siblings.

Williamina Fleming, in contrast, could claim no familial or collegiate connection to the observatory. She had been hired in 1879, on the residence side, as a second maid. Although she had taught school in her native Scotland, certain circumstances—her marriage to James Orr Fleming, her immigration to America, her husband’s abrupt disappearance from her life—forced her to seek employment in a “delicate condition.” When Mrs. Pickering recognized the new servant’s abilities, Mr. Pickering reassigned her as a part-time copyist and computer in the other wing of the building. No sooner had Mrs. Fleming mastered her tasks in the observatory than the impending birth of her baby sent her home to Dundee. She stayed there more than a year after her confinement, then returned to Harvard in 1881, having left her son, Edward Charles Pickering Fleming, in the care of her mother and grandmother.

• • •

NONE OF THE PROJECTS UNDER WAY at the observatory looked familiar to Mrs. Draper. Henry’s amateur standing and private means had freed him to follow his own interests at the forefront of stellar photography and spectroscopy, while the professional staff here in Cambridge hewed to more traditional pursuits. They charted the heavens, monitored the orbits of planets and moons, tracked and communicated the courses of comets, and also provided time signals via telegraph to the city of Boston, six railroads, and numerous private enterprises such as the Waltham Watch Company. The work demanded both scrupulous attention to detail and a large capacity for tedium.