In The Glass Universe, she brings to the foreground the glittering brilliance of five 19th-century women whose work at the Harvard Observatory changed the history of astronomy." - Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March Dava Sobel is extraordinarily accomplished at uncovering the hidden stories of science and conveying complex information with ease and grace.
"This is intellectual history at its finest. "A welcome and engaging work that does honor to Sobel's subjects." - Kirkus The Glass Universe is a feast for those eager to absorb forgotten stories of resolute American women who expanded human knowledge." - Booklist With grace, clarity, and a flair for characterization, Sobel places these early women astronomers in the wider historical context of their field for the very first time. Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard - and Harvard's first female department chair.Įlegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of a group of remarkable women who, through their hard work and groundbreaking discoveries, disproved the commonly held belief that the gentler sex had little to contribute to human knowledge. 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.
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. Anna Draper, whose late husband pioneered the technique of stellar photography - enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. The "glass universe" of half a million plates that Harvard amassed in this period - thanks in part to the early financial support of another woman, Mrs. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but by the 1880s the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges - Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith.Īs photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or "human computers," to interpret the observations made via telescope by their male counterparts each night. Dava Sobel returns with the captivating, little-known true story of a group of women whose remarkable contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.
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