by Dava Sobel
Many of the nearly two hundred delegates to the Cambridge IAU meeting swapped eclipse stories as they gathered on Saturday, September 3, for the start of ceremonies at Alice Longfellow Hall in the Radcliffe Yard. Bernice V. Brown, the dean of Radcliffe College, could not resist dropping an eclipse allusion in her opening address: “We are used to welcoming students to the College who come here looking at the world through rose-colored glasses,” she said, “but this is the first time we have had visitors with smoked glasses.”
The students were all absent on summer holiday, freeing the lecture halls and dormitories for the astronomers’ use. Dean Brown said she hoped some of the guests would return another time when classes were in session. “The Harvard Observatory,” she acknowledged, “has not only been ready and willing to give instruction to the Radcliffe girls, but they have fostered a long line of graduate students. We are delighted to show hospitality to their colleagues.”
Sir Frank Dyson, astronomer royal of Great Britain and current president of the IAU, thanked Dean Brown and saluted Charles Francis Adams, the secretary of the navy, who conveyed official greetings from President Herbert Hoover. Turning to Shapley, Sir Frank recalled an earlier visit: “In 1910 on the way to the Solar Union at Mount Wilson we saw the many activities in which Professor Pickering was engaged. We are all delighted to come again. We are glad to see the pleasant face of Miss Cannon once more. We are all delighted to see the Harvard Observatory and all the activities in which you are engaged, especially your researches on the Milky Way.”
Addressing the full audience, Sir Frank welcomed one and all, with special reference to the representatives from Germany and Austria, whose countries were not yet officially connected to the Union. Then he asked the assembly to stand as he recited the names of the twenty-two IAU members who had died since the Leiden meeting. “Some of these,” Sir Frank said, “like Monsieur Bigourdan, Father Hagen, and Doctor Knobel, have died in the fullness of years, but others, like Monsieur Andoyer, General Ferrié, and Professor Turner, we hoped to have with us for many more years, and we can ill spare them. We particularly wish to express our sympathy to Professor Shapley and the staff of the Harvard Observatory on the tragic death of their gifted and charming colleague, Miss Adelaide Ames, who was the secretary of the local committee charged with the preparations for this meeting. We are mindful of the services to astronomy of all those we have lost and we shall keep them in affectionate memory.”
• • •
THE DEATH OF MISS AMES devastated her “Heavenly twin,” Cecilia Payne. Miss Payne had been among the invited guests at Squam Lake, and could not bear to speak of what had happened there. One day she bumped into an acquaintance who, having heard a bungled account of the accident, blurted out, “Why, I heard you had been drowned!” To which Miss Payne confessed that she wished it were true, and that the lake had claimed her life instead of Miss Ames.
In the aftermath, Miss Payne compared herself—“absorbed in my work, shy and unattractive”—with the other twin, whom she idolized as beautiful, outgoing, and beloved by everyone. Miss Payne resolved to try giving more of herself in the future—to “embrace life and do my part as a human being.” Open and vulnerable, she fell in love for the first time, “unreasonably, groundlessly, but nonetheless thoroughly (for I am nothing if not thorough),” she wrote in her memoir. “It did not take me long to see that my love was not, never would be reciprocated, and I fell into a state of despair.” Priscilla and Bart Bok buoyed her through the dark hours, encouraging her to go away for a while. She took their advice and planned an extended trip to visit the observatories of northern Europe.
In the summer of 1933 Miss Payne traveled to Leiden, Copenhagen, Lund, Stockholm, Helsinki, and the historic Tartu Observatory, with its 9-inch refractor built by Joseph von Fraunhofer, in Estonia. Everywhere she went she was welcomed and indulged. At the IAU meeting in Cambridge the previous summer, she had renewed her friendship with Boris Gerasimovič, who invited her to visit him at Pulkovo. Once in Europe, however, other hosts tried to persuade her to skip the Russian leg of her journey, as did the American consul in Estonia. The United States had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the official told her, and would not be able to help her out of any difficulties she might encounter there. But Miss Payne did not heed these entreaties; she meant to honor her promise to Gerasimovič.
Miss Payne found herself alone on the train after it crossed the Russian border. At Leningrad, Gerasimovič came to meet her with a driver in a pickup truck, but, since it was illegal for three to ride in the front seat, she had to sit on the floor of the truck bed all the way to the observatory. “I spent two weeks at Pulkovo,” she recorded, “and felt I had experienced a lifetime. The atmosphere of tension never lifted. It was not only the drab and squalid living conditions of the man who was the Director of one of the great Observatories. It was not only the scarcity of food—for food was severely rationed and they shared their rations with me. I had brought them some coffee, and they gave a party to celebrate it—nobody there had tasted coffee for several years. One day there was a special treat for supper—carrots, and my host confessed that he had stolen them from a neighboring garden. Small wonder that the food nearly choked me—unappetizing as it was, I was taking it from their plates. Everyone was afraid—afraid to talk lest they should be overheard. One of the young women . . . led me to the middle of a wide field and begged me in a whisper to help her to go abroad—‘I would wash dishes,’ she said, ‘I would do anything to get away from here.’ And what could I do? What could I possibly have done? I was appalled.”
Miss Payne lost all sense of personal grief in those grim surroundings. She felt as though she were holding her breath for the duration of her stay, and she carried that sense of oppression away with her on the train ride to Germany. In Göttingen in August, still shaken, she attended the meeting of the Astronomische Gesellschaft held at the Mathematics Institute. She spotted her mentor Eddington there, but dared not try to attach herself to his distinguished circle. Instead she took a seat by herself in the rear of the large auditorium. A young stranger of about her own age sat down near her, asking in German, “Are you Miss Payne?” He introduced himself as Sergei Illarionovich Gaposchkin. He had ridden a bicycle from Potsdam to the meeting, one hundred fifty miles, in hopes of finding her, he said, and he gave her an autobiographical sketch that explained his desperate situation. She read it that night, in lieu of sleep. Gaposchkin was a Russian émigré facing Nazi persecution. As one of ten children born to poor parents in the Crimean village of Yevpatoria, he had worked on fishing boats, farms, and in factories to realize his childhood dream of becoming an astronomer. He had studied in Bulgaria and Berlin, and written a doctoral dissertation about eclipsing binary stars, in which he cited papers by both Harlow Shapley and Cecilia Payne. Just recently he had lost his job at the Babelsberg Observatory for political reasons. Gaposchkin was under suspicion in Germany of being a Soviet spy, and had been denied reentry into Russia, where authorities presumed him a German spy. “Of course I knew I must help him to escape the last of the many disasters that had overtaken him,” Miss Payne realized. “When I saw him the next day I told him that I could make no promises, but I would do what I could.”
Gaposchkin’s first sight of Miss Payne surprised him, he later wrote, because he had expected her to be as old as the famed Harvard astronomer Annie Jump Cannon. Her youth and bearing put him in mind of “a ripe peach left alone on a tree, darkened, wrinkled a little outside, but the more delicious inside.”
Miss Payne found it relatively easy to convince Shapley of the need to rescue Gaposchkin. Since the early 1920s, the director had been engaged in various efforts to aid Russian astronomers affected by war, revolution, and civil strife. Yes, Shapley said, they would make room for Gaposchkin at Harvard, but how to get him there? He was stateless and destitute. Miss Payne, who had become a naturalized United States citizen in 1931, went to Washington to expedite t
he granting of a visa to a man without a country.
On Sunday, November 26, 1933, Gaposchkin sailed into Boston Harbor, and Miss Payne met his ship at the pier. She drove the new arrival to the apartment she had found for him in Cambridge, then took him to meet Shapley and the rest of the observatory staff that same evening at a party in the director’s residence. Given that Gaposchkin spoke very little English, Miss Payne continued to converse with him in German. They had almost constant occasion to speak to each other, as he was assigned to work under her direct supervision on the new photometric standards. Even his one-year salary of $800 came out of the funding for her project. Their familiarity bred affection. After three months of working together, they eloped to New York and were married in City Hall on March 5, 1934. Shapley, informed in advance of their plans, facilitated the wedding through New York friends, who not only served as witnesses at the ceremony but also treated the couple to a nuptial luncheon of champagne and caviar. The next day the bride wrote to Shapley from the Hotel Woodstock, “I had never thought that such happiness could be for me.”
Shapley broke the news of the Payne-Gaposchkin marriage to the observatory community during one of his “Hollow Squares.” These informal meetings took place weekly in the library of the newly expanded Brick Building. They got their name from the temporary rearrangement of the reading tables into a rectangle, with the chairs ranged around the outside so that all participants could face one another. Shapley used the Hollow Squares (renamed “Harlow Squares” by the graduate students) to share research developments at other observatories, introduce visiting astronomers, and give the Harvard staff a forum for reporting their own progress or suggesting new ideas.
Apparently no one had noticed the romance blossoming between Miss Payne and her Russian research assistant, for the general reaction was one of shock, even outrage: why, aside from being two lonely astronomers in their midthirties, the pair had absolutely nothing in common, and what’s more Cecilia, at five feet ten inches, stood half a head taller than her new husband, who had no prospects and precious little to offer her, so far as anyone could tell.
• • •
THE PASSAGE OF TIME embellished the story of the wedding announcement at the Hollow Square. People liked to say that Miss Cannon reacted by fainting dead away, but of course she did nothing of the kind. The union of two scientists, she knew, could produce a whole greater than the sum of its components. Single or married, Cecilia was still her top pick for the first Annie Jump Cannon Prize, to be awarded at the December 1934 meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), in Philadelphia. It just so happened that the current president and first vice president of the society were men particularly important to the winner’s career, Henry Norris Russell and Harlow Shapley.
The interest earned on Miss Cannon’s $1,000 principal amounted to an inaugural prize of only $50. However, she had located an able jeweler, Marjorie Blackman, to fashion the desired gold pin in the form of a spiral nebula. After a few tries in silver, Miss Blackman, who was new to astronomy, mastered the nebular proportions, smoothed an area on the back for engraving, and attached a loop that allowed the pin to be worn also as a pendant on a chain. Miss Cannon was pleased. “I think it is quite pretty,” she wrote to AAS secretary Raymond Smith Dugan shortly before the meeting. “Isn’t it the first universe ever made by a woman?”
At the banquet on December 28, Russell presented the award to Mrs. Gaposchkin for “her valuable work in interpreting stellar spectra.” She gave a brief acceptance speech, and then invited Miss Cannon to make a few anecdotal remarks on the preparation of the Henry Draper Catalogue.
More and more these days, Miss Cannon was called upon to share her memories. Her recorder, Margaret Walton, had taken to typing up some of the anecdotes and filing them in folders with labels such as “Under Southern Stars” and “Old Dover Days.” Miss Cannon remembered some details from childhood as clearly as she recalled her stellar classifications. “In the house where I was born,” she dictated to Miss Walton, “there stood on the white marble mantel, a candelabra representing a gilded tree. At the base two children are about to waken a sleeping huntsman. Five outspreading branches support the candles, which are surrounded by glass prismatic pendants. I remember no earlier plaything than these prisms which were easily detachable. To hold one in my hands, to catch a sunbeam, and watch the brilliant prismatic colors dance over the wall was a delight to my youthful eyes. Even now I hold one of these pendants in my hands, and note that it is embossed with stars. Stars and prisms! How prophetic was this baby amusement of the profession which was destined to fill my life.”
Miss Cannon continued to classify ever fainter stars with gusto, but publication lagged on account of budget shortfalls. In 1937 Shapley solved the problem by changing the format. In place of the tabular rows and columns of digits typical of the Henry Draper Catalogue and the early installments of the Henry Draper Extension, the new “Henry Draper Charts” were presented as reproductions of photographic plates. On these plates, Miss Cannon numbered the spectra and designated the class letter for each, and sometimes assessed the magnitude as well. Every annotated picture thus compressed several hundred stars’ worth of data. Assistants no longer needed to list the individual star alongside its other catalogue designations, or describe its position in declination and right ascension. These shortcuts saved so many pages of type that five to ten times the number of spectra could be published annually. There was no need for Miss Cannon to slow down.
Along with her classifying, Miss Cannon also kept up her bibliography pertaining to variable star observations. The fifteen thousand index cards she inherited in 1900 had since multiplied many times over, and now numbered around two hundred thousand. She maintained as well a much smaller collection of astronomical verse—poems by Milton, Longfellow, Tennyson, and others—within the covers of a slim notebook. She liked these lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature” well enough to transcribe them: “Teach me your mood, O patient stars! / Who climb each night the ancient sky, / Leaving on space no shade, no scars, / No trace of age, no fear to die.”
Now in her seventies, Miss Cannon still reported to the observatory six days a week. Every spring she selected a new Pickering Fellow and a new recipient for financial aid from Nantucket nonagenarian Lydia Hinchman. The fresh faces of the incoming young ladies had gradually replaced the long-familiar ones. Florence Cushman retired in 1937 after forty-nine years of computing, proofreading, and assisting Willard Gerrish, who soon followed her. Lillian Hodgdon, the assistant curator of the photographic library, left at the end of half a century’s service. Miss Hodgdon’s title, like Miss Cannon’s, was an observatory honorific, not a university position. In January 1938, however, five years after James B. Conant succeeded Abbott Lawrence Lowell as president, the Harvard Corporation officially recognized Miss Cannon as the William Cranch Bond Astronomer and Curator of Astronomical Photographs. In the same stroke, the corporation reversed the discrimination against Mrs. Gaposchkin by naming her the Phillips Astronomer.
“G O S H !” observatory secretary Arville Walker exclaimed in an in-house broadside announcing the twin events. “For the first time in its 301 glorious years, the Corporation of Harvard University has deliberately recognized women academically” by these appointments. “It is an occasion. Let’s celebrate with a Dutch-treat luncheon—Commander Hotel—Tuesday, January 18, 12:30—85¢. Please report your plans promptly to Miss Walker.” Fully fifty well-wishers showed up.
In her excitement, Miss Walker had slightly overstated the nature of the honors done to Miss Cannon and Mrs. Gaposchkin. While their new titles had indeed been granted by the corporation and approved by the Board of Overseers, they were not exactly academic. Miss Cannon was to continue as before, in a post now glorified by association with the name of founding observatory director William Cranch Bond. The Phillips name, as in “Phillips Astronomer,” had also been attached to the institution since its infancy. Edward
Bromfield Phillips, a Harvard classmate and close friend of Bond’s son George, had willed his family fortune of $100,000 to the observatory shortly before he killed himself in 1848, at the age of twenty-three. William Cranch Bond consequently became the first Phillips Professor, followed by his successors, George Phillips Bond and Joseph Winlock. In Pickering’s day, the bequest of an even larger fortune changed the director’s title to Paine Professor, in memory of benefactor Robert Treat Paine. At that point, the Phillips Professorship devolved on Arthur Searle, and passed to Solon Bailey after Searle officially retired in 1912. Now that the Phillips title belonged to Mrs. Gaposchkin, it gained her a listing in the Harvard catalogue as an officer of the university. Shapley hoped it would do yet more. In pressing for her appointment as the Phillips Astronomer, he had needed to assure the corporation that conferring the title on a woman would not make her a member of the college faculty or even of the astronomy department. Meanwhile Shapley confided to President Conant, “At some future time, if the University approves the policy, I should like to recommend that the title be changed to Phillips Professor of Astronomy.” After all, she was already teaching and directing graduate research, sitting on three IAU commissions, and enjoying an international reputation as an astrophysicist, spectroscopist, and photometrist. She was also the mother of two children. Edward, named for her father, was born May 29, 1935, and Katherine on January 25, 1937. The Gaposchkins had bought a house in Lexington on a large lot, where they cleared the yard of rocks and brambles to make room for flowers and trees.
