Download The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars AudioBook Free
Number-one New York Times best-selling author Dava Sobel profits with the captivating, little-known true report of a group of women whose amazing contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our knowledge of the celebrities and our devote the universe. In the mid-19th hundred years, the Harvard University Observatory began utilizing women as calculators, or "human computers", to interpret the observations made via telescope by their guy counterparts every night. First 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 universities - Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography altered the practice of astronomy, the girls turned to studying the celebrities captured nightly on wine glass photographic plates. The "glass universe" of half a million plates that Harvard amassed in this era - thanks in part to the early financial support of an other woman, Mrs. Anna Draper, whose later hubby pioneered the strategy of stellar picture taking - enabled the ladies to make outstanding discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what celebrities were made of, divided the celebrities into important categories for further research, and found ways to measure ranges across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify 10 novae and even more than 300 adjustable stars; Annie Hop Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers around the world and continues to be used; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, who in 1956 became the first ever before woman teacher of astronomy at Harvard - and Harvard's first girl department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Cup Universe is the invisible history of a group of amazing women who, through their effort and groundbreaking discoveries, disproved the commonly placed idea that the gentler making love experienced little to donate to human knowledge.
