Today in 1857, the birthday of Williamina Fleming, a big name in the world of astronomy but one who had a pretty low-profile start.
Fleming was born in Scotland; she had to start working in her teens as an assistant teacher, before coming to the United States around age 21.
Once in America, Fleming’s husband abandoned her, so she started working as a maid for one Edward Charles Pickering.
He happened to run the observatory at Harvard College, and the story goes that at one point Pickering was complaining that the men he employed to carry out mathematical calculations weren’t doing quality work.
Supposedly he said something like “my Scotch maid could do better!”
And while this may be more legend than history, Pickering or someone close to him must’ve noticed Fleming’s talent, because he eventually moved her from maid service to a job at the observatory.
And she made the most of the opportunity.
Fleming played a key role in Pickering’s project to classify all the known stars by studying a collection of glass plate photographs taken through a prism.
In carefully moving, examining and tagging hundreds of thousands of these fragile photographic plates, Fleming developed a new system to classify the stars and added more than 10,000 of them to the system.
She also discovered dozens of phenomena in the sky, the most famous of them being the Horsehead Nebula.
Fleming started winning some high profile awards and honors for her contributions; in 1893 she spoke at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago to call for more women in the field, and while they offered lower wages than what they gave their male employees, other observatories did hire women for scientific jobs.
So Williamena Fleming made a difference on the ground as well as in the skies.
And there may even be more to her story.
There’s an effort now to review and digitize the papers that Fleming and the women she directed and supervised left, and you can participate.
You might be able to say you worked with a legendary astronomer… or at least that you worked with her papers.
Starting tomorrow in Illinois, it’s the Long Grove Chocolate Festival.
The 25th anniversary event should be a big one, with countless treats to try and share, plus live music, rides, multiple pie eating contests and a live re-creation of the chocolate factory scene from “I Love Lucy.”
Williamina Fleming, From Scottish Maid to Harvard Astronomer (New England Historical Society)
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Image courtesy Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard College Observatory, via Wikicommons