November 9, 2020 • 41 mins
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was an astronomer who made a lot of firsts. She grew up in a society that didn’t really prioritize education for girls, and she was determined and creative about getting around that.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. A couple
of months ago, we got a pile of listener requests
for an episode on Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin. She was an
(00:24):
astronomer who made a lot of firsts, including being the
first person to figure out that stars are made of
mostly hydrogen and helium. Usually, when we get a whole
bunch of listener requests of one right after the other,
I can figure out what prompted them, like usually there
was a Google doodle or there's a viral post that's
circulating around this time, it was kind of a mystery
(00:46):
because there is a new biography that came out earlier
this year, which is Donovan Moore's What Stars Are Made Of,
which is beautiful. I recommend it um and there have
been some viral posts, but none of this lined up
with when we got this file of requests. And then
on top of that, when I tried to go through
(01:08):
our inbox so I could make a list of all
the listeners that I wanted to thank. Here at the
top of the episode. I found nothing, zero emails. I
remember them coming in, yet I could not find them. Honestly, though,
this feels like just a mysterious gift from the universe,
because by the time I got to this end of
the research for this, I just loved Celia Payne Copashkin.
(01:31):
I don't love the sexism she faced that we're going
to talk about, but like her whole story I really
delighted in She grew up in a society that just
did not prioritize education for girls and that regarded women's
academic ambitions as suspect. But her determination and her creativity
at getting around that just was so delightful to me.
(01:55):
So that's what we're going to talk about today. So
Cecilia Payne was born in wind Over, England, on May tenth,
ndred Her father, Edward was a barrister and a historian,
and her mother, Emma, was an artist. Cecilia was the
oldest of Edward and Emma's children, with a younger brother,
Humphrey and a sister, Leonora. From a very early age,
Cecilia was curious and imaginative, with a keen memory and
(02:18):
sharp observation. Their home was full of music, art, and literature,
and they had a large library. They were a pretty
comfortable middle class family. They had enough money to afford
household help, and that allowed Emma to keep working as
an art copyist even when her children were still really small.
But that changed after Edward's sudden death when Cecilia was four.
(02:41):
Edward had married Emma somewhat later in life, and he
died the day after Christmas nineteen o four, at the
age of sixty. His body was found in a river
where he had apparently drowned. He had been experiencing some
heart trouble in some dizziness, which may have contributed to
his death, but it's it's just not clear or exactly
what happened. Although Emma received a widow stipend after edwards death,
(03:05):
it really didn't match what his income had been, and
money was a lot tighter. Even so, Emma tried to
make sure that her children were immersed in culture. She
would scrape together enough to travel and attend concerts and
go to museums. The children's upbringing also wasn't always conventional.
When Cecilia asked for a bedtime story, her mother read
(03:26):
her The Odyssey. When Emma decided Cecilia was too old
for stories. Cecilia started by telling herself stories at bedtime,
before moving on to making up bedtime stories for her
younger sister. Although Cecilia was really bright and driven to learn,
when she started school, she had some struggles. The teachers
at the little school across the street from their home,
(03:46):
which she was attending. They encouraged her, but Cecilia was
also left handed, and they taught her to write with
her right hand. This really deeply frustrated her, so she
taught herself to be more ambidextrous and to do things
like right upside down, using techniques and exercises from a
pamphlet that her great grandfather had written. That pamphlet was
(04:07):
called painting with both hands. I know so many people
who were natural lefties that were forced to write right handed,
and it was never delightful for anybody. No. I my
preschool teachers kept telling me to put the pencil in
the hand that felt most comfortable in and I was like,
I don't know what you're talking about, so I just
imitated what the other children were doing. UM and I,
(04:31):
like I to this day don't know if I really
should have learned to write with my left hand, and
that's why my penmanship has been terrible my entire life.
Or maybe my penmanship is just terrible for my entire life.
You know, everybody scribbling. My dad was a lefty that
was pushed to right handedness, and his penmanship has always
been a little bit fraught, looking like it always looks stressed. Um.
(04:55):
But when Cecilia was eight, she was out in the
family's orchard when she spotted a bat or kid growing
in the grass. She recognized it not because she had
seen one before, but because her mother had described one
to her once. And when she convinced her mother that yes,
there really was a b orchid growing out in the orchard,
Emma had the gardener transplanted to a better location. And
(05:17):
after this experience, Cecilia decided that the one thing she
wanted to do was study nature and science. It was
a few years before she could really do that, though.
When Cecilia was twelve, the family moved from Wendover, which
was a little more rural surrounded by woods and hills,
to the Bayswater neighborhood of London. They moved there for
(05:37):
the sake of her brother Humphrey's education, to give him
access to a better public school. Cecilia was enrolled in
a parochial school called St. Mary's. That school was really
not a good fit for Cecilia, though a big part
of her school day was religious instruction, which really did
not interest her so much so that she would pretend
to faint to try to get out of going to chapel.
(06:00):
She also tried to get a bookbinder to make her
an addition of Plato in a Bible cover so that
she could read classical philosophy during her religion classes. Unfortunately,
that brilliant plan was sorted because the bookbinder said no
to it. Yeah, apparently the bookbinder was appalled by that
very suggestion. On top of all of that, girls who
(06:20):
have truly wanted to learn and who excelled at school
were viewed with a lot of suspicion. When Cecilia, who
was in the youngest class, came in second out of
the entire school in a year and exam, she wasn't
praised for her performance. The other students were scolded for
allowing her to beat them. Classes for girls were also
(06:40):
mostly focused on reading and writing, not on the subjects
that Cecilia felt a real passion for Cecilia turned to
the family library to try to make up for what
she saw as huge holes in her education. And while
she did love theater, opera, music in literature, which were
all represented there, what she really wanted to study with science,
(07:00):
and there were almost no books on science on the
family shelves. She finally found one book on botany, but
it was in German and French, which she did not speak,
so she got a dictionary from school and laboriously translated
that book into English. She turned to this kind of
resourcefulness again and again during her education, including, for example,
(07:21):
transcribing an entire textbook from the library by hand before
she started at Cambridge because she could not afford to
buy a copy of her own. Eventually, the teachers at
St Mary's started to get really tired of Cecilia's persistence
at demanding to study science and to be more challenged
in her schoolwork. In addition to trying to teach herself
outside of school, she was essentially badgering her teachers into
(07:44):
tutoring her in other subjects than the ones that the
school offered. Finally, somebody told her that the only way
she might be able to study science was as part
of training to become a school teacher, so she volunteered
to teach Sunday school classes to try to prepare herself.
Although she focused her Sunday school teaching a lot more
on science than on the Bible Today's lesson dandeliance what uh?
(08:10):
Cecilia spent years as St Mary's butting up against all
kinds of barriers to the education that she wanted for herself,
and that, of course, was frustrating and exasperating for everyone involved.
Teachers and administrators saw her behavior as inappropriate and disruptive,
and when she was seventeen and had just a year
left to go, she was expelled. However, it does seem
(08:32):
that the headmistress of St Mary's wrote a letter encouraging St.
Paul's Girls School, which had been established by the Worshipful
Company of Mercers, to allow her to enroll there for
her last year. St. Paul's was far more focused on
the academic success of its students than St Mary's had been,
and once she got there, Cecilia was finally encouraged in
(08:53):
her pursuit of science, and she excelled in other courses
there as well, including polishing her skills and public speaking
and studying music, which was actually being taught by Gustav Holst,
who was not a famous composer. Yet when Holst finished
his orchestral suite that's known as The Planets, Cecilia was
actually one of the students who got to hear a
performance of it. That is the coolest. Later on, Cecilia
(09:17):
Payne Gaposchkin wrote in her autobiography that the first time
she walked through the door at St. Paul's, she thought, quote,
I shall never be lonely again. Now I can think
about science. She finally had the freedom to really pursue
her ambitions, and one of those ambitions was to go
to Cambridge, which we'll talk about after a sponsor break.
(09:43):
Although Cecilia Payne really thrived in the year that she
spent at St. Paul's, she still had a huge amount
of catching up to do if she wanted to go
to the University of Cambridge. It wasn't just the challenge
of getting into school there. She could only afford to
go if she got a scholarship and aside from her
self taught knowledge of botany from that book she translated
(10:05):
herself out of the dictionary. She was way behind and
all the sciences and in math, but she devoted herself
to catching up, and in the end, not only did
she get into Cambridge, but she also scored well enough
on a competitive exam to earn the only scholarship that
was big enough to cover all of her expenses in full.
Cecilia started at Newnham College, which is a women's college
(10:28):
at Cambridge, in nineteen nineteen. Getting into Cambridge, though, did
not mean that she had left behind the kind of
sexism that was such a big part of her earlier education.
Newnham is a women's college, and it had strict rules
for students behavior, from standards of dress to curfews to
a ban on male visitors. There were also specific rules
(10:49):
for Newnham students when they attended lectures or other functions
at other Cambridge colleges, and even though all the students
at Cambridge were meeting the same academic requirements regard us
of their gender, only men were actually awarded degrees. There
were also expectations about which courses women should take. There
wasn't really a barrier to studying the natural sciences in general,
(11:13):
but in the first part of their time at Cambridge,
women studying the natural sciences were expected to focus on botany.
Botany was like the women's science. Students selected two other
subjects to go along with that primary focus, and the
companion courses for botany were typically zoology and chemistry. So
(11:34):
if a woman wanted to study science at Cambridge during
this time, it was just generally understood that she would
start out studying botany, zoology and chemistry. Well, of course,
because ladies like flowers and animals. Correct uh. In spite
of Cecilia's childhood experience with the b orchid and her
(11:55):
self taught study of botany, by this point, she was
really a lot more interested in mystery and physics at
the same time. Trying to make either of those her
primary course of study seemed incredibly risky, given how shaky
her earlier instruction in these subjects had been, and in
the math that was required, which she was also behind on,
(12:15):
and in the uphill battle she would face as a
young woman pursuing either of these subjects. So she initially
chose to study botany and chemistry as expected, but she
added physics to that rather than zoology. But on December
second of nineteen nineteen, Cecilia Payne had an experience that
completely shifted her focus, much like the discovery of that
(12:38):
b orchid had when she was a child, this time
it was a lecture by Arthur Stanley Eddington. Eddington had
been part of an expedition to view the total solar
eclipse that took place on May nineteenth of nineteen nineteen,
and that expedition was to measure how the Sun's gravity
affected light from stars. We talked about that expedition in
(12:58):
our episode on historical eclipses. The data gathered during this
eclipse supported Einstein's theory of general relativity, and Cecilia was
absolutely captivated by this lecture. She later wrote, quote, the
result was a complete transformation of my world picture. When
I returned to my room, I found that I could
(13:18):
write down the lecture word for word. At about this
same time, Cecilia was also starting to question her choice
of studying botany. Most of the material that she was
hearing in lectures was already familiar to her, but at
the same time, she was so inexperienced at the more
practical side that she made mistakes that caused her to
doubt herself. After Eddington's lecture, she really wished she could
(13:42):
change her focus to astronomy, but that was blatly impossible.
Astronomy was classified under math, not under natural science, and
students could not jump into a totally different course of
study that way, So she changed her main focus from
botany to physics, and since students were allowed to attend
(14:02):
lectures outside their particular field of study, she also went
to astronomy lectures and spent as much time at Cambridge
Observatory as she could. With the help of astronomer L. J. Comrie.
She also repaired the clock at Newnham's small observatory and
started spending her evenings there making observations and recording data.
(14:22):
At one point, she ran into Arthur Eddington again at
Cambridge Observatory and told him that she wanted to be
an astronomer. When he realized how set she was on
this idea and how much study she had already done
on her own, he recommended some journals that she could
use to continue her studies, and also told her that
she could use the Cambridge Observatory library. As all of
(14:44):
this had been happening, debate had been ongoing about how
women's education should work at Cambridge, and on October one,
the Cambridge Council of the Senate voted that women would
be granted titular degrees from the university. This was better
than the previous set up, which was that women who
completed all the requirements of the degree were awarded nothing,
(15:06):
but it also meant that women were to be given
the title of the degree, but not the degree itself.
This sparked outrage, mainly from men who objected to women
being acknowledged at all. In early nine, Cecilia Payne was
getting towards the end of her study at Cambridge, and
she had spent those years dividing her time, adding as
(15:27):
much astronomy as she could to her study of physics
and natural sciences. She had learned from luminaries like Niels Bore,
who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with
Adams Ino. She also studied computing, including joining the computing
section at the British Astronomical Association, and she had been
elected to the Royal Astronomical Society while still a student
(15:51):
as well. She had done all this while facing derision
and resentment, not just from her mail peers, but also
in some cases from the faculty. At lectures, women were
required to sit in the front row by themselves. She
described how at the start of his lectures, Ernest Rutherford
would very pointedly begin ladies and gentlemen. She had also
(16:13):
come to understand that she just had no future as
an astronomer if she stayed in England because of her sex.
The only path that was really open to her was
still becoming a school teacher. LJ. Comrie offered to take
her to a lecture that Harlowe Shapley, who was director
of the Harvard College Observatory, was giving in London. Camre
(16:33):
could introduce the two of them, and then maybe that
would open a door for Cecilia to continue her education
in the United States, where she might have more opportunities
than she did in the UK. This worked, Payne told
Shapley directly that she wanted to come to Harvard to
work for him. Shaple encouraged this idea, casually suggesting that
she might replace Annie jump Canon, Harvard Observatories Curator of
(16:56):
Astronomical Photographs when she retired. The was more of a
reflection on the rules that women filled at Harvard rather
than an actual job offer. Yeah, it was sort of
like off handed, Hey, maybe you could be Annie's replacement
because obviously a woman does that job, and a woman
would do that job anyway. Just as going to Cambridge
(17:17):
had required Cecilia to gain admission and also to get
a scholarship, going to Harvard also required her to secure
some funding, otherwise she just would not have the money
to do it. On February she wrote to Shapily about
trying to get a fellowship. She also got recommendations from
Arthur Eddington, L. J. Comery, and her old headmistress at St. Paul's.
(17:40):
It really seems like she got a recommendation from every
conceivable person that could give her one. She also applied
for as many scholarships and fellowships as she could to
try to scrape together enough money to afford her passage
across the ocean, to buy appropriate clothing, and to pay
for her living expenses while she was there, and once
again she was successful. As she prepared to leave England,
(18:03):
astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne suggests that if he were in
her place, he would take advantage of the wealth of
data available at Harvard to verify an equation that astrophysicist
meg nod Saha had developed in nineteen This equation expressed
the relationship between a star's pressure and temperature in the
ionization of the elements in the star. We'll get to
(18:26):
what she did with that after one more sponsor break.
Cezlia Paine left Cambridge, England, for Cambridge, Massachusetts in September
of nine. Her fellowship at Harvard College Observatory gave her
the freedom to choose the focus of her research, and,
(18:49):
as E. A. Milne had suggested, she started studying photographic
plates of the spectra of stars to try to confirm
SAHA's equation to make sense of what she was doing.
All the way back in sixteen sixty six, Isaac Newton
used a prism to separate sunlight into a continuous series
of colors, using the word spectrum to describe what he saw. Later,
(19:12):
William Wallaceton and Joseph Frownhoffer each observed that if you
looked at the sun's spectrum and find enough detail, there
were dark lines within that spectrum. These became known as
Fraunhofer lines or absorption lines, but Fraunhoffer did not have
an explanation for what those lines were or why they
were there. Then, in eighteen fifty five, Robert Bunsen built
(19:33):
on earlier designs to develop the Bunsen burner. The Bunsen
burner produced an almost colorless flame, and that made it
useful for studying the light that was produced by heating
or burning different elements. Not long after, Gustav Kershoff suggested
that they could use a prism to separate this light
into its spectrum. That would make it easier to distinguish
(19:55):
the fine differences in flames that have really similar colors.
This was an early version of the spectroscope. Through this work,
Kershof discovered that each element had its own unique set
of spectral lines when it was heated, almost like a fingerprint.
We talked a little bit about this when we talked
about the discovery of helium m Emission lines come from
(20:16):
the wavelengths of light that elements emit when they're excited,
and absorption lines appear when wavelengths of light are absorbed
in between when they're produced and when we observe them. Today,
we know that the presence of these lines relates to
the structure of the atom and what happens when atoms
are excited to different levels of energy. But at the
end of the nineteenth century, physicists and astronomers knew that
(20:38):
these spectra existed, but they didn't quite know what they meant.
At Harvard College Observatory, astronomers started using these spectra to
classify stars. Wilhelmina PS Fleming, who had been the housekeeper
of observatory director Edward C. Pickering, developed a classification system
that was primarily based on the strength of the hydrogen
(21:01):
lines in these spectra. Annie Jump Cannon later simplified and
refined this system into one that still exists today. The
types O, B, A, F, G, K, and M often
put into the mnemonic ol be a fine girl Kiss
me that was purportedly coined by Henry Norris Russell. There
(21:21):
are also a few other classifications that can be added
into that mnemonic, and some other attempts at mnemonics that
are less gendered, relying on the idea that, like, you
want a woman to kiss you, maybe whether she's really
up for that or not that includes only bad astronomers
forget generally known mnemonics. But, as was the case with
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Fraunhofer's discovery of absorption spectrum, Cannon didn't really have a
sense of why stars fit into these categories or what
those categories meant she was cataloging, not analyzing or interpreting,
but the Observatory did have more than two hundred thousand
photographic late's documenting stars spectrum organized into these categories thanks
(22:04):
to the work of Williamina Fleming, Anti Jumpcannon, and other
women at Harvard Observatory. I have Anti Jumpcannon on my
list for a future episode, just in case folks are
like I wish you had an episode on any jump Canon.
After getting to Harvard, Cecilia Payne got to work examining
these plates through a jeweller's loop. She worked with an
intense and unshakable focus, sometimes going days without sleep, Shaine
(22:28):
smoking the whole time, rarely remembering to empty the ashtray.
A lot of accounts of her office talk about the
like overflowing ashtray. Eventually, she realized that she was seeing
four different ionizations of silicon represented in the spectra on
the plates. This ultimately led her to the discovery that
the variation she was seeing among these spectra were coming
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from different levels of ionization of the elements that were
involved based on the stars temperature, not on actual differences
in the amounts of elements that were present there. Through
all of this work folded into SAHA's equation. Pain gradually
came to understand that all the stars had roughly the
same proportions of eighteen different elements, with hydrogen and helium
(23:14):
being most abundant. However, this was totally contrary to the
theories of the day. Most astronomers and physicists at the time.
We're working from the principle of uniformity, that all the
planets and stars were made of the same elements, that
Earth was in about the same proportions, and while there
were a few elements that did have similar proportions to
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what was found on Earth. She discovered that helium was
one thousand times more abundant than expected, and hydrogen, which
we now know is the most prevalent element in the universe,
was a million times more abundant. So Pain had always
been ambitious, but she also realized that it was possible
that she had not just discovered something that would completely
(23:55):
rewrite our understanding of the stars, that maybe she had
just made a mistake, like it's a short walk to
I made a mistake, than I have just discovered something
that fundamentally changes our understanding of how the universe works.
So she painstakingly went through her work over and over
trying to figure out where she had made an error,
and she could not find one because she had not
(24:17):
made one. She was right. At this point, Harlow Shapley
was trying to transform Harvard Observatory into a Department of
Astronomy at Harvard. He convinced Paine to use her findings
to write a thesis which would allow her to earn
the first PhD in astronomy ever to be awarded at
Harvard University. At first, Paine doubted that this would be
(24:39):
worth her time, but she ultimately agreed. However, some of
the people who were involved with reviewing and approving this
thesis doubted her conclusions. In particular, Henry Norris Russell, whose
work hinged on the principle of uniformity, demanded that she
allow for the possibility that she was just mistaken. Her
thesis included the caveat quote the outstanding discrepancies between the
(25:03):
astrophysical and terrestrial abundances are displayed for hydrogen and helium.
The enormous abundance derived for these elements in the stellar
atmospheres is almost certainly not real. Russell would not have
accepted Pain's thesis without this concession. So if she hadn't
included it, she wouldn't have had a thesis at all
(25:24):
or been awarded a PhD. So including this couching was
a pragmatic decision. This wasn't something that she brooded over,
but it was something she regretted. She would later say,
quote as a warning to the young, if you are
sure of your facts, you should defend your position, even
with its downplaying of the most revolutionary for findings. In
(25:45):
nineteen sixty two, Auto Struva and Delta Zieberg's called this thesis,
which was published under the title Stellar Atmospheres, a Contribution
to the Observational Study of high temperature and the Reversing
layers of Stars. They called it quote undoubtedly the most
brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy. It was also
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the first monograph ever to be published by the Harvard Observatory.
Cecilia Payne was awarded a PhD from Radcliffe College in
as Harvard itself did not yet award degrees to women.
Harlow Shapley had thought her work was so obviously profound
and worthy that, after she took her final oral exam
for her PhD. He didn't tell her she had passed.
(26:28):
She only found out after astronomer Margaret Harwood found her
weeping inconsolably in her office, thinking that she must have failed.
I want a time travel and hug her, I want
to time travel, and yell at Harlow Shapley. Well, I
feel like though his thing wasn't even he was just thoughtless. Yeah,
he was like, obviously you passed. How what Anyway? Eventually,
(26:51):
the field of astronomy did come to realize that Paine's
conclusions about the compositions of stars and the abundance of
hydrogen and helium and the universe work wrecked. This included
Henry Norris Russell, who acknowledged that fact in the completion
of her PhD meant that Pain no longer had fellowship
money to live off of, so she started looking for
(27:12):
a job. She got offers from other observatories and universities,
but she ultimately stayed at Harvard, where she was hired
as Harlow Shapley's assistant. This didn't pay very much, and
she had to pawn some of her belongings to make
ends meet. In the gap between when her fellowship ended
and when her job started, but it was enough for
her to move out of the dorm and into her
own apartment as long as she had a roommate. Being
(27:35):
Shapley's assistant also meant that Paine no longer had the
freedom to choose the research that she wanted to do,
and at first Shapley had her keep working with photographic
plates of stellar spectra, even though there was more sophisticated
technology becoming available by that point. She was also expected
to teach courses for the newly established Department of Astronomy
at Harvard, although since she wasn't technically on the faculty,
(27:58):
her name was not included in the course catalog. Her
students described her as very intense, sometimes intimidating, and her
lectures were both beautiful and memorable. Even though she was
not being paid or recognized accordingly, Shapley was definitely aware
of what an asset pain was. In one letter, he
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described her as quote one of the most outstanding astrophysicists
of America of any and all sexes. In ninety six,
she also became the youngest person to be listed in
American Men of Science. She became a US citizen in
nineteen thirty one, then in nineteen thirty two and nineteen
thirty three, Cecilia Pain experienced a series of tragedies. Her
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closest friend from Harvard was astronomer Adelaide Aims. The two
of them were so close that they had been nicknamed
the Heavenly Twins. Adelaide drowned after being swept from a
canoe during a sudden storm in nineteen thirty two. While
at Cambridge, Cecilia had been similarly inseparable from her friend
Betty Leaf, and they remain very close. In the years
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that had followed, Cecilia learned that Betty had also drowned
in nine As she later wrote in her autobiography, quote
Adelaide and Betty all that I was not beautiful, delicate,
beloved were dead and I was alive. I was absorbed
in my work, shy and unattractive. What was I giving?
(29:22):
I made a silent resolve. I would open my heart
to the world. I would embrace life. She decided to travel,
making a trip to the Polkovo Observatory outside St. Petersburg.
During that trip, she also went to an astronomical conference
in Gutengen, Germany, and there she met Sergei Gaposchkin. Gaposchkin
was from Russia. His parents and most of his siblings
(29:45):
had died during a Typhus outbreak, and at the end
of the Russian Civil War had left him with no
money and no documents that could prove his identity. Eventually,
he had made his way into Germany, where he had
earned a PhD in astronomy, but Hitler's rise to power
put him in a really impossible situation. He was a
Russian living in Germany without any papers. Poshkin traveled by
(30:08):
bicycle for four days to get to good and get
for this conference with the hope that one of the
other astronomers there could help him get out, and the
person who helped him with Cecilia Payne. She got Harlow
Shaply to offer him a position at Harvard and to
contact the American consul in Germany to try to get
Gaposhkin out of the country. After she got back to
(30:29):
the United States, Cecilia personally went to Washington, d c.
To try to get his visa expedited. In four three
months after Sarage arrived in the US, he and Cecilia
got married. Most of her colleagues were baffled. It did
seem quite sudden, but in a lot of ways their
marriage really made sense. Both of them were dedicated astronomers,
(30:51):
and Sarage was also an artist. At the time, it
was expected for women to leave the workforce after getting married,
but Sarage was a refuge g and his temporary job
at Harvard paid even less than Cecilia's did. If they
got married, that meant that he would be dependent on
her income to survive. There would be no possible way
for her to just leave the workforce because she was
(31:12):
a married woman. Now. In other ways, it made less sense.
Over time, Serge developed a reputation for being opinionated and
hard to work with, and he openly flirted with other
women in the observatory. He was a capable astronomer, but
Cecilia was brilliant. In some accounts, Harvard tolerated his rough
edges just to keep Cecilia there. Between nineteen thirty five
(31:35):
and nineteen forty, they had three children, Edward, Catherine, and Peter,
and Cecilia broke with convention yet again by continuing to
teach while she was pregnant. Since they couldn't afford childcare,
they pretty much bought the kids with them to work
Cecilia and Saragey also started doing research together, publishing a
book on variable stars in ninety eight. That same year,
(31:57):
the American Astronomical Society a war did Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin
the first ever Annie Jump Cannon Prize, which still exists
today and recognizes outstanding postdoctoral research by a woman. Also
in nineteen thirty eight, Payne Gaposchkin was finally named to
the Harvard faculty with the title of Astronomer. In the
summer of nineteen thirty nine, Serge and Cecilia traveled to
(32:20):
Paris for a conference in spite of the growing tensions
in Europe, but Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was also going
to be at this conference, and Cecilia wanted the chance
to see him again. Was actually turned out to be
her last opportunity to do so. He died. In nineteen
forty four. Germany invaded Poland just days before Cecilia and
(32:40):
sarage arrived back in the US aboard a ship, the
French vessel called the S S. Normandy. Cecilia and Sergey
continued to work at Harvard during and after the war.
Cecilia's name was finally included in the course catalog starting
in nineteen forty five. In nineteen fifty six, she became
the first woman to be a tenured professor sir at Harvard,
(33:01):
and soon after she was also the first woman to
chare a department that wasn't specifically for women. At this point,
her salary was doubled, but her children were still a
fixture around the laboratory. The Harvard Observatory Council formally warned
Peter the Youngest, to stop bothering the staff in ninety.
She was away when the meeting happened when they had
(33:23):
this discussion and was outraged about it. It's very embarrassing.
And she was also like, he's old enough for you
to be talking directly to him about these issues anyway.
During her career as an astronomer, Cecilia Pangapashkin published more
than a hundred and fifty papers and several monographs, as
well as multiple books on astronomy in addition to the
(33:44):
one we mentioned earlier. This included The Stars of High
Luminosity in ninety and Variable Stars and Galactic Structure in
nineteen fifty four. In nineteen seventy six, she was awarded
the Henry Norris Russell Prize, which is essentially a lifetime
achievement award the American Astronomical Society and a nice irony
considering his earlier appearance in this story. Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin
(34:09):
died of lung cancer on December seven nine. Her daughter
published her autobiography The Dyer's Hand, along with other collected writings,
in four Today. There is a portrait of Cecilia Payne
Gaposchkin hanging in the faculty room in Harvard's University Hall.
It is in the style of Vermeier sixteen sixty eight
painting The Astronomer, and it was painted by Patricia Watwood.
(34:32):
We will end with a quote from Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin quote.
There is no joy more intense than that of coming
upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of
currently accepted ideas. Nature has always had a trick of
surprising us, and she will continue to surprise us. But
she has never let us down yet. I love her.
I do too. She's marvelous and I'm so glad you
(34:53):
picked this one. I'm so glad that mysterious people asked
for this a couple of months ago and now I
can find no record of it. They maybe maybe someone
will write and explain where they saw it, like what
maybe what Facebook group or Twitter thread or whatever it
got brought up on that got so many people excited
about her story. Yeah. I tried several different U searches
(35:16):
to try to try to like try to find the emails.
I tried just Cecilia, I tried Gapashkin, I tried her
whole name. I remember specifically somebody said, can you do
an episode on the woman who discovered helium? And I
was like, I don't think that's quite right, quite what,
but like and I like just searching helium. I also
didn't find it was just a whole big mystery. Anyway.
(35:40):
Do you have listener mail that is less of a mystery?
I sure do. It is from Meg. Meg says Hi,
Tracy and Holly. I'm behind in my podcast listening and
I've been marathony to catch up. As an amateur gardener
and food fermenter, I was delighted when I reached the
August nineteenth episode about the invention of canning. At the
end of that episode, you encourage listeners with the resources
(36:01):
to do so to donate canned and dry goods, local
food pantries. I would like to offer an alternative for
anyone who cannot contribute monetarily or from their own pantries
food rescue. I volunteered for several years with a local
organization called food Link, which partners with grocery stores and
bakeries to get excess inventory and fresh produce into the
hands of community members who are food insecure. In a nutshell,
(36:24):
stores donate food to s. We make sure everything is
a safe temperatures and hasn't spoiled. Then we distribute boxes
of food to organizations serving at risk use seniors, and
families who may not have access to fresh food. There
are similar food rescue groups all over the US and
probably worldwide, and there are lots of ways your listeners
can help if they can't donate food or money. For
(36:45):
a few examples, it's late in the season, but some
fields have leftovers that aren't profitable to harvest. Can you
work with the farmer to glean that field and get
that produce to people who need it. Maybe your local
food rescue just purchased a building to turn into an
operations center are working on retrofitting it for freezers and shelves.
You have graphic or interior design skills that you can
volunteer to help make signs or optimized sorting spaces. Boxes
(37:10):
are always running out or falling apart. You ask for
banana boxes that your supermarket might be throwing out or crushing.
The COVID nineteen pandemic has been isolating and soul crushing
in a lot of ways, and volunteering and food rescue
has allowed me to remain connected to my community. It
gets me out of the house for fresh air and
physical activity, and because we have to meet all food
(37:30):
preparation regulations, it's a very safe environment for some social interaction.
Digging through mesh bags to pull out rotten oranges isn't glamorous,
but it doesn't put me at risk of not being
able to pay rent. I can't recommend it highly enough
for anyone who wants to help others but can't make
a material donation. Thank you for taking the time to
read this email, and thank you and all of the
(37:51):
Mists and History family for the hours of education you've provided.
I've been a listener since the Candice and Josh days,
and I definitely everyone involved at least one cup of coffee.
Maybe keep each other safe, healthy and sane. Meg, Thank
you so much for this email. Meg. Um, the one
food bank I have actually volunteered at does a lot
of this food rescue. So in my head, all of
(38:13):
that was kind of folded together into one thing. Um,
my job was sorting the unbroken eggs out of the
egg cartons. Someone else's job was been doing this thing
called egg candling, where they would like examine the egg
through a light to make sure there weren't any cracks
in it that were not visible the you know, the
(38:34):
unaided I anyway, Yes, there are so many ways to
contribute even if you don't really have like either the
money or the you know, canned goods to contribute to
a food bank. Um, my recommendation is always to like
contact the food bank and see what they need. Um,
whether it's a food rescue organization or like a food pantry,
(38:56):
that's that's just getting the resources to people. Um. Some
places are are way more able to do more with
money than with the canned goods donations. So um, like
that's a thing. You know, I would hate for somebody
to take a bunch of a bunch of boxes and
then it turned out that like, that's not something that
(39:17):
particular food pantry eats. So, like my my guideline is
always check in see what kind of donations are going
to help the most. Um. There are definitely a lot
of places that needs some volunteer help that are still
doing volunteer intakes, um in a in a safe and
socially distanced way during the pandemic. Um. So there are
(39:38):
lots of options out there for people who do have
time but maybe not money or or goods to donate. Yeah. Um,
I want to say, first of all, I adore Meg,
like for just the great detailed like it's perfect and
it's a good reminder and to like this is so
timely because we are heading into holiday season and it's
(39:59):
getting colder. Yeah, people like the needs are only going
to increase right now, They're not going to to We're
not getting to a place where things are better and
it's less urgent. It's margin than ever. Yeah, yeah, for sure,
for sure. So thank you so much Meg for this email.
Thank you to all of our listeners. We have gotten
so many gracious emails from folks over the last several months. Um. Again,
(40:21):
we keep saying this, we really truly mean it. We
hope people are able to stay as well and safe
and and I don't know, as as good as possible.
There's so much happening in the world right now. Um So, anyway,
thank you again to everyone, and so Meg especially for
writing this email. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or history podcast
(40:43):
at I heart radio dot com and we're all over
social media at mist in History. That's where you'll find
our Facebook and Pinterest, on Twitter and Instagram. You can
subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app
and on Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Ye Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production
(41:05):
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. A couple
of months ago, we got a pile of listener requests
for an episode on Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin. She was an
(00:24):
astronomer who made a lot of firsts, including being the
first person to figure out that stars are made of
mostly hydrogen and helium. Usually, when we get a whole
bunch of listener requests of one right after the other,
I can figure out what prompted them, like usually there
was a Google doodle or there's a viral post that's
circulating around this time, it was kind of a mystery
(00:46):
because there is a new biography that came out earlier
this year, which is Donovan Moore's What Stars Are Made Of,
which is beautiful. I recommend it um and there have
been some viral posts, but none of this lined up
with when we got this file of requests. And then
on top of that, when I tried to go through
(01:08):
our inbox so I could make a list of all
the listeners that I wanted to thank. Here at the
top of the episode. I found nothing, zero emails. I
remember them coming in, yet I could not find them. Honestly, though,
this feels like just a mysterious gift from the universe,
because by the time I got to this end of
the research for this, I just loved Celia Payne Copashkin.
(01:31):
I don't love the sexism she faced that we're going
to talk about, but like her whole story I really
delighted in She grew up in a society that just
did not prioritize education for girls and that regarded women's
academic ambitions as suspect. But her determination and her creativity
at getting around that just was so delightful to me.
(01:55):
So that's what we're going to talk about today. So
Cecilia Payne was born in wind Over, England, on May tenth,
ndred Her father, Edward was a barrister and a historian,
and her mother, Emma, was an artist. Cecilia was the
oldest of Edward and Emma's children, with a younger brother,
Humphrey and a sister, Leonora. From a very early age,
Cecilia was curious and imaginative, with a keen memory and
(02:18):
sharp observation. Their home was full of music, art, and literature,
and they had a large library. They were a pretty
comfortable middle class family. They had enough money to afford
household help, and that allowed Emma to keep working as
an art copyist even when her children were still really small.
But that changed after Edward's sudden death when Cecilia was four.
(02:41):
Edward had married Emma somewhat later in life, and he
died the day after Christmas nineteen o four, at the
age of sixty. His body was found in a river
where he had apparently drowned. He had been experiencing some
heart trouble in some dizziness, which may have contributed to
his death, but it's it's just not clear or exactly
what happened. Although Emma received a widow stipend after edwards death,
(03:05):
it really didn't match what his income had been, and
money was a lot tighter. Even so, Emma tried to
make sure that her children were immersed in culture. She
would scrape together enough to travel and attend concerts and
go to museums. The children's upbringing also wasn't always conventional.
When Cecilia asked for a bedtime story, her mother read
(03:26):
her The Odyssey. When Emma decided Cecilia was too old
for stories. Cecilia started by telling herself stories at bedtime,
before moving on to making up bedtime stories for her
younger sister. Although Cecilia was really bright and driven to learn,
when she started school, she had some struggles. The teachers
at the little school across the street from their home,
(03:46):
which she was attending. They encouraged her, but Cecilia was
also left handed, and they taught her to write with
her right hand. This really deeply frustrated her, so she
taught herself to be more ambidextrous and to do things
like right upside down, using techniques and exercises from a
pamphlet that her great grandfather had written. That pamphlet was
(04:07):
called painting with both hands. I know so many people
who were natural lefties that were forced to write right handed,
and it was never delightful for anybody. No. I my
preschool teachers kept telling me to put the pencil in
the hand that felt most comfortable in and I was like,
I don't know what you're talking about, so I just
imitated what the other children were doing. UM and I,
(04:31):
like I to this day don't know if I really
should have learned to write with my left hand, and
that's why my penmanship has been terrible my entire life.
Or maybe my penmanship is just terrible for my entire life.
You know, everybody scribbling. My dad was a lefty that
was pushed to right handedness, and his penmanship has always
been a little bit fraught, looking like it always looks stressed. Um.
(04:55):
But when Cecilia was eight, she was out in the
family's orchard when she spotted a bat or kid growing
in the grass. She recognized it not because she had
seen one before, but because her mother had described one
to her once. And when she convinced her mother that yes,
there really was a b orchid growing out in the orchard,
Emma had the gardener transplanted to a better location. And
(05:17):
after this experience, Cecilia decided that the one thing she
wanted to do was study nature and science. It was
a few years before she could really do that, though.
When Cecilia was twelve, the family moved from Wendover, which
was a little more rural surrounded by woods and hills,
to the Bayswater neighborhood of London. They moved there for
(05:37):
the sake of her brother Humphrey's education, to give him
access to a better public school. Cecilia was enrolled in
a parochial school called St. Mary's. That school was really
not a good fit for Cecilia, though a big part
of her school day was religious instruction, which really did
not interest her so much so that she would pretend
to faint to try to get out of going to chapel.
(06:00):
She also tried to get a bookbinder to make her
an addition of Plato in a Bible cover so that
she could read classical philosophy during her religion classes. Unfortunately,
that brilliant plan was sorted because the bookbinder said no
to it. Yeah, apparently the bookbinder was appalled by that
very suggestion. On top of all of that, girls who
(06:20):
have truly wanted to learn and who excelled at school
were viewed with a lot of suspicion. When Cecilia, who
was in the youngest class, came in second out of
the entire school in a year and exam, she wasn't
praised for her performance. The other students were scolded for
allowing her to beat them. Classes for girls were also
(06:40):
mostly focused on reading and writing, not on the subjects
that Cecilia felt a real passion for Cecilia turned to
the family library to try to make up for what
she saw as huge holes in her education. And while
she did love theater, opera, music in literature, which were
all represented there, what she really wanted to study with science,
(07:00):
and there were almost no books on science on the
family shelves. She finally found one book on botany, but
it was in German and French, which she did not speak,
so she got a dictionary from school and laboriously translated
that book into English. She turned to this kind of
resourcefulness again and again during her education, including, for example,
(07:21):
transcribing an entire textbook from the library by hand before
she started at Cambridge because she could not afford to
buy a copy of her own. Eventually, the teachers at
St Mary's started to get really tired of Cecilia's persistence
at demanding to study science and to be more challenged
in her schoolwork. In addition to trying to teach herself
outside of school, she was essentially badgering her teachers into
(07:44):
tutoring her in other subjects than the ones that the
school offered. Finally, somebody told her that the only way
she might be able to study science was as part
of training to become a school teacher, so she volunteered
to teach Sunday school classes to try to prepare herself.
Although she focused her Sunday school teaching a lot more
on science than on the Bible Today's lesson dandeliance what uh?
(08:10):
Cecilia spent years as St Mary's butting up against all
kinds of barriers to the education that she wanted for herself,
and that, of course, was frustrating and exasperating for everyone involved.
Teachers and administrators saw her behavior as inappropriate and disruptive,
and when she was seventeen and had just a year
left to go, she was expelled. However, it does seem
(08:32):
that the headmistress of St Mary's wrote a letter encouraging St.
Paul's Girls School, which had been established by the Worshipful
Company of Mercers, to allow her to enroll there for
her last year. St. Paul's was far more focused on
the academic success of its students than St Mary's had been,
and once she got there, Cecilia was finally encouraged in
(08:53):
her pursuit of science, and she excelled in other courses
there as well, including polishing her skills and public speaking
and studying music, which was actually being taught by Gustav Holst,
who was not a famous composer. Yet when Holst finished
his orchestral suite that's known as The Planets, Cecilia was
actually one of the students who got to hear a
performance of it. That is the coolest. Later on, Cecilia
(09:17):
Payne Gaposchkin wrote in her autobiography that the first time
she walked through the door at St. Paul's, she thought, quote,
I shall never be lonely again. Now I can think
about science. She finally had the freedom to really pursue
her ambitions, and one of those ambitions was to go
to Cambridge, which we'll talk about after a sponsor break.
(09:43):
Although Cecilia Payne really thrived in the year that she
spent at St. Paul's, she still had a huge amount
of catching up to do if she wanted to go
to the University of Cambridge. It wasn't just the challenge
of getting into school there. She could only afford to
go if she got a scholarship and aside from her
self taught knowledge of botany from that book she translated
(10:05):
herself out of the dictionary. She was way behind and
all the sciences and in math, but she devoted herself
to catching up, and in the end, not only did
she get into Cambridge, but she also scored well enough
on a competitive exam to earn the only scholarship that
was big enough to cover all of her expenses in full.
Cecilia started at Newnham College, which is a women's college
(10:28):
at Cambridge, in nineteen nineteen. Getting into Cambridge, though, did
not mean that she had left behind the kind of
sexism that was such a big part of her earlier education.
Newnham is a women's college, and it had strict rules
for students behavior, from standards of dress to curfews to
a ban on male visitors. There were also specific rules
(10:49):
for Newnham students when they attended lectures or other functions
at other Cambridge colleges, and even though all the students
at Cambridge were meeting the same academic requirements regard us
of their gender, only men were actually awarded degrees. There
were also expectations about which courses women should take. There
wasn't really a barrier to studying the natural sciences in general,
(11:13):
but in the first part of their time at Cambridge,
women studying the natural sciences were expected to focus on botany.
Botany was like the women's science. Students selected two other
subjects to go along with that primary focus, and the
companion courses for botany were typically zoology and chemistry. So
(11:34):
if a woman wanted to study science at Cambridge during
this time, it was just generally understood that she would
start out studying botany, zoology and chemistry. Well, of course,
because ladies like flowers and animals. Correct uh. In spite
of Cecilia's childhood experience with the b orchid and her
(11:55):
self taught study of botany, by this point, she was
really a lot more interested in mystery and physics at
the same time. Trying to make either of those her
primary course of study seemed incredibly risky, given how shaky
her earlier instruction in these subjects had been, and in
the math that was required, which she was also behind on,
(12:15):
and in the uphill battle she would face as a
young woman pursuing either of these subjects. So she initially
chose to study botany and chemistry as expected, but she
added physics to that rather than zoology. But on December
second of nineteen nineteen, Cecilia Payne had an experience that
completely shifted her focus, much like the discovery of that
(12:38):
b orchid had when she was a child, this time
it was a lecture by Arthur Stanley Eddington. Eddington had
been part of an expedition to view the total solar
eclipse that took place on May nineteenth of nineteen nineteen,
and that expedition was to measure how the Sun's gravity
affected light from stars. We talked about that expedition in
(12:58):
our episode on historical eclipses. The data gathered during this
eclipse supported Einstein's theory of general relativity, and Cecilia was
absolutely captivated by this lecture. She later wrote, quote, the
result was a complete transformation of my world picture. When
I returned to my room, I found that I could
(13:18):
write down the lecture word for word. At about this
same time, Cecilia was also starting to question her choice
of studying botany. Most of the material that she was
hearing in lectures was already familiar to her, but at
the same time, she was so inexperienced at the more
practical side that she made mistakes that caused her to
doubt herself. After Eddington's lecture, she really wished she could
(13:42):
change her focus to astronomy, but that was blatly impossible.
Astronomy was classified under math, not under natural science, and
students could not jump into a totally different course of
study that way, So she changed her main focus from
botany to physics, and since students were allowed to attend
(14:02):
lectures outside their particular field of study, she also went
to astronomy lectures and spent as much time at Cambridge
Observatory as she could. With the help of astronomer L. J. Comrie.
She also repaired the clock at Newnham's small observatory and
started spending her evenings there making observations and recording data.
(14:22):
At one point, she ran into Arthur Eddington again at
Cambridge Observatory and told him that she wanted to be
an astronomer. When he realized how set she was on
this idea and how much study she had already done
on her own, he recommended some journals that she could
use to continue her studies, and also told her that
she could use the Cambridge Observatory library. As all of
(14:44):
this had been happening, debate had been ongoing about how
women's education should work at Cambridge, and on October one,
the Cambridge Council of the Senate voted that women would
be granted titular degrees from the university. This was better
than the previous set up, which was that women who
completed all the requirements of the degree were awarded nothing,
(15:06):
but it also meant that women were to be given
the title of the degree, but not the degree itself.
This sparked outrage, mainly from men who objected to women
being acknowledged at all. In early nine, Cecilia Payne was
getting towards the end of her study at Cambridge, and
she had spent those years dividing her time, adding as
(15:27):
much astronomy as she could to her study of physics
and natural sciences. She had learned from luminaries like Niels Bore,
who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with
Adams Ino. She also studied computing, including joining the computing
section at the British Astronomical Association, and she had been
elected to the Royal Astronomical Society while still a student
(15:51):
as well. She had done all this while facing derision
and resentment, not just from her mail peers, but also
in some cases from the faculty. At lectures, women were
required to sit in the front row by themselves. She
described how at the start of his lectures, Ernest Rutherford
would very pointedly begin ladies and gentlemen. She had also
(16:13):
come to understand that she just had no future as
an astronomer if she stayed in England because of her sex.
The only path that was really open to her was
still becoming a school teacher. LJ. Comrie offered to take
her to a lecture that Harlowe Shapley, who was director
of the Harvard College Observatory, was giving in London. Camre
(16:33):
could introduce the two of them, and then maybe that
would open a door for Cecilia to continue her education
in the United States, where she might have more opportunities
than she did in the UK. This worked, Payne told
Shapley directly that she wanted to come to Harvard to
work for him. Shaple encouraged this idea, casually suggesting that
she might replace Annie jump Canon, Harvard Observatories Curator of
(16:56):
Astronomical Photographs when she retired. The was more of a
reflection on the rules that women filled at Harvard rather
than an actual job offer. Yeah, it was sort of
like off handed, Hey, maybe you could be Annie's replacement
because obviously a woman does that job, and a woman
would do that job anyway. Just as going to Cambridge
(17:17):
had required Cecilia to gain admission and also to get
a scholarship, going to Harvard also required her to secure
some funding, otherwise she just would not have the money
to do it. On February she wrote to Shapily about
trying to get a fellowship. She also got recommendations from
Arthur Eddington, L. J. Comery, and her old headmistress at St. Paul's.
(17:40):
It really seems like she got a recommendation from every
conceivable person that could give her one. She also applied
for as many scholarships and fellowships as she could to
try to scrape together enough money to afford her passage
across the ocean, to buy appropriate clothing, and to pay
for her living expenses while she was there, and once
again she was successful. As she prepared to leave England,
(18:03):
astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne suggests that if he were in
her place, he would take advantage of the wealth of
data available at Harvard to verify an equation that astrophysicist
meg nod Saha had developed in nineteen This equation expressed
the relationship between a star's pressure and temperature in the
ionization of the elements in the star. We'll get to
(18:26):
what she did with that after one more sponsor break.
Cezlia Paine left Cambridge, England, for Cambridge, Massachusetts in September
of nine. Her fellowship at Harvard College Observatory gave her
the freedom to choose the focus of her research, and,
(18:49):
as E. A. Milne had suggested, she started studying photographic
plates of the spectra of stars to try to confirm
SAHA's equation to make sense of what she was doing.
All the way back in sixteen sixty six, Isaac Newton
used a prism to separate sunlight into a continuous series
of colors, using the word spectrum to describe what he saw. Later,
(19:12):
William Wallaceton and Joseph Frownhoffer each observed that if you
looked at the sun's spectrum and find enough detail, there
were dark lines within that spectrum. These became known as
Fraunhofer lines or absorption lines, but Fraunhoffer did not have
an explanation for what those lines were or why they
were there. Then, in eighteen fifty five, Robert Bunsen built
(19:33):
on earlier designs to develop the Bunsen burner. The Bunsen
burner produced an almost colorless flame, and that made it
useful for studying the light that was produced by heating
or burning different elements. Not long after, Gustav Kershoff suggested
that they could use a prism to separate this light
into its spectrum. That would make it easier to distinguish
(19:55):
the fine differences in flames that have really similar colors.
This was an early version of the spectroscope. Through this work,
Kershof discovered that each element had its own unique set
of spectral lines when it was heated, almost like a fingerprint.
We talked a little bit about this when we talked
about the discovery of helium m Emission lines come from
(20:16):
the wavelengths of light that elements emit when they're excited,
and absorption lines appear when wavelengths of light are absorbed
in between when they're produced and when we observe them. Today,
we know that the presence of these lines relates to
the structure of the atom and what happens when atoms
are excited to different levels of energy. But at the
end of the nineteenth century, physicists and astronomers knew that
(20:38):
these spectra existed, but they didn't quite know what they meant.
At Harvard College Observatory, astronomers started using these spectra to
classify stars. Wilhelmina PS Fleming, who had been the housekeeper
of observatory director Edward C. Pickering, developed a classification system
that was primarily based on the strength of the hydrogen
(21:01):
lines in these spectra. Annie Jump Cannon later simplified and
refined this system into one that still exists today. The
types O, B, A, F, G, K, and M often
put into the mnemonic ol be a fine girl Kiss
me that was purportedly coined by Henry Norris Russell. There
(21:21):
are also a few other classifications that can be added
into that mnemonic, and some other attempts at mnemonics that
are less gendered, relying on the idea that, like, you
want a woman to kiss you, maybe whether she's really
up for that or not that includes only bad astronomers
forget generally known mnemonics. But, as was the case with
(21:44):
Fraunhofer's discovery of absorption spectrum, Cannon didn't really have a
sense of why stars fit into these categories or what
those categories meant she was cataloging, not analyzing or interpreting,
but the Observatory did have more than two hundred thousand
photographic late's documenting stars spectrum organized into these categories thanks
(22:04):
to the work of Williamina Fleming, Anti Jumpcannon, and other
women at Harvard Observatory. I have Anti Jumpcannon on my
list for a future episode, just in case folks are
like I wish you had an episode on any jump Canon.
After getting to Harvard, Cecilia Payne got to work examining
these plates through a jeweller's loop. She worked with an
intense and unshakable focus, sometimes going days without sleep, Shaine
(22:28):
smoking the whole time, rarely remembering to empty the ashtray.
A lot of accounts of her office talk about the
like overflowing ashtray. Eventually, she realized that she was seeing
four different ionizations of silicon represented in the spectra on
the plates. This ultimately led her to the discovery that
the variation she was seeing among these spectra were coming
(22:51):
from different levels of ionization of the elements that were
involved based on the stars temperature, not on actual differences
in the amounts of elements that were present there. Through
all of this work folded into SAHA's equation. Pain gradually
came to understand that all the stars had roughly the
same proportions of eighteen different elements, with hydrogen and helium
(23:14):
being most abundant. However, this was totally contrary to the
theories of the day. Most astronomers and physicists at the time.
We're working from the principle of uniformity, that all the
planets and stars were made of the same elements, that
Earth was in about the same proportions, and while there
were a few elements that did have similar proportions to
(23:34):
what was found on Earth. She discovered that helium was
one thousand times more abundant than expected, and hydrogen, which
we now know is the most prevalent element in the universe,
was a million times more abundant. So Pain had always
been ambitious, but she also realized that it was possible
that she had not just discovered something that would completely
(23:55):
rewrite our understanding of the stars, that maybe she had
just made a mistake, like it's a short walk to
I made a mistake, than I have just discovered something
that fundamentally changes our understanding of how the universe works.
So she painstakingly went through her work over and over
trying to figure out where she had made an error,
and she could not find one because she had not
(24:17):
made one. She was right. At this point, Harlow Shapley
was trying to transform Harvard Observatory into a Department of
Astronomy at Harvard. He convinced Paine to use her findings
to write a thesis which would allow her to earn
the first PhD in astronomy ever to be awarded at
Harvard University. At first, Paine doubted that this would be
(24:39):
worth her time, but she ultimately agreed. However, some of
the people who were involved with reviewing and approving this
thesis doubted her conclusions. In particular, Henry Norris Russell, whose
work hinged on the principle of uniformity, demanded that she
allow for the possibility that she was just mistaken. Her
thesis included the caveat quote the outstanding discrepancies between the
(25:03):
astrophysical and terrestrial abundances are displayed for hydrogen and helium.
The enormous abundance derived for these elements in the stellar
atmospheres is almost certainly not real. Russell would not have
accepted Pain's thesis without this concession. So if she hadn't
included it, she wouldn't have had a thesis at all
(25:24):
or been awarded a PhD. So including this couching was
a pragmatic decision. This wasn't something that she brooded over,
but it was something she regretted. She would later say,
quote as a warning to the young, if you are
sure of your facts, you should defend your position, even
with its downplaying of the most revolutionary for findings. In
(25:45):
nineteen sixty two, Auto Struva and Delta Zieberg's called this thesis,
which was published under the title Stellar Atmospheres, a Contribution
to the Observational Study of high temperature and the Reversing
layers of Stars. They called it quote undoubtedly the most
brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy. It was also
(26:06):
the first monograph ever to be published by the Harvard Observatory.
Cecilia Payne was awarded a PhD from Radcliffe College in
as Harvard itself did not yet award degrees to women.
Harlow Shapley had thought her work was so obviously profound
and worthy that, after she took her final oral exam
for her PhD. He didn't tell her she had passed.
(26:28):
She only found out after astronomer Margaret Harwood found her
weeping inconsolably in her office, thinking that she must have failed.
I want a time travel and hug her, I want
to time travel, and yell at Harlow Shapley. Well, I
feel like though his thing wasn't even he was just thoughtless. Yeah,
he was like, obviously you passed. How what Anyway? Eventually,
(26:51):
the field of astronomy did come to realize that Paine's
conclusions about the compositions of stars and the abundance of
hydrogen and helium and the universe work wrecked. This included
Henry Norris Russell, who acknowledged that fact in the completion
of her PhD meant that Pain no longer had fellowship
money to live off of, so she started looking for
(27:12):
a job. She got offers from other observatories and universities,
but she ultimately stayed at Harvard, where she was hired
as Harlow Shapley's assistant. This didn't pay very much, and
she had to pawn some of her belongings to make
ends meet. In the gap between when her fellowship ended
and when her job started, but it was enough for
her to move out of the dorm and into her
own apartment as long as she had a roommate. Being
(27:35):
Shapley's assistant also meant that Paine no longer had the
freedom to choose the research that she wanted to do,
and at first Shapley had her keep working with photographic
plates of stellar spectra, even though there was more sophisticated
technology becoming available by that point. She was also expected
to teach courses for the newly established Department of Astronomy
at Harvard, although since she wasn't technically on the faculty,
(27:58):
her name was not included in the course catalog. Her
students described her as very intense, sometimes intimidating, and her
lectures were both beautiful and memorable. Even though she was
not being paid or recognized accordingly, Shapley was definitely aware
of what an asset pain was. In one letter, he
(28:18):
described her as quote one of the most outstanding astrophysicists
of America of any and all sexes. In ninety six,
she also became the youngest person to be listed in
American Men of Science. She became a US citizen in
nineteen thirty one, then in nineteen thirty two and nineteen
thirty three, Cecilia Pain experienced a series of tragedies. Her
(28:40):
closest friend from Harvard was astronomer Adelaide Aims. The two
of them were so close that they had been nicknamed
the Heavenly Twins. Adelaide drowned after being swept from a
canoe during a sudden storm in nineteen thirty two. While
at Cambridge, Cecilia had been similarly inseparable from her friend
Betty Leaf, and they remain very close. In the years
(29:01):
that had followed, Cecilia learned that Betty had also drowned
in nine As she later wrote in her autobiography, quote
Adelaide and Betty all that I was not beautiful, delicate,
beloved were dead and I was alive. I was absorbed
in my work, shy and unattractive. What was I giving?
(29:22):
I made a silent resolve. I would open my heart
to the world. I would embrace life. She decided to travel,
making a trip to the Polkovo Observatory outside St. Petersburg.
During that trip, she also went to an astronomical conference
in Gutengen, Germany, and there she met Sergei Gaposchkin. Gaposchkin
was from Russia. His parents and most of his siblings
(29:45):
had died during a Typhus outbreak, and at the end
of the Russian Civil War had left him with no
money and no documents that could prove his identity. Eventually,
he had made his way into Germany, where he had
earned a PhD in astronomy, but Hitler's rise to power
put him in a really impossible situation. He was a
Russian living in Germany without any papers. Poshkin traveled by
(30:08):
bicycle for four days to get to good and get
for this conference with the hope that one of the
other astronomers there could help him get out, and the
person who helped him with Cecilia Payne. She got Harlow
Shaply to offer him a position at Harvard and to
contact the American consul in Germany to try to get
Gaposhkin out of the country. After she got back to
(30:29):
the United States, Cecilia personally went to Washington, d c.
To try to get his visa expedited. In four three
months after Sarage arrived in the US, he and Cecilia
got married. Most of her colleagues were baffled. It did
seem quite sudden, but in a lot of ways their
marriage really made sense. Both of them were dedicated astronomers,
(30:51):
and Sarage was also an artist. At the time, it
was expected for women to leave the workforce after getting married,
but Sarage was a refuge g and his temporary job
at Harvard paid even less than Cecilia's did. If they
got married, that meant that he would be dependent on
her income to survive. There would be no possible way
for her to just leave the workforce because she was
(31:12):
a married woman. Now. In other ways, it made less sense.
Over time, Serge developed a reputation for being opinionated and
hard to work with, and he openly flirted with other
women in the observatory. He was a capable astronomer, but
Cecilia was brilliant. In some accounts, Harvard tolerated his rough
edges just to keep Cecilia there. Between nineteen thirty five
(31:35):
and nineteen forty, they had three children, Edward, Catherine, and Peter,
and Cecilia broke with convention yet again by continuing to
teach while she was pregnant. Since they couldn't afford childcare,
they pretty much bought the kids with them to work
Cecilia and Saragey also started doing research together, publishing a
book on variable stars in ninety eight. That same year,
(31:57):
the American Astronomical Society a war did Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin
the first ever Annie Jump Cannon Prize, which still exists
today and recognizes outstanding postdoctoral research by a woman. Also
in nineteen thirty eight, Payne Gaposchkin was finally named to
the Harvard faculty with the title of Astronomer. In the
summer of nineteen thirty nine, Serge and Cecilia traveled to
(32:20):
Paris for a conference in spite of the growing tensions
in Europe, but Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was also going
to be at this conference, and Cecilia wanted the chance
to see him again. Was actually turned out to be
her last opportunity to do so. He died. In nineteen
forty four. Germany invaded Poland just days before Cecilia and
(32:40):
sarage arrived back in the US aboard a ship, the
French vessel called the S S. Normandy. Cecilia and Sergey
continued to work at Harvard during and after the war.
Cecilia's name was finally included in the course catalog starting
in nineteen forty five. In nineteen fifty six, she became
the first woman to be a tenured professor sir at Harvard,
(33:01):
and soon after she was also the first woman to
chare a department that wasn't specifically for women. At this point,
her salary was doubled, but her children were still a
fixture around the laboratory. The Harvard Observatory Council formally warned
Peter the Youngest, to stop bothering the staff in ninety.
She was away when the meeting happened when they had
(33:23):
this discussion and was outraged about it. It's very embarrassing.
And she was also like, he's old enough for you
to be talking directly to him about these issues anyway.
During her career as an astronomer, Cecilia Pangapashkin published more
than a hundred and fifty papers and several monographs, as
well as multiple books on astronomy in addition to the
(33:44):
one we mentioned earlier. This included The Stars of High
Luminosity in ninety and Variable Stars and Galactic Structure in
nineteen fifty four. In nineteen seventy six, she was awarded
the Henry Norris Russell Prize, which is essentially a lifetime
achievement award the American Astronomical Society and a nice irony
considering his earlier appearance in this story. Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin
(34:09):
died of lung cancer on December seven nine. Her daughter
published her autobiography The Dyer's Hand, along with other collected writings,
in four Today. There is a portrait of Cecilia Payne
Gaposchkin hanging in the faculty room in Harvard's University Hall.
It is in the style of Vermeier sixteen sixty eight
painting The Astronomer, and it was painted by Patricia Watwood.
(34:32):
We will end with a quote from Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin quote.
There is no joy more intense than that of coming
upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of
currently accepted ideas. Nature has always had a trick of
surprising us, and she will continue to surprise us. But
she has never let us down yet. I love her.
I do too. She's marvelous and I'm so glad you
(34:53):
picked this one. I'm so glad that mysterious people asked
for this a couple of months ago and now I
can find no record of it. They maybe maybe someone
will write and explain where they saw it, like what
maybe what Facebook group or Twitter thread or whatever it
got brought up on that got so many people excited
about her story. Yeah. I tried several different U searches
(35:16):
to try to try to like try to find the emails.
I tried just Cecilia, I tried Gapashkin, I tried her
whole name. I remember specifically somebody said, can you do
an episode on the woman who discovered helium? And I
was like, I don't think that's quite right, quite what,
but like and I like just searching helium. I also
didn't find it was just a whole big mystery. Anyway.
(35:40):
Do you have listener mail that is less of a mystery?
I sure do. It is from Meg. Meg says Hi,
Tracy and Holly. I'm behind in my podcast listening and
I've been marathony to catch up. As an amateur gardener
and food fermenter, I was delighted when I reached the
August nineteenth episode about the invention of canning. At the
end of that episode, you encourage listeners with the resources
(36:01):
to do so to donate canned and dry goods, local
food pantries. I would like to offer an alternative for
anyone who cannot contribute monetarily or from their own pantries
food rescue. I volunteered for several years with a local
organization called food Link, which partners with grocery stores and
bakeries to get excess inventory and fresh produce into the
hands of community members who are food insecure. In a nutshell,
(36:24):
stores donate food to s. We make sure everything is
a safe temperatures and hasn't spoiled. Then we distribute boxes
of food to organizations serving at risk use seniors, and
families who may not have access to fresh food. There
are similar food rescue groups all over the US and
probably worldwide, and there are lots of ways your listeners
can help if they can't donate food or money. For
(36:45):
a few examples, it's late in the season, but some
fields have leftovers that aren't profitable to harvest. Can you
work with the farmer to glean that field and get
that produce to people who need it. Maybe your local
food rescue just purchased a building to turn into an
operations center are working on retrofitting it for freezers and shelves.
You have graphic or interior design skills that you can
volunteer to help make signs or optimized sorting spaces. Boxes
(37:10):
are always running out or falling apart. You ask for
banana boxes that your supermarket might be throwing out or crushing.
The COVID nineteen pandemic has been isolating and soul crushing
in a lot of ways, and volunteering and food rescue
has allowed me to remain connected to my community. It
gets me out of the house for fresh air and
physical activity, and because we have to meet all food
(37:30):
preparation regulations, it's a very safe environment for some social interaction.
Digging through mesh bags to pull out rotten oranges isn't glamorous,
but it doesn't put me at risk of not being
able to pay rent. I can't recommend it highly enough
for anyone who wants to help others but can't make
a material donation. Thank you for taking the time to
read this email, and thank you and all of the
(37:51):
Mists and History family for the hours of education you've provided.
I've been a listener since the Candice and Josh days,
and I definitely everyone involved at least one cup of coffee.
Maybe keep each other safe, healthy and sane. Meg, Thank
you so much for this email. Meg. Um, the one
food bank I have actually volunteered at does a lot
of this food rescue. So in my head, all of
(38:13):
that was kind of folded together into one thing. Um,
my job was sorting the unbroken eggs out of the
egg cartons. Someone else's job was been doing this thing
called egg candling, where they would like examine the egg
through a light to make sure there weren't any cracks
in it that were not visible the you know, the
(38:34):
unaided I anyway, Yes, there are so many ways to
contribute even if you don't really have like either the
money or the you know, canned goods to contribute to
a food bank. Um, my recommendation is always to like
contact the food bank and see what they need. Um,
whether it's a food rescue organization or like a food pantry,
(38:56):
that's that's just getting the resources to people. Um. Some
places are are way more able to do more with
money than with the canned goods donations. So um, like
that's a thing. You know, I would hate for somebody
to take a bunch of a bunch of boxes and
then it turned out that like, that's not something that
(39:17):
particular food pantry eats. So, like my my guideline is
always check in see what kind of donations are going
to help the most. Um. There are definitely a lot
of places that needs some volunteer help that are still
doing volunteer intakes, um in a in a safe and
socially distanced way during the pandemic. Um. So there are
(39:38):
lots of options out there for people who do have
time but maybe not money or or goods to donate. Yeah. Um,
I want to say, first of all, I adore Meg,
like for just the great detailed like it's perfect and
it's a good reminder and to like this is so
timely because we are heading into holiday season and it's
(39:59):
getting colder. Yeah, people like the needs are only going
to increase right now, They're not going to to We're
not getting to a place where things are better and
it's less urgent. It's margin than ever. Yeah, yeah, for sure,
for sure. So thank you so much Meg for this email.
Thank you to all of our listeners. We have gotten
so many gracious emails from folks over the last several months. Um. Again,
(40:21):
we keep saying this, we really truly mean it. We
hope people are able to stay as well and safe
and and I don't know, as as good as possible.
There's so much happening in the world right now. Um So, anyway,
thank you again to everyone, and so Meg especially for
writing this email. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or history podcast
(40:43):
at I heart radio dot com and we're all over
social media at mist in History. That's where you'll find
our Facebook and Pinterest, on Twitter and Instagram. You can
subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app
and on Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Ye Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production
(41:05):
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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