The Draper Catalogue sorted the stars by the appearance of their spectral lines—not merely for the sake of sorting, but in the hope of opening new avenues of investigation. The classification inspired Pickering, for one, to analyze the distribution of stars by spectral type. Peering into the luminous band of the Milky Way, he found a preponderance of B stars. The B stars clustered along the Milky Way as though they had an affinity for one another or for that region of space. The Sun, a G star, seemed to Pickering to have little relation to the lights of the Milky Way.
Meanwhile Miss Maury proceeded with her own elaborate classification system. She intended to increase Mrs. Fleming’s fifteen classes to twenty-two, and also subdivide each type into three or four subcategories, based on the further gradations she detected in the spectra of her bright stars. The strain on her vision prompted her to consult a Boston oculist, who prescribed eyeglasses.
“Dear Auntie,” she wrote to her great-aunt Dorothy Catherine Draper on February 18, 1890, “I am now writing up the results of my work of the last two years. I have made a short outline that is the beginning of my classification. I was very much afraid Prof. Pickering would not like it, but I am glad to find that he is quite satisfied and says with a few changes it will do to print. Of course it will take me a long time to get the whole thing written and I expect all the details will make quite a volume. … I wear your black hat every day and your afghan keeps me warm at night.”
In his fourth annual report of the Henry Draper Memorial, published shortly after Mrs. Fleming’s catalogue in 1890, Pickering announced that the total number of photographs taken with the various telescopes had reached 7,883. Other observatories, he noted, made the “very common mistake” of accumulating photographs without deriving results from them through discussion and measurement. At Harvard, however, a corps of computers had been studying the photographs for several years, so that “for many purposes the photographs take the place of the stars themselves, and discoveries are verified and errors corrected by daylight with a magnifying-glass instead of at night with a telescope.” Here, too, as in the Annals, he cited both Mrs. Fleming and Miss Maury by name. It was the niece of Henry Draper, he emphasized, who had discovered the doubling of the lines in Beta Aurigae.
In line with his usual practice, Pickering distributed the fourth annual report of the Henry Draper Memorial far and wide, including publication in Nature and other scientific journals. The report found one of its most appreciative audiences in England, at the home of astronomer and military engineer Colonel John Herschel. As a grandson of William Herschel (discoverer of the planet Uranus) and a son of Sir John Herschel (thrice president of the Royal Astronomical Society), the colonel had seen his share of important leaps in celestial knowledge.
“I have just rec’d your last H. D. Mem. report,” he wrote to Pickering on May 28, 1890. “It is very like a pudding all plums—but I will ask you to convey to Miss Maury my congratulations on having connected her name with one of the most notable advances in physical astronomy ever made.”
Like the colonel’s much celebrated great-aunt, Caroline Herschel, Miss Maury had entered a field of discovery dominated by men, yet she stood among the first astronomers to detect an entirely new group of objects through the upstart method of spectral photography. Its future—and hers—seemed full of promise.
EVEN BEFORE SOLON BAILEY selected the site for Harvard’s Southern Hemisphere observatory, Edward Pickering had envisioned a superb new telescope to mount there. This ideal instrument would have a lens 24 inches in diameter, or triple the size of the trusty 8-inch Bache, and would therefore gather nine times as much light. He estimated the cost of manufacture at $50,000. In November 1888 he issued a general appeal for the needed funds, and, as in a fairy tale, another heiress stepped forward to grant his wish.
Catherine Wolfe Bruce lived in Manhattan, not far from Anna Draper, but the two were unacquainted before their fortunes crossed in the Harvard Observatory. Miss Bruce, more than twenty years older than Mrs. Draper, had no practical experience with telescopes of any kind. She was a painter and a patron of the arts. Although she lacked Mrs. Draper’s knowledge of astronomy, she had long nurtured a vague, distant interest in the subject. Now, at seventy-three, she evinced a genuine eagerness to support further research in the field. As the eldest surviving child of the successful typefounder and print innovator George Bruce, she controlled the disbursement of his wealth. In 1888 she paid $50,000 to erect the George Bruce Free Library on Forty-second Street and fill it with books. An equal expenditure on a single scientific instrument did not seem unreasonable to her, especially the way she heard Pickering describe it when he called on her at home on the morning of June 3, 1889. The large photographic telescope of his dreams, he informed her, would be the most powerful ever pointed at the sky. Dispatched to some lofty mountain for unimpeded, unceasing work, it promised to enrich humankind’s knowledge of the distribution and constitution of the stars, far beyond the combined capabilities of numerous—even much larger—telescopes of more typical design.
Perhaps Pickering’s reference to the 24-inch object glass as a “portrait” lens appealed to Miss Bruce’s artistic sensibility. Surely his optimistic enthusiasm provided an antidote to the disquieting article she had recently read by astronomer Simon Newcomb, director of the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office and professor at the Johns Hopkins University. Professor Newcomb predicted that no exciting astronomical finds would turn up in the near or even the distant future. Since “one comet is so much like another,” he asserted “that the work which really occupies the attention of the astronomer is less the discovery of new things than the elaboration of those already known, and the entire systematization of our knowledge.”
Miss Bruce viewed the matter differently. Nowhere had she seen a complete list of the ingredients of stars, nor did anyone seem to know what made them shine, or how they formed in the first place. The more she read, the more questions occurred to her. What occupied the spaces between the stars? How could Professor Newcomb call the knowledge complete? As she judged astronomy’s prospects, the introduction of photography and spectroscopy, along with advances in chemistry and electricity, suggested that major new findings were afoot. She was counting on Professor Pickering to prove her right, and within weeks of his visit she sent him the requisite sum of $50,000.
As Pickering expressed his thanks to Miss Bruce, he assured his other benefactress that her project, the Henry Draper Memorial, would reap great rewards from the acquisition of the Bruce telescope—at no added cost to the Draper fund.
Mrs. Draper’s beloved 28-inch telescope, like the 11-inch before it, had been installed in its own new domed building at the observatory. Although it was the largest of the four telescopes she donated, and the one she had been the most reluctant to part with, it was not living up to expectations. Willard Gerrish, the observatory’s talented and innovative tinkerer, along with George Clark, the telescope maker, had spent the first few months of 1889 fussing with it, trying various configurations and adjustments, but wrested from it only a single good spectrum of a faint star. These frustrating experiences increased Pickering’s admiration for Dr. Draper’s skill, but also forced him to admit defeat, and he abandoned further experiments with the instrument. Mrs. Draper, disappointed but understanding, joined the Pickerings that summer for a short vacation in Maine.
Miss Bruce made no plans to visit Cambridge, as she rarely left home. (“Rheumatism and Neuralgia have racked me badly,” she explained.) Nevertheless she followed every step of the telescope’s progress via close correspondence with Pickering, beginning in mid-1889, when he ordered the four large lens disks from the firm of Edouard Mantois in Paris. Miss Bruce had learned about glass in her salad days, while collecting art and antiquities on travels throughout Europe. Immersed now in her astronomy self-education, she found the lens for the new