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 telescope preoccupied her as no figurine or chandelier ever had.
“I bought [Charles] Young’s Elements of Astronomy,” she told Pickering, “after reading in a newspaper that it was adapted to the humblest capacity—Well there is in ‘every lowest depth a lower deep’ and I fear to fall into it.
“Young calls the vast spaces between the stars a vacuum,” Miss Bruce continued, while another book she read by philosopher John Fiske “speaks of it as the luminiferous ether. I shall hold on to Young.” Pickering obligingly provided her with all the Harvard Observatory’s publications, from volumes of the Annals to offprints of his research reports. “Your paper on Variable Stars of Long Periods,” she said in a thank-you note, “I at once read and with admiration— not of the Tables but of the simple goodness of heart shown in the detailed directions to unskilled amateurs how to become useful aids to Science.”
Since his initial 1882 open invitation to amateurs, especially ladies, to observe the changing brightness of variable stars, Pickering had repeated the request with relevant instructions, and also rewarded the volunteers by publishing several summaries of their results in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He recommended that amateurs follow only those variables that cycled slowly through their brightness changes over periods of days or weeks, and leave the more rapid or erratic examples to study by professionals. No amount of amateur assistance, however, relieved Pickering of the need to repeat his exhortations for additional funding in every annual report of observatory activities.
Upon hearing that certain millionaires had failed to open their pocketbooks in response to a worthy appeal, Miss Bruce reminded Pickering that “some generalship is required” in dealing with rich gentlemen: “They must not be attacked directly and squarely but in flank or rear.” For her part, she volunteered to lend further assistance, not just to Harvard, but to astronomers everywhere, if Pickering would agree to help her choose the most deserving cases. With her promise of $6,000 to start, he announced a call for aid applications in July 1890. He also sent letters to individual researchers at observatories all over the world, asking whether they could put $500 to immediate good use—say, to hire an assistant, repair an instrument, or publish a backlog of data. Nearly one hundred responses met the October deadline. Pickering evaluated the proposals and Miss Bruce approved his recommendations in time for a November selection of the winners. Simon Newcomb, author of the article that had aroused Miss Bruce’s indignation, became one of the first five scientists in the United States to receive her support. Another ten awards went overseas to astronomers working in England, Norway, Russia, India, and Africa.
“The same sky overarches us all,” Pickering avowed when he submitted the list of awardees to the Scientific American Supplement. As usual, he hoped that word of one donor’s generosity would spur others to follow suit. But no one proved more motivated by the outcome than Miss Bruce herself. She felt a particular obligation to astronomers whose plans had arrived too late for consideration.
“My dear Professor,” she wrote Pickering on February 10, 1891, “I am sorry that so lately
