attention to sky conditions, with updates made every few minutes while manning the meridian photometer, when even the faintest wisp of cloud might throw off a brightness reading by several tenths of a magnitude. The streetlights alerted the observers to virtually invisible clouds. “The effect is like that of the Moon,” Pickering explained, “but as the lights are below the clouds instead of above them, the latter become conspicuous even when too faint to be seen in moonlight.”
• • •
THE LETTER OF INTRODUCTION that Pickering had provided for Miss Maury won her a warm welcome at the observatories of Rome and Potsdam. As she traveled abroad with her brother in 1895, Scottish chemist William Ramsay released the results of his laboratory experiments with cleveite gas, which findings threw Miss Maury’s Orion lines into stark new relief.
Ramsay, working at University College in London, collected the gas bubbles given off when the uranium compound called cleveite was dissolved in sulfuric acid. He described the properties of the gas and submitted a sample to spectrum analysis. One of its spectral lines shared the same wavelength as a line previously seen only in association with the Sun—a line that English astronomer Norman Lockyer attributed in 1868 to a solar substance, which he called helium after the Greek sun god, Helios. Ramsay’s new discovery proved that helium occurred on Earth as well. He went on to demonstrate its presence not only in uranium ores but also in the atmosphere.
While Lockyer had named helium on the basis of a single spectral line, Ramsay revealed the element’s full spectrum. Its additional lines matched the “Orion lines” that Miss Maury had so often mentioned in the manuscript she left with Pickering upon her departure. She thought it imperative to incorporate the new revelation about helium into her classification, now in preparation for publication. On the other hand, the time for making major revisions had long since passed. “I do not know,” she wrote “in haste” in an undated letter to Mrs. Fleming, “whether Professor Pickering will care to insert the statement in regard to Orion lines being due to helium.”
• • •
SOLON BAILEY TRAVELED ALONE to Cambridge to claim the Bruce telescope in the summer of 1895. Pickering wanted him to spend a few months at Harvard familiarizing himself with the operation of the instrument before superintending its removal to Peru.
Ruth Bailey had asked her husband to carry two gifts to her friend Lizzie Pickering, but the bulky alpaca shawl and robe took up so much room in his luggage that she sent them on ahead, with a letter. “The only regret I have about the robe is that it needed cleaning, and as there are no establishments here for anything of the kind, I was obliged to send it just as it was.” She hoped it would reach Cambridge before the Pickerings left for Europe. She also wanted to plead, woman to woman, for Mrs. Pickering to look out for Solon. “I am very anxious for Mr. Bailey to leave Cambridge before December for fear of the cold,” she wrote. “I trust you will see that he starts for Arequipa before it is too cold. Men take no care of themselves, that is most men need looking after, they never think they must be careful of their health. I dread to have him go, still I think it is wiser for him to see the instrument there in running order.”
Her concerns sounded like typical wifely worries, but the turn of events in the following months lent them eerie prescience. In July, while her husband was at Harvard, their son, Irving, fell seriously ill. Bailey rushed back to Arequipa as soon as he received her cable, though even “as the crow flew,” the distance to Peru exceeded four thousand miles, and the roundabout route by available transport widened that gap. Fortunately, the child recovered soon after his father’s return.
On February 13, 1896, Bailey stood waiting at the dock to greet the Bruce telescope when its ship pulled into Mollendo. Willard Gerrish had dismantled the instrument in Cambridge and chaperoned the pieces as far as New York, where he took pains to delay loading them until the incoming tide raised the steamer to the level of the wharf. Then he convinced the captain to store the lenses in the vessel’s strong room for the long voyage down the eastern coasts of both Americas, through the Strait of Magellan, and up the Pacific to Peru.
Pickering dictated the all-water route, despite its added expense, to avoid the overland shortcut across the Isthmus of Panama. The fewer changes of conveyance through inexperienced hands, the better, he reasoned. Neither Pickering nor Gerrish ever imagined how the steamer would pitch about in Mollendo’s harbor, even in the best of weather, or how the waves would toss the little launch that ferried the Bruce piecemeal from ship to shore. The captain laughed as he recounted the extreme care exercised at New York, and Bailey shared the joke with Pickering. “It does look rather risky,” he wrote of the Bruce’s off-loading, “to see the heavy pieces roll up and down over the heads of the boatmen.” The process took a full day but met with no mishap. After reaching Arequipa by train, the telescope ascended the last leg of its journey in an oxcart, along the winding trail to the mountain lookout.
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