Harvard Harnesses the Heavens (episode 158)

Since we “fell back” to Standard Time this past weekend, Boston has been forced to adjust to 4:30 sunsets.  To help us understand why the sun sets so early in Boston in the winter and what we could do about it, we’re going to replay a classic episode about how the idea of time zones and standard time was born in Boston, with the help of the Harvard Observatory.  And because we’re talking about the observatory, we have to share the story of the women who worked as human computers at the Harvard Observatory.


Boston Standard Time

My own graphic showing what our move to Atlantic Time could look like

Harvard’s Human Computers

Harvard computers pose in 1918. Photo courtesy of the Harvard College Observatory.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt (r) and Annie Jump Cannon (l) in 1913. Photo courtesy of the Harvard College Observatory.
  • Hat tip to the Self Rescuing Princess Society blog for first introducing us to Williamina Fleming and the Human Computers.
  • As long as we’re at it, some praise for the children’s book Rejected Princesses for sharing Annie Jump Cannon with the next generation.
  • Williamina Fleming’s journals from 1900.
  • kept by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, and Cecilia Payne, or the volumes yourself.
  • Two views of a nebula discovered by Williamina Fleming.
A nebula discovered by Williamina Fleming. Photo by Sara Wager

Boston Book Club

Two years ago, a legislative commission looked at what it would mean if Massachusetts moved to the Atlantic time zone, effectively keeping Daylight Saving Time year round.  In the end, their conclusions were fairly optimistic for those of us who hate 4:30 sunsets.  They said that Massachusetts residents would likely be happier, healthier, and wealthier than they are now, due to increased economic activity, opportunities for fitness activities, and evening sunlight.  However, they stressed that we could only move to Atlantic time if the other New England states came along, as well.  Read their report, and then listen to the episode to find out what the other states are up to.

Upcoming Event(s)

David J Silverman of George Washington University will be giving a presentation titled “This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving” in two different Boston events.  Here’s how the event is described:

Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, historian David J. Silverman offers a transformative new look at the Plymouth colony’s founding events, told for the first time with the Wampanoag people at the heart of the story, in This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. Silverman is a professor of Native and Colonial American history at George Washington University and has worked with modern-day Wampanoag people for more than twenty years. Through their stories, other primary sources, and historical analysis, Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of the alliance between the Wampanoag tribe and the Plymouth settlers. The result complicates and deepens our current narrative of the first Thanksgiving, presenting us with a new narrative of our country’s origins for the twenty-first century.

You can see the presentation at 6pm on Monday, November 18 at the Massachusetts Historical Society, or at noon the next day at the Boston Athenaeum.  In both cases, admission is $10 and advanced registration is required.

Don’t forget about recent podcast guest Nancy Seasholes’ upcoming event for the Atlas of Boston History.  She’ll be appearing at the Mass Historical Society with Bob Allison, Jim Vrabel, and Richard Garver at 6pm on November 14. 

Transcript

(Note: This text is automatically generated and may contain errors)

[0:04] Welcome Hub history, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston. The hub of the universe.
This is Episode 1 58 Harvard harnesses the heavens. Hi, I’m Jake.
This week, Nikki and I are visiting America’s other cradle of Liberty, Philadelphia.
While we’re there, we’re hoping to walk in the footsteps of great Bostonians like John Adams and hopefully visit lots of great history museums.

[0:32] Meanwhile, back home, we’ve been trying to adjust to this year’s first week of 4 30 sunsets, thanks to falling back to standard time last weekend to help us understand why Boston’s sunsets air so early in the winner and what we could do to fix it.
We’re going to replay a classic episode about how the idea of time zones and standard time was born in Boston with the help of Harvard Observatory.
And because we’re talking about the Harvard Observatory, we just have to share the story of the women who work there as human computers.
But before we talk about 4 30 sunsets in the Harvard Observatory, it’s time for this week’s Boston Book Club selection and our upcoming historical event my pick for the Boston Book Club this week is a bit of a spoiler for our segment about Boston standard time.
But two years ago, a legislative commission performed a comprehensive study relative to the practical economic, fiscal and health related impacts of the Commonwealth.
Remaining on Eastern daylight time four hours behind coordinated universal time, also known as Atlantic Standard time throughout the calendar year,
that is, they looked at what it would mean if Massachusetts moved to the Atlantic time zone, effectively keeping daylight saving time year round.
In the end, their conclusions were fairly optimistic. For those of us who hate for 30 sunsets, the recommendations included.

[1:53] Based on its research and findings, and after weighing the costs and benefits associated with the observance of time in Massachusetts, the commission believes that under certain circumstances, the Commonwealth would make a data driven case for moving to the Atlantic Time zone year round.
Although appreciable costs associated with making this change would result on balance, the commission finds that doing so could have positive benefits that largely stem from the absence of a spring transition to daylight savings time and the additional hour of winter evening light.

[2:24] Providing an additional hour of winter evening light could bring societal benefits to Massachusetts, largely by boosting consumer spending and economic development opportunities, reducing certain types of crime, increasing the population’s physical activity level.
And cutting greenhouse gas emissions. And associated energy costs for residences in Massachusetts from early November 2 mid March, when Massachusetts currently observes standard time.
The adoption of year round daylight savings time would also eliminate this spring transition to daylight savings time and the week of population wide sleep loss that results.
Preventing that sleep loss could have broad and powerful impacts on public health in the Commonwealth.
During the weekend question, Massachusetts residents could experience fewer traffic fatalities, workplace injuries and heart attacks with many lives and tens of millions of dollars saved.
As a result, However, that commission also concluded that it only makes sense for Massachusetts to move to Atlantic time.
If the other New England states do as well, what are the chances of that happening?
Well, stay tuned for this week’s main story to hear a legislative update from around the region,
and for our upcoming event this week, we have a talk by David Jay Silverman of George Washington, university titled This Land Is Their Land, the Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.

[3:44] Here It Hub history. We are the world’s biggest fans of Thanksgiving dinner.
But the story of the first Thanksgiving we all learned his children isn’t without its problems.
Here’s how this events described.

[3:56] Ahead of the 4/100 anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, Historian David Jay Silverman offers a transformative new look at the Plymouth Colonies, founding events told for the first time with the Wampanoag people at the heart of the story. And this land is their land.
The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony and the troubled history of Thanksgiving.
David J. Silverman is a professor of native and colonial American history at George Washington University and its work with modern day Wampanoag people for more than 20 years.
Through their stories, other primary sources and historical analysis, Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation and bloody dissolution of the alliance between the Wampanoag tribe and the Plymouth settlers.
The result complicates and deepens our current narrative of the first Thanksgiving, presenting us with a new narrative of our country’s origins for the 21st century.

[4:49] Now the cool thing about this talk is that you have your choice of venues and dates.
You can catch it at 6 p.m. On Monday, November 18th at the Massachusetts Historical Society, or at noon the next day at the Boston Athenaeum.
In both cases, admission is $10 advanced registration is required as long as we’re talking about upcoming events.
Don’t forget about Nancy Seashells. Upcoming event For the Atlas of Boston history, she’ll be appearing at the Mass Historical Society with Bob Alison, Jim Vrabel and Richard Garver at 6 p.m. On November 14th.
Check out Episode 1 56 for more on Nancy and her new book that will link to the registration page for this talk as well as both of your options for this land is your land in this week’s show. Notes at hub history dot com slash 158,
before we move on to this week’s featured stories, we just want to say a big thank you to all of our patriotic sponsors.
Your support allows us to cover the expenses of making hub history and keep this show going as we kick off our fourth year.
If you’re not a supporter yet and you’d like to be, you can check out patri and dot com slash hub history or just goto hub history dot com and click on the support Us. Like there, you’ll see the special rewards available of the $2.5 dollar and $10 monthly levels.
Or, as we like to call them, the Amelia Earhart, Louis Hayden and Abigail Adams levels thanks again to everyone who helps us make hub history.

[6:18] And now it’s time for this week’s main topic since we set the clocks back last weekend, we’re entering the dark season in Boston this past week, the sunset at about 4:35 p.m.
Before long Sunset will creep back to 4:10 p.m. And Sunrise is gonna push forward toa after 7 a.m.
Which means that my poor dog basically never gets to go outside. Well, it’s light out.
In honor of this transition, we’re gonna play a clip from a show we released back at New Year’s about how Boston used technology to establish ultra precise timekeeping in the 19th century and how that led to our local time being established as the first time zone.
So Boston Standard time kept early railroad safely in sync.
You’ll also hear why setting our clocks forward and back every year is a terrible system and how our Legislature could fix it.
This story, originally aired, is part of Episode 1 13.

[7:14] Are you planning to watch the ball drop in Times Square tomorrow night? Or if you’re listening to this later in the week?
Did you tune in to watch the ball drop in the small rural town where I grew up?
There really wasn’t anything to do on New Year’s Eve, but my parents would let me stay up late and watch the ball drop every year.
Of course, now that I’m pushing 40 staying in and watching the ball drop is starting to sound like a pretty good way to spend a night again.

[7:38] When the giant illuminated ball reaches the bottom of its 141 foot drop, it’s officially the new year.
It’s a very visual symbol of a landmark time.
According to the official website of the Times Square Ball, the tradition began in 1907 and has been repeated every year except during wartime precautions In 1942 and 43,
the website says the first New Year’s Eve ball bait of iron and wood and adorned with 125 watt light bulbs was five feet in diameter and weighed £700.
It was built by a young immigrant metal worker named Jacob Starr, and for most of the 20th century, the company he founded, sign maker Artkraft Strauss, was responsible for lowering the ball.

[8:23] In 1924 £100 ball, made entirely of wrought iron, replaced the original in 1955 the Iron Ball was replaced by an aluminum ball weighing a mere £150.
This aluminum ball remained unchanged until the 19 eighties, when red light bulbs and the addition of a green stem converted the ball into an apple for the I Love New York marketing campaign.
From 1981 to 1988 after seven years, the traditional glowing white ball with white light bulbs and without the green stem returned to brightly light the sky above Times Square.
In 1995 the ball was upgraded with aluminum skin, rhinestones, strobes and computer controls, but the aluminum ball was lowered for the last time in 1988.

[9:08] There have been two more designs since then, including the most recent adoration, a quote permanent big ball weighing nearly six tons and 12 feet in diameter.
The 2688 Waterford crystal triangles are illuminated by 32,256 Phillips led ese.

[9:25] What you might not know is that a similar time ball used to drop every day at noon right here in Boston.
In his book Marking Modern Times. A History of Clocks, Watches and Other Timekeepers in American Life, Alexis MK Ross and described the scene in the spring of 18 78.
Boston clock Maker’s daybook noted the time ball on top of the building of the Equitable Life Insurance Company at the corner of Milk and Devonshire Street, was dropped for the first time today.
Harvard College is observatory sent the time signal gratis. The United States Army’s Signal service operated the mechanism each day, and Equitable Life insurance paid for the apparatus.

[10:05] In a rapidly industrializing nation, people were beginning to demand more accuracy in time keeping than the layman could get from observing when the sun was directly overhead or from listening to a little local church bells, chime,
factories, clipper ships and especially railroads all demanded accurate time and, in particular synchronised time, where everybody kept the same clock.
Time balls were a very public way to tell an entire city what time it waas, and they had to be accurate enoughto literally set your watch to,
in a 2000 article in the journal Material Cultural Review across and dug deeper into what the’s time balls were and where they came from.

[10:45] During the decades after the Civil War, time balls joined the array of newly erected monuments across the nation, many of which embodied the cultural, commercial and political aspirations of Americans,
typically perched atop the highest point in the central part of a city, usually a tower, thes globes with metal ribs and canvas covers of various colors were rigged to an electric pulse, which caused them to drop it nude.
The daily except Sunday. In most cases, dropping of the ball was a public event, and on occasion of error or failure to drop notice was published in city papers.

[11:19] In this respect, Boston was far from unique. Starting in the 18 thirties, time balls were installed around the English speaking world, first in England than the U. S.
And then Australia. New Zealand in South Africa there are less common in other areas, but time balls eventually came to Chile, Poland and probably other countries around the world.
An article published by the Woods Hole Observatory itself, eventually the site of a Time bowl, describes the earliest time balls.
In the 18 twenties, various visual means flags, Gunsmoke, searchlights, rockets were tried in different ports to delineate some pre selected moment in time.
But it was not until late in 18 29 that an experimental time ball hoisted to the top of a mast and dropped at a precise time, was tried at Portsmouth, England, and found satisfactory,
time balls were subsequently his donut, Liverpool and Greenwich, England.

[12:16] Now the reason all these time balls were getting built and the reason keeping accurate time was important all comes down to sailing ships.
In the days before GPS, they used a system known a celestial navigation to plot their positions on the open ocean using the stars.
My stepfather was a navigator in the U. S Navy during the Vietnam era, and he always likes to joke about the time when he used celestial navigation to steer the ship from San Diego to the Philippines and he got a medal. Because there are only 100 miles off course.
By the 19 sixties, that was apparently seen as a pretty good error rate for such an ancient navigational art.
The basic principles of celestial navigation have been known since the days of Ptolemy, the Greek mathematician who lived almost 2000 years ago to find your position on a map, you need to know both your latitude and your longitude.
The latitude is how far north or south you are relative to the equator, with lines of latitude circling the earth parallel to the equator, while longitude is your position.
East or west around the globe, with lines of latitude circling the earth in the other direction, all intersecting with one another at the north and south poles.
Because the system was laid out during the height of the British Empire, the prime meridian, the line of longitude that everything is based on runs through Greenwich, England.

[13:33] Finding your latitude. Assuming you have the training of the necessary reference tables is actually pretty simple.
The navigator simply has to measure the angle of the sun stars or other celestial bodies above the horizon when they reach their highest point.
Take the North Star, for example, a remains within one degree of true north. So all you need to know is when it has reached its highest elevation of the night.
When it’s there, look directly ahead at the horizon, then tilt your head back until you’re looking at the North Star.
If you tilted your head back in a 15 degree angle, your latitude is approximately 15 degrees north.

[14:10] Navigational tables and manuals give the calculations for using the sun or another star.
And, of course, a navigator far out at sea will use a device called a sextant to shoot the precise angles.
Rather than just tipping their head back and guessing, Longitude gets more tricky.
Calculating. It also relies on measuring the angle of the North Stars highest point for longitude, though ah, second angle must be taken to a star directly on the eastern or Western horizon.
Again. Navigational tables give the calculation to turn these two numbers into a longitude.
However, in this case there’s a catch. The earth spins at 1000 miles an hour, so the navigational tables have to be adjusted for the local time.
For this to work, there had to be a reliable way to know the time, so sailors couldn’t practically calculate longitude until an accurate chronometer was invented in 17 61,
when a ship was in port, they could use the very public, very visible tool of a dropping time ball to calibrate their chronometer, sze, in turn, ensuring that they would be able to navigate accurately when they were out of sight of land.

[15:16] We should mention that the navigational calculations and tables that sailors used were all created by a Massachusetts man who spent the last 15 years of his career in Boston.
Nathaniel Bowditch was born in Salem and 17 73 to a family of modest means.
At 12 he became an indentured servant to a merchant serving as a bookkeeper and discovered that he had a knack for math,
saying Nak really under sells it because he managed to teach himself algebra, calculus, navigation and theoretical astronomy over the next five years or so.
He also learned Latin and French, so we could read the latest scientific papers and journals.

[15:54] From 17 95 to 18 02 he went on four sea voyages during which he detected and corrected the many errors in the state of the art navigational manual in common use.
At that time, he went on to completely rework the standard navigation tables from scratch and put in place methods of calculation that any crew member could learn.
Finally, in 18 02 he published about Itches American Practical Navigator, which remained the standard instructional text for navigation. For over 150 years.
It was said that on his fifth voyage after its publication, every crewman, even the cook could work out their position from bandages, charts and methods, but about it.
His calculations, like those in every navigational texts in 17 61 relied on an accurate chronometer that kept accurate time to know the accurate time.
Port cities began installing time balls in the mid 19th century.
Following the lead of the Greenwich Observatory, a time ball was set up at the Naval Observatory on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D. C.
And 18 45 however, is Ian Barchi, noted in selling the true time 19th century timekeeping in America.
It was of limited practical use.

[17:11] The Naval Observatory is signal Ball did not serve as a need to navigation for few if any vessels plying the Potomac River carried chronometer.
Sze Navy officials, however, wrapped it in all the trappings of a navigational device in their budget requests in public documents.
Actually, the time ball was an innovation in public timekeeping, giving residents what they lacked an authoritative source by which all other timekeepers, clocks and watches could be regulated.
The time ball that was installed in Boston in 18 78 served both practical and ceremonial purposes.
At first, proponents argued that the time ball should be placed on the most prominent and important building in town, the State House perched right on top of Beacon Hill.
In the pre skyscraper era, it was visible from far and wide.
However, as Alexis McCraw send notes, some critics were worried that it would not be visible enough.
Around mid century, a prominent Boston chronometer maker pointed out that were a time ball placed on the couple of the state House on Lee, a small number of city inhabitants would see the ball drop.
Furthermore, most navigators in port if they could see the ball, could little afford to prepare and watch for the signal.

[18:24] A blood, published by Brown University’s Lad Observatory, describes what the first time ball to be lofted over Boston looked like the ball was four feet in diameter and made of rolled plate copper.
It was raised on a staff 20 feet high, giving a clear 16 foot drop.
Ah, break mechanism was used to stop the ball after to drop to within six feet of the bottom.
The time signal to release the ball was related from the standard clock at Harvard College Observatory by telegraph wire to the ball on the roof of the Equitable Building.
A ball of this size could be seen from about four miles away.
The Equitable building had been newly constructed after Boston’s 18 72 great fire on the corner of milk and Devonshire streets across from the main post office.
The massive insurance company building in a prominent location was visible bar across the harbor, making it perfect for the newly standardised time signal.
A late 19th century author extols the virtues of the Boston time Ball, the Observatory of Harvard College, in connection with the United States Army Signal Service drops a time ball for the benefit of Boston Harbor.
And perhaps there is no one public signal of the Harvard Time service, which is received with more public favor than this,
not only by the commanders of vessels lying in the harbor by the many people living on the surrounding highlands and numerous factories and institutions from which the signal is visible.

[19:48] The need for a new universal timekeeping standard became apparent in the 18 forties as railroad networks grew and began to cover wider geographic regions.
The long stretches between stations were often covered by only a single track, with trains travelling in opposite directions. Needing to share while a north bound train was stopped at a station, the South bound train would pass by on the single track.
When an eastbound train was scheduled to pass, the westbound train would turn out into a siding.
To make all this work, the railroads required very precise timetables governing which training needed to beware at what time to be able to follow a timetable everyone involved in railroad business needed to keep very accurate time.

[20:33] The potential problems that could arise when the time was off at any point in the chain were illustrated by a terrible crash on the Providence in Worcester Railroad in 18 53 has described by Barchi.

[20:46] On August 12th a terrible collision on the Providence and Worcester brought railroad timekeeping once again under the public scrutiny at 7:20 a.m.
A. P and W train left Providence bound for Worcester.
Meanwhile, the PM W’s crowded excursion train running south toward Providence arrived late at Valley Falls, a town just north of the city.
Checking his time, this train’s neophyte conductor concluded that he still had four minutes in which to reach the double track section of rail 3/4 of a mile away, he signaled his train to move on down a section of curving track.

[21:24] Out of sight. Around the bend, the up train waited while it’s engineer observed the five minutes allotted for the excursion train to cross the switch on to the double track.
Five minutes past, a guard raised the signal ball, giving the up train the right to move through the switch.
The conductor called all aboard the engine driver waited a minute or so and then started the train forward, passing through the switch to the single track.
The two engines struck less than a minute later. The impact of the collision was so great that some of the excursion trains wouldn’t passenger cars telescoped, ramming and tearing through adjacent cars.
In all, 14 passengers were killed and 23 were injured.
An investigation concluded that the conductor of the excursion train was using a watch that ran over a minute and 1/2 slow.
He was arrested and eventually tried for manslaughter.
The immediate aftermath of the accident was photographed and the grisly pictures were published in newspapers.
Soon, people all across New England were clamoring for improved accuracy in time keeping.

[22:30] Luckily, another technological innovation had been developed alongside the railroads that allowed synchronization of clocks across a wide reaching geographical area,
from the very moment that telegraphs were developed, they were used for comparing times, as Barchi describes,
on Friday, the 24th of May 18 44 the American government’s 40 mile line along the Baltimore and Ohio railroads, right away from Baltimore to Washington, open for trials after transmitting an Old Testament comment. What hath God wrought?
Operator sent additional messages toe awe and entertain those assembled at the Capitol?
What is your time? Was the day’s fifth message. From that moment on, Americans were captivated by the near instantaneous transmission of time to distant places.

[23:18] Telegraphs gave people the means to set their clocks to an agreed upon time across the region, rather than simply calculating the moment when the Sun reached its highest point for the day and calling that noone,
in Boston the agreed upon time was set by the astronomers at Harvard Observatory in 18 49 the president of the observatory was also the best clockmaker in Boston.
William Bonds telescopes were used to take the astronomical measurements from which an exact time could be calculated.
William Bonds, Chronometer Sze were used at first to carry the time from the observatory to its watching clock shop near Downtown Crossing, and the time it William Bond shop was used as the basis of standard times for Boston based railways.
Technically, the time of the Harvard Observatory in Cambridge was 16 seconds earlier than astronomical time with Watch Shop in Boston.
Then, when the railroad’s began standardizing time in 18 49 they settled on a time two minutes ahead of Boston to coincide with the Meridian, about 30 miles west of the city.
Because they were the paying customer, the railroads one and Bond began setting his clocks to match the railroad time in 18 41.
A telegraph wire lengthy observatory to the shop, allowing the instant transmission of the time without having to carry a clock back and forth.

[24:37] In 18 50 to the observatory, Telegraph was wired into the city wide fire alarm telegraph system, allowing anyone in town to determine accurate time.
The bells of the many churches in Boston would finally begin Chai Ming or less in sync instead of spread out over five minutes or Maura’s they had in the past.
When the time Ball was introduced in 18 78 it to used the telegraph signal from the Harvard Observatory.
The procedure used in dropping Boston’s time ball every day was described by IBM Personal of the U. S. Army Signal Corps in Winslow Upton’s report on time signals.

[25:14] The rules by which the display of the ball is governed are as follows.
Number one at 11:55 a.m. The ball is to be at half mast.
Number two At 11:58 a.m. The ball is to be at the top of the mast.
Number three at 12 o’clock, zero minutes and zero seconds. Exact noon Boston Statehouse time. The ball will fall.
Number four Should the ball for any reason failed to drop it 12 o’clock sharp, and the trouble is of a nature that could be readily removed.
The ball will remain at the top of the mast and be dropped at 12 05,
And if the ball should by accident fall before 12 o’clock, it will immediately be raised again and dropped at 12 05,
If for any reason it becomes necessary to lower the ball, it will be done very slowly so that ship masters may not miss. Take the movement for the noon signal.

[26:09] By 18 70. The railroad had given up on the two minute delay, and they adopted the true time broadcast from the Harvard Observatory to Bond’s watch shop as their standard, which would be known across the New England rail system as Boston Standard time.
It was America’s first time zone, but as a 2011 article in the Harbor Gazette put it,
instead of covering the large geographic swaths that we’re familiar with today, that first time zone followed the rail lines, creating a spider web of towns across the region whose clocks were all synchronized to the Harvard Observatory.

[26:42] The adoption of Boston Standard Time was good for much of New England, but the rest of the country continued to struggle with different times in every town, As the Woods Hole Observatory points out in an article.
Initially noon meant the local apparent noon, which varied with the locations longitude up to three and 1/2 hours from coast to coast.
Each major city had its own local time.
When the railroads came, the need for a common time stater became much more obvious.
In Pittsburgh, for example, there were six different times standards for train arrivals and departures.
A traveler from Maine to California would change his watch some 20 times. Along the way.

[27:21] We’ll include an 18 79 railway guide in this week’s show notes showing the dozens of local time standards in cities across the nation.

[27:29] Astronomer Leonard Waldo, arguing in favor of nationally standardized time zones in 18 80 essay in the North American Review,
describes how the region wide adoption of Boston Standard time was preferable to the hodgepodge of time standard scattered around the rest of the country outside of New England.
There has been scarcely any concert of action among the railroads, and there are about 70 different standards of time and use.
The result of the experiment in New England fairly justifies the belief that where the railroads in the rest of the United States approached on this question, they would combine to adopt the standards of time now used by a few of the great centres of population.

[28:08] The principal systems now in operation comprise the United States Naval Observatory System, which extends its distribution of Washington time to Chicago in the West, The Harvard and Yale Systems, which distribute respectively Boston and New York time over new England.
The Allegheny Observatory system, which is concerned chiefly with the Pennsylvania Railroad and the more local service is emanating from the observatory’s at Albany, Chicago Cincinnati in St Louis.
Unfortunately, except in New England, the distribution of the time Oven Observatory has not always resulted in the adoption of that time for general use.
And it is often the case that the local jewelers, who are the guardians of town clocks and local time as well we’ll convert the time received by telegraph into their own local time on thus make it inconveniently different from the time in use in any other city of their region.

[28:59] Having described the chaos of competing local time standards, he introduces a scheme proposed by a professor, Benjamin Pierce, that prescribed four standardised time zones for the country.
Each zone would be exactly an hour apart and cover roughly 15 degrees of longitude.
They would be centered on the 75th 90th 105th and 120th meridians, Waldo said.
It’s great. Merit consists in there being no greater difference than half a now er in any part of the country between the true local time and the arbitrary standard amount, but slightly greater than exists between Greenwich and the west of England.
In passing from the Ohio into the Mississippi Valley, for instance, the traveler merely changes his watch by one hour in The Merchant.
Remembering the Pacific Time is three hour slow of Atlantic Time knows that in this half past two in San Francisco, when it is half past five in New York.

[29:55] The railroad’s hoping to avoid government regulation were quick to pick up the idea of standardized time.
They began planning for standard railway time in 18 81 with it going into effect in 18 83 to make sure that the new time zones were accepted, they had to be used by cities, not just railroads.
A man named William F. Allen was tasked with convincing municipalities to adopt the new system in marking modern times. Alexis McCraw Sin describes the challenge Alan faced here in Boston.
Apparently, railroad managers were worried about Weather Observatory. Time Service’s would provide Meridian time.
The sense among Boston railroaders, for instance, was that the Harvard Observatory would stay with the local time.
As Alan put it, There is some difficulty in securing the acquiescence of the roads in the vicinity of Boston unless the time Balkan be dropped on the 75th Meridian time.
Like the general superintendent of the Boston and Albany Railroad, regional railroad superintendents wanted the time has furnished by the observatory’s to agree with railroad time.
Alan reassured them that the time balls at various points in Boston, New York and elsewhere would be regulated in accordance with the new standards.

[31:09] Indeed, this would happen. According to Allan, upon the same day that the new standard went into effect, Alan was sure that all of the New England railway companies would gladly conform to the proposed system once arrangements were made for the time ball to drop, according to the new standard.
So he proceeded to lobby anyone who had influence over the Harvard Observatory, which was where the time signal for the Boston time ball originated.
Foremost was Professor Edward Pickering, its director, who was out of the country for the summer.
You may recall the name Edward Pickering from our podcast about the women who worked as human computers at Harvard Observatory, making many important astronomical discoveries in the late 19th and early 20th century’s.
It was Pickering who first decided to begin hiring women after getting angry with his mail assistance and shouting, My scotch made could do a better job. Long story short, she did across and continues.
When Pickering finally returned from Europe the second week of October, he agreed to consider the change, which in turn persuaded Boston City authorities to take up the question of adopting the new stated for the city.
In early November, just a week before the railroads would inaugurate standard time, the Harvard Observatory and Boston City Council resolved to adopt 75th Meridian time.
The adjustment for Boston was notable but easily adjusted to as the 1906 Harper’s Encyclopedia of American History explained.

[32:35] The true local time of any place is slower or faster than the standard time, as the place is east or west of the time Meridian.
Thus, the true local time at Boston Mass is 16 minutes faster than the Eastern standard time, while at Buffalo, New York, it is 60 minutes slower.
The 75th Meridian time being halfway between Boston and Buffalo.

[32:57] Starting at noon on September 18th 18 83 the nation officially said it’s clocks to conform to the four new time zones.
Professor Peter Gallus, a KN director of Harvard’s collection of historic scientific instruments, told the Harvard Gazette about people’s reservations with the new system.
If you live at the edge of a time zone when it’s noon, the sun is not in the highest point in the sky.
We don’t know or even care about that anymore. But they knew it good and well, when all this was happening, many people didn’t like it at all.
They didn’t like being told by New York or Boston that it was noon when they could see that it was not noon.

[33:35] Despite early grumbling, the New Time Standard Stock Boston was now officially part of the Eastern Time Zone.
But it seems like the older terminology was still in use for a while.
For example, here’s a question from the geography section of the 18 87 Boston Grammar School diploma exam.
If you are a tte San Francisco and your watch indicated Boston standard time, how would it differ from the clocks of San Francisco?
Also indicating standard time the introduction of telegraphic time service and especially wiring a noon bell directly into the city’s fire alarm system.
Spell doom for the Boston Time ball.
If you could get an instant notification from any fire alarm box, why would you wait around with bated breath watching the mast on the Equitable building with unblinking eyes waiting to mark the split second, the ball began to drop,
across and makes it clear that the time balls were of limited utility in the first place.
The officer in charge of Boston’s hydrographic office found in 18 86 that a prominent member of the Chamber of Commerce had never heard of the time Paul and those city officials who were in the know did not make use of it.
Since bells are struck all over the city at noon by the Cambridge Observatory, he further reported that prominent shipping people assured him that the ball is seldom, if ever, made use of by the captains of vessels for rating chronometer.
Sze, captains of ships themselves confirmed this report, stating that they seldom see the ball and never think of rating there. Chronometer is by it.

[35:02] Nevertheless, enough people still relied on the time ball to keep it going.
Whether this reflected the needs of sailors and residents or simply affection for the public ritual of timekeeping, Boston’s time ball persisted into the 20th century.
In fact, it was replaced in upgraded at the beginning of the century. An article from September 17th 1902 in the Jeweler Circular and Hora Logical Review describes the new installation, The New Time Ball, about to be installed at Boston Mass.
The time ball to be placed on the top of the Ames Building, a 13 story structure at Washington and Court streets, arrived in Boston yesterday with part of the machinery on the steamer Howard,
work of installing the ball on top of the Ames building, commanding a view of the harbor and other points will begin at once.
The ball will be operated by a direct wire from the hydrographic office at Washington connected with the local branch office.
A backup chronometer will be kept in his office at the Custom House will be regulated by the Washington Time in case of wire trouble between here and Washington.
This timepiece can be used for dropping the ball until communications air established with headquarters.

[36:09] When the apparatus is in place and the wires connected, the ball will be hoisted each day by an employee of the hydrographic office, perhaps 10 or 15 minutes before the noon hour.
Either Mr Richardson or one of his assistants will then follow. The time is announced by clicks on the wire from Washington.
Thes will cease 10 seconds before the noon hour. Then the switch connecting the Washington wire with shorter one between the custom house and the Games building will be turned on,
exactly on the stroke of 12 in the Naval Observatory in Washington will come the tick that causes the time ball to fall from the pole in which it is placed into the drum below.

[36:45] The direct connection to the Naval Observatory indicates how centralized and standardized timekeeping was by that time.
Then, in 1924 a radio time beacon was introduced instantly, rendering time balls completely anachronistic.
Radio signals could carry an accurate time instantly over hundreds of miles.
They could be repeated more than once a day at noon, and they could be detected by ships at sea, far out of sight of any land based time ball around the world.
And here in Boston, time balls went into a slow decline as neglect and indifference led nearly all to go out of service in the first decades of the 20th century.

[37:23] There are said to be at least 60 time ball’s still in existence today, the only a few are still operational.
As far as I know the nearest time ball that still standing Is it Plymouth Light on Garnett Point in Plymouth?
It has amassed in time ball, but the ball’s permanently parked in the down position.
The Titanic Monument in Manhattan incorporates a time bowl, and it was dropped every day at noon until 1967.
But when the monument was moved in 1968 the ball was fixed permanently at the top of the mast.
The U. S Naval Observatory in Washington carried on, dropping a time ball at noon until 1936.
And then in 1999 they installed a new one to mark the millennium down in New Zealand.
And 18 76 time ball in Littleton was operational until the building housing it was destroyed in 2010 earthquake.
The community is currently raising funds to get it back in service.

[38:17] One of the original time balls was installed at the Greenwich Observatory on the Greenwich Meridian home of Greenwich Mean Time in Greenwich, England, in 18 33 today.
The bright red ball atop Flam Steed house of the observatory is part of the Royal Museum of Greenwich, but it is still operational, and it still drops at 1 p.m. Every day unless it’s too windy.
In fact, the Royal Museums of Greenwich just announced that they’re looking for a new curator of navigation.
So if you have a postgraduate degree in a background in public history, you could wind up in charge of the time ball, along with many other collections.

[38:56] The closest your humble hosts have ever been to a time ball was at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park in the Park Service Museum overlooking Hyde Street Pier.
There’s a display on the city’s time balls, starting with the original installed on Telegraph Hill in 18 52.
In the corner of the room stands a section of masked, complete with a metal ball about four feet in diameter.
This was San Francisco’s later time ball, installed at the Fairmont Hotel in Nob Hill.
In 1909 we’ll have a picture of it in this week’s show notes.

[39:28] Now we know that our listeners love it when we make political comments.

[39:33] No, that’s a lie. In fact, the most common feedback we get is that we should cut out the political comments.
Well, I’m going there. I’m going to make a deeply controversial fringe political statement in the winter.
Sunset in Boston is too dang early.
When this episode airs on December 30th Sunset will fall it for 20.
But two weeks ago, this sunset in Boston was at its earliest for the year. 4:11 p.m.
Friends, Citizens, My fellow Bostonians, We shouldn’t have to live like this. The Eastern Time zone is just too wide, and we’re too far to the north and east. And as bad as it is for us, it could be worse.
Up in the former eastern counties of Massachusetts, known today as Maine. Sansa in Mathias on December 11th was 3:49 p.m.
Compare that to the other extreme on the same day in the same time zone, the sunset was at 503 Innes Ssh! Coming Michigan.
That’s an hour and 1/4 difference in 2014. The Boston Globe took up this cause on its editorial page.

[40:45] A look at the map suggests we’re currently in the wrong time zone entirely.
Boston lies so far East in the eastern time zone that during standard time, our earliest nightfall of the year is a mere 27 minutes later than in Anchorage.
When it comes to daylight, we can do much better than Alaska.

[41:03] Fortunately for us, there’s already a time zone one hour ahead of Eastern, the Atlantic time zone, switching to Atlantic standard time.
Essentially, keeping the clock in our forward all year wouldn’t be nearly as radical changes. It sounds as it is. We’re actually only on Eastern standard time for about four months a year, from early November until early March.
In the spring, summer and early fall, we’re on Eastern daylight time, which is the same as Atlantic Standard time.

[41:33] The line between Atlantic and Eastern time now runs east of main, including Nova Scotia and the Canadian maritime provinces.
In a perfect world, we would re draw the line to roughly follow the Champlain Hudson corridor.
The New England states, Montreal and Quebec City would all fall within the newly expanded Atlantic time zone.
New York State, Ottawa and Toronto would remain in Eastern time.

[41:59] Imagine my delight when a special state commission on the Commonwealth’s time zone was appointed in 2017 to study whether it makes sense for Massachusetts to remain in the Eastern Time zone.
Their final report said that moving to Atlantic Time would have benefits in economic development, worker productivity, reduced traffic and workplace accidents, lower crime and reduced energy costs.
They’re finding stated based on its research and findings.
And after weighing the costs and benefits associated with the observance of time in Massachusetts, the commission believes that under certain circumstances, the Commonwealth could make a data driven case for moving to the Atlantic Time zone year round,
effectively observing year round daylight savings time.
Although there are appreciable costs associated with making this change on balance, the commission finds that doing so could have positive benefits,
that largely stem from the absence of a spring transition to daylight savings time and the additional hour of winter evening daily.

[42:58] Of course, this recommendation came with strings attached. One concern was for school children.
Without a switch to standard time, they’ll be left waiting for the bus or walking to school in the dark. Through most of the winter months, the commission recommended moving toe a later school opening time if we switched time zones.
The other concern is for pure practicality. Clearly, Massachusetts couldn’t go it alone.
Are states so small that it wouldn’t make sense to be a tiny island of Atlantic time surrounded by a sea of eastern time?
On this front, the commission concluded that Massachusetts should only move two year round daylight savings time if a majority of the other New England states also do so.

[43:41] So how do things look from a regional perspective? Lawmakers in Rhode Island debated legislation to move the state to Atlantic time in 2016 but it didn’t really go anywhere.
In early 2017 the New Hampshire House passed a bill stating,
This bill provides that if Massachusetts adopts Atlantic standard time, the state of New Hampshire shall also adopt Atlantic Standard Time, the effect of which shall be to make daylight savings time permanent in both states.
The legislation, however, died in the state Senate.
At about the same time, legislation was introduced in the Connecticut House and Senate that would provide for year round daylight saving time in Connecticut and allow Connecticut to maximize additional daylight in the evening.
In order for residents, employers and business is to get the most beneficial use of their time as a way to increase productivity and create additional consumer opportunities for Connecticut residents.
The bill did not pass that same summer.
The main house passed an act opt out of federal daylight saving time and to ask the United States secretary of Transportation to place the state in the Atlantic time zone.
It was contingent on both New Hampshire and Massachusetts switching to Atlantic time.
But it never got that far because that bill also failed in the state Senate.

[45:01] Vermont hasn’t introduced legislation specific to moving to Atlantic time, but in the spring of 2017 their Legislature did debate a bill that would demand Congress abolished daylight saving time.
Change doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea of moving New England to Atlantic time has gone from the realm of cranks and crazies toe what looks like a nascent movement and Boston’s leading the way again.
It’ll be a long process, but it seems possible now for the first time.
Perhaps if we’re successful one day we can name our new Time Zone, Boston Standard Time and that last story. You heard how the Harvard Observatory used astronomy to establish exact time keeping.
They started transmitting their time signal in 18 78 which was just three years before Williamina Fleming join the observatory staff as a human computer.
She was the first of a series of women to serve in this role. At first it was considered a menial task, but Fleming, along with successors like Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Annie Jump Cannon,
ended up revolutionizing astronomy in helping toe open the hard sciences to women.
This story originally aired in December of 2017 as part of Episode 58.

[46:15] When we think of computers today, we think of the amazing devices that let us do everything from access books and faraway archives to decode the human genome to record podcasts.
As a matter of fact, this microphone is plugged into one right now.
But before electronics, the word computer referred to a person, a person who computed or did calculations.

[46:38] Human computers may sound like something out of science fiction, like the mint tats from the 1984 movie Dude.

[46:51] Human.

[46:54] Breath. It is by will alone. I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of that thoughts acquire speed.
The lips acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by will alone. I set my mind in motion.

[47:07] Riel. Human computers were vital to science and technology right up to the dawn of the space age, with some of the earliest working on problems of astronomy.
And 17 50 a team of French computers correctly calculated that Halley’s comet would return in 17 59.
British computers calculated navigation tables to include nautical almanacs so sailors could work out where they were anywhere in the world.
Later, computers would work on the Manhattan Project and the Apollo missions.

[47:34] If the idea of women working as human computers, it’s fresh in your mind, it might be because of the movie Hidden Figures, which came out in January.
The film celebrates the lives and careers of a group of African American women who worked his computers for NASA during the early space race.
The central character is Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician who grew up in segregated West Virginia, She worked on every major project, from the first American in space to the moon landings to the space shuttle.
When John Glenn was chosen to orbit the Earth for the first time, he refused to do it unless Katherine Johnson verified the calculations in early electronic Computer had made.
Today. Johnson is 99 years old, and she’s been retired since 1986.
Our story, however, begins over a century before that.

[48:22] Legend has it that the director of the Harvard Observatory in Cambridge went on a tear in 18 81.

[48:28] The young men who worked his computers in the observatory were doing what he considered shoddy work, and while dressing them down, he shouted, My scotch. Mead could do a better job.
Luckily for Edward Charles Pickering, his Scottish American made proved that she was more than up to the task.
Williamina Stephens grew up in Dundee, Scotland. Meena was an outstanding student and began teaching school when she was just 14 years old.
She married an older, widowed carver and builder named James Fleming in 18 77 when she was 21.
Together, they immigrated to America, arriving in New York on December 3rd, 18 78 before seeking their fortunes in Boston.
About a year later, while Nina was pregnant with their first born child, James left the family Williamina. Fleming found herself alone in a foreign land with no money, no husband and a new child teaching school.
The only profession she had any experience with was not available to her Onley. Men and young unmarried women could teach, so Fleming was forced to seek work as a maid.
If you tour the Gibson House Museum, imagine Young Nina as your guide describes daily duties. The household servants were expected to perform through sheer look.
Williamina Fleming began working as a housekeeper for the Pickering family in 18 79.

[49:53] Perhaps out of gratitude, she named her young son, Edward Pickering Fleming.
That may sound like a long way from there to the Harvard Observatory.
Some accounts say that Pickering, his wife, quickly realized Nina’s intelligence and recommended that he find work for her at the observatory.
By 18 80 she was doing some clerical tasks for the observatory alongside her duties as a maid.
But in 18 81 she was invited to join a team that would soon revolutionize the field of spectrographic astronomy.
Spectrographic astronomy used advanced photographic techniques to allow researchers at Harvard to classify and analyze distant stars.
This was happening in 18 81 that July gunfighter Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garret in New Mexico territory.
Just a week later, 186 members of the hunk Papa Lakota band, led by Sitting Bull, went to a small fort in Northern Dakota territory and surrendered to the U. S. Army.
In September, the Apache band led by Geronimo broke out of their reservation in Arizona territory and continued their war against both the Mexican and U. S Army’s.

[51:03] In December 18 81 town Marshal Virgil Erp and his brothers Morgan and Wyatt Erp and their friend Doc Holliday attempted to enforce the town gun control laws in Tombstone, Arizona,
Town Ordinance number nine required anyone entering town with a gun or knife to check their weapons until they left town again.
After some freedom loving cowboys floated this rule by continuing to openly carry their guns in town, the officers confronted them in a vacant lot on Third Street.
You’re the O. K. Corral ahead, skin it, skin that smoke wagon and see what happens.
In the gunfight that followed, 30 shots were fired in about 30 seconds.
Three cowboys were killed, while Doc Holliday and two of the Earp brothers were wounded.
The gunfight at the OK Corral is one of the most iconic stories of the American West, and it happened the same year that Williamina Fleming join the observatory staff at Harvard.
For most people, the history of America in the late 19th century is synonymous with the frontier, a lawless, violent place ruled by gunfighters and cowboys and Indian chiefs.
That mythological vision of the West has come to define how Americans see ourselves as a nation and how we’re seeing around the world.

[52:14] But in 18 81 the vast majority of Americans live lives that were more similar to that of Williamina Fleming than Wyatt her.
At the time of the 18 80 cents ist, the vast majority of Americans lived east of the Mississippi and most live north of the Mason Dixon line.

[52:32] The country was beginning a process of urbanization that would accelerate and continue well into the 20th century.
Already, 28% of the U. S population lived in cities, and that number was much higher in the Northeast, where most of the population lived.
Massachusetts was the second most heavily urban state, at 62% behind only little. Rhode Island.

[52:55] Boston was the fifth most populous city in the nation. The population of Boston and Cambridge was larger than that of Wyoming, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arizona, Nevada, Washington and Montana.
Combined in 18 81 the Northeast was well connected by telegraph lines in a growing rail network, Steamers carried mail and news from Europe in record time,
Boston was criss crossed by streetcar lines, and by the end of the decade they would convert from horse drawn cars to electric power.
The telephone’s invented by Bostonian Alexander Graham Bell were becoming increasingly popular, and electric light bulbs were just starting to catch on.
The iconic image of America in the 19th century. Maybe the Wild West.
But the East Shore was civilized in this civilized and technologically advanced Eastern world.
Williamina Fleming’s journal casually mentions discovering a few brand new stars and nebulae.
After lunch one day before lunch, I found time to examine a few Southern spectrum plates and marked 1/4 type star and a gaseous nebula, both probably known later in the afternoon.
I noted a fume or interesting objects among them to fourth type stars, one gaseous nebula and several bright line stars. Some of them may be new.

[54:17] Using a new dry glass plate photography method, the Harvard Observatory was able to capture photographs of the night sky that were as clear as directly observing the sky through a telescope.
However, instead of taking pictures of the sky as that I would see it.
They used a special prism to capture photographs of the spectrum of light emitted by each star, which would in turn reveal its chemical composition.
In a book about the women of the observatory, Dava So Bell described how Fleming and the other women would handle these photos.
She removed each glass plate from its Kraft paper sleeve without getting a single fingerprint on either of the eight by 10 inch surfaces.
The trick was to hold the fragile packet by its side edges between her palm’s set, the bottom open end of the envelope on the especially designed stand and then ease the paper up and off without letting go off the plate, as though undressing a baby.
Making sure the emotion side faced her, she released her grip and let the glass settle into place.
The wooden stand held the plate in a picture frame, tilted at a 45 degree angle a mirror fixed to the flat base caught daylight from the computing rooms, big windows and directed illumination up through the glass.

[55:27] Williamina, Fleming and the other women at the observatory would hunch over the glass plates with magnifying glasses to see the tiny spectral streaks, quickly computing the amount of hydrogen.
The spectrum revealed they would classify the stars based on a system Fleming had developed and record the position of the star in the sky.

[55:46] Despite discovering the existence of white dwarf stars cataloguing tens of thousands of new stars and dozens of nebula I, including the Horsehead Nebula, Williamina herself treated her daily work as being utterly routine.

[56:01] From day to day.
My duties at the observatory or so nearly alike that there will be but little to describe outside ordinary routine work of measurement, examination of photographs and work involved in the reduction of these observations.
In the Astro photographic building of the observatory, 12 women, including myself, are engaged in the care of the photographs, identification, examination and measurement off them.
Reduction of these measurements and preparation of the results for the printer.

[56:30] The measurements made with the Meridian for Tom Attar’s Air, also reduced and prepared for publication in this department of the observatory.
What Williamina and the women of Harvard treated as a routine day in the office would have been astounding to most men of their era.
At the time, conventional wisdom held that women were physically and emotionally unsuited to higher education or work in intellectual fields.
Just a few years before, Harvard Professor Edward Clark wrote about the dangers of educating girls in his 18 73 book, Sex in Education.
Quoting Dr Fisher, he said, a certain proportion of girls are apt to be quick, brilliant, ambitious and persistent at study and need not stimulation but repression,
for the sake of a temporary reputation for scholarship, they risk their health at the most susceptible period of their lives and break down after the excitement of a school life has passed away.

[57:32] The fact which Dr Fischer alludes to that many girls breakdown not during but after the excitement of school or college life is an important one and is apt to be overlooked.
The process by which the development of the reproductive system is arrested or degeneration of the brain and nerve tissue, said it going is an insidious one,
at its beginning, and for a long time after it is well on its progress.
It would not be recognized by the superficial observer.
A class of girls might and often do graduate from our schools, higher seminaries and colleges that appear to be well and strong at the time of their graduation, but whose development has already been checked and whose health is on the verge of giving away.

[58:20] What Dr Fisher fails to consider is that these women might simply be bored.

[58:26] Nevertheless, the women of the Harvard Observatory persisted in their work and somehow managed to avoid complete physical or mental breakdown.
In fact, the university went out of its way to hire women for work in the observatory.
As word of their success spread, other observatories around the country began to hire women as well.
However, this preference for women had nothing to do with their innate intellectual abilities and everything to do with the fact that they could be paid about half the salary of a male employees.
The director of the Yale Observatory was very frank about this, saying, I am thoroughly in favor of employing women as measurers and computers.
Not only are women available at smaller salaries than our men, but for the routine work, they have important advantages.
Men are more likely to grow impatient after the novelty of the work has worn off, and would be harder to retain for that reason.

[59:24] Despite her lifelong enthusiasm for the work, Williamina Fleming always harbored a secret resentment of the pay gap for women,
right up through my own mother’s generation that pay gap was justified by saying that a man should be paid more for the same work because he would have a family to support,
as a single woman.
That logic didn’t apply to Meena Fleming.
She had a family to support a child attending in my tea, ah, home to pay for.
And she still made less than the girls who worked in the textile mills and Lowell, much lesser male colleagues in astronomy.
Her private diaries are full of comments and complaints about the pay gap, like this one from March 12th 1900.

[1:00:04] I had some conversation with the director regarding women’s salaries. He seems to think that no work is too much or too hard for me, no matter what the responsibility or how long the hours.
But let me raise the question of salary. And I immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand.
If he would only take some step to find out how much he is mistaken in regard to this, he would learn a few facts that would open his eyes and set him thinking.

[1:00:32] Sometimes I feel tempted to give up and let him try someone else or some of the men to do my work in orderto have him find out what he is getting for $1500 a year for me, compared with 2500 from some of the other assistance.
Does he ever think that I have a home to keep in a family to take care of as well as the men?
But I suppose a woman has no claim to such comforts, and this is considered an enlightened age.
I cannot make my salary meet my present expenses with Edward in the institute and still another year there ahead of him.
The director expects me to work from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m.
Although my time called for seven hours a day, and I feel almost on the verge of breaking down.
There is a great pressure of work, certainly. But why throw so much of it on me and pay me in such small proportion to the others who come and go and take things easy?
Given that there’s a 20% pig up in my field, I can certainly sympathize.

[1:01:27] The disadvantage is that women faced in the field of astronomy didn’t stop more women from flocking to the Harvard Observatory.
11 years after Williamina Fleming began working as a computer, Ah, woman, 11 years her junior joined the team.
In many ways, Henrietta Swan Leavitt represented a new generation of women among the Harvard computers,
rather than stumbling into astronomy after applying for a job in menial clerical work, Leavitt came to the observatory in hopes of earning credit toward a graduate degree from Harvard,
Leavitt grew up in Lancaster, Massachusetts, before attending Oberlin College and eventually getting her bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in 18 92 where she was able to take a single astronomy course,
with a college degree and an interest in astronomy, Henrietta Swan Leavitt was a perfect candidate for what was becoming known as Pickering’s harem of astronomical computers.
Better still, at least in the eyes of Edward Charles Pickering was the fact that she came from a wealthy family and didn’t need to be paid for her work.

[1:02:34] Pickering assigned Henrietta Swan Leavitt to study variable stars, which sometimes appear brighter and sometimes appear dimmer To compare their intensity. She would often overlay one glass plate atop another to see how the brightness changed over time.
Within a few years, she made a discovery that would change how we understand our universe forever.
She published her findings in a 1908 edition of the Annals of Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College,
and they were published under her own name, though in a 1912 journal article that confirmed her findings and promoted them to the wider scientific world,
Pickering put his own name on top and said merely that the supporting data had been prepared by Ms Leavitt.

[1:03:21] We’re not really smart enough with scientific terminology to figure out what Leavitt was saying in her 19 await paper.
So luckily, Pickering dumbed it down a bit in the 1912 version that he put his name on saying, a remarkable relation between the brightness of these variables and the length of their periods will be noticed in a Che 60.
Number four attention was called to the fact that the brighter variables have the longer periods.
But at that time it was felt that the number was too small to warrant the drawing of general conclusions.
The periods of eight additional variables which have been determined since that time, however, conform to the same law.

[1:03:58] Henrietta Swan Leavitt had determined that the length of a selfie ID variable stars pulsation was directly correlated with its brightness.
This means that you can tell how far away a faintly pulsing star is based on how long the pulse lasts.
This correlation became known as Leavitt slaw, and it allowed astronomers to accurately determine how faraway, distant stars actually are.
For the first time in 1920 astronomers held a great debate at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History over the nature of the universe.
One side argued that the sun was the center of the universe in all the distant Galaxies and nebulae that astronomers observed were structures in the outer part of our own solar system.
The other side argued that these structures were actually different independent Galaxies similar to our own, and that the universe was much larger than anyone had previously imagined.
Leavitt slaw allowed astronomers to calculate the true distance to some of these distant Galaxies, so the entire scientific model of the universe was revised.
Just a few years later, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble used Leavitt slow to measure the distance between Galaxies and determined that the universe was expanding.

[1:05:08] Hubble recognize the magnitude of Henrietta Swan love. It’s contributions to astronomy, often commenting that she should have received a Nobel Prize.
In fact, she came close to doing so.
According to Air and Space magazine Leavitt CE discovery was so important that in 1924 Goulston Mittag Leffler of the Swedish Academy of Sciences tried to nominate her for the Nobel Prize.
Unfortunately, Henrietta died of cancer three years before this, and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.
A young woman with one of the greatest names we’ve ever read, joined the Harvard Observatory team in 18 96.
Unlike the previous generation of Harvard computers, when Annie Jump Cannon arrived at the observatory, she was already an expert in astronomy and photography.
After Annie lost her hearing at a young age, perhaps from scarlet fever, she spent many nights in a home observatory with her mother from the attic windows of their home near Dover, Delaware.
The two would stay up late at night, watching the stars, using an old astronomy textbook toe, identify what they observed.
Annie Jump Cannon at first attended Wesley College in Delaware, but was soon encouraged to transfer toe Wellesley so that she could have access to a more challenging curriculum.

[1:06:26] She studied physics under Sarah Francis Witting, one of the Onley women physicist in the nation.
At that time, her interest in astronomy deepened, and she excelled in her studies in 18 84 and he graduated as valedictorian of her class with a bachelor’s degree in physics,
because she was young and unmarried and our society could hardly imagine any other path with her.
She then moved back to Delaware At some point, Cannon developed an interest in photography,
she toward Europe in 18 92 and the photo she took with her Blair camera, where later published in a book titled In the Footsteps of Columbus.
The Blair company distributed the book at the 18 93 World’s Fair to promote the quality images that their cameras could produce.
So it seems that Anne was a pretty decent photographer.
After her mother died in 18 94 and he began looking beyond her childhood home again.
She contacted Professor Waiting at Wellesley, and Professor Winning, hired her as a junior physics instructor.
Cannon taught, took graduate level physics classes and began studying spectroscopic photography.
She soon began taking astronomy courses at Radcliffe, which got her access to the Harvard Observatory.
In 18 96 Edward Pickering hired her to work on the team that was classifying and cataloging the stars.

[1:07:53] She was frighteningly good at it. In her career, Annie Jump Cannon catalogued over 350,000 stars, and people said that she remembered all of them when somebody would ask about a star she had worked on.
She immediately knew the stars type the reference number for the photographic plate it was on and which quadrant of the photo it was in very quickly.
After joining the observatory team, she realized that the classifications system developed by Williamina Fleming and a woman named Antonia Murray was woefully inadequate.

[1:08:24] Based on the ions president, a star’s spectrum, she would classify them as an O B A, f, g, K, or M type star.

[1:08:36] Although it has been extended to include some star types that hadn’t yet been discovered then The classifications system, developed by Annie Jump Cannon in the 18 nineties, is still the standard by which astronomers around the world categorize stars.
Astronomy students learn its classes with the pneumonic device. Oh, be a fine girl Kissed me Cannons Career was right at the cusp between two eras.
Women who followed her would be recognized, his true astronomers while the women who came before her were dismissed as menial computers, as Aaron Space magazine put it.
Though Cannon and Leavitt CE work was fundamental to astronomical research in the early 20th century, they were still limited by their role as computers.
Computers reduce data but did not create the data nor interpret their results.

[1:09:25] Williamina. Fleming had been named as curator of astronomical photographs at Harvard, but before her death in 1911 she received few other honors or awards to recognize her groundbreaking work.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was considered for a Nobel Prize and was a member of both the American Astronomical and Astrophysical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
but received no awards during life for her discovery that literally changed mankind’s understanding of the universe.
Edward Pickering, on the other hand, got plenty of awards before his death. In 1919 he was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and the vault’s prize of the French Academy of Sciences.
The Henry Draper Metal from the National Academy of Sciences. Ah pre You’ll Johnson, the highest award of the society Astronomic Difference and the Bruce Medal for Outstanding Lifetime contributions to astronomy.
Not bad for essentially putting your name on someone else’s work.

[1:10:26] After Fleming’s death, Annie Jump Cannon took over US Harvard’s curator of astronomical photographs to mark this passing of the torch, Cannon wrote an obituary for Williamina Fleming, saying industrious by nature.
She was seldom idle and long years of observatory work, never unfit id her for the domestic side of life, as much at home with the needle as with the magnifying eyepiece.
She could make a dainty bag, exquisitely sewed or dress a doll in complete Scott Ceylan costume.
She was never too tired to welcome her friends at her home or at the observatory with that quality of human sympathy, which is sometimes lacking among women engaged in scientific pursuits.
Her bright face, her attractive manner and her cheery greeting with its charming Scotch accent will long be remembered by even the most casual visitors to the Harvard College Observatory.

[1:11:24] Fleming’s obituary from the Royal Astronomical Society followed in the same vein,
as an astronomer, Mrs Fleming was somewhat exceptional and being a woman, and in putting her work alongside that of others, it would be unjust not to remember that she left her heavy daily labors at the observatory,
toe undertake on her return home.
Those household cares of which a man usually expects to be relieved.

[1:11:51] She was fully equal to the double task as those who have had the good fortune to be her guests can testify.
And it is perhaps worthy of record as indicating how lightly the double burden sat on her, that she yielded to none in her enjoyment of a football match, especially a match between Harvard and Yale.

[1:12:10] And they described one of her discoveries as an achievement bordering on the marvelous.

[1:12:17] Cannon earned a long list of awards in her own right and completed a master’s degree in astronomy from Wellesley.
But she was never granted a phD and the recognition that would come with being a real astronomer.
She became the first woman to be awarded the Henry Draper Metal for investigations in astronomical physics and the first woman elected as an officer of the American Astronomical Society.
She received honorary doctorates from Oxford and a Dutch university.
She won the Ellen Richards Prize from the Association to Aid Scientific Research by Women and in 1929 was named one of the greatest living American women by the League of Women Voters.
In 1934 she established the Annie Jump Cannon Award, which recognizes American women who make distinguished contributions to astronomy, and the first would go to her protege.
In the meantime, a California pioneer became one of the first American women to earn a doctorate in astronomy and the gravitas that comes with it.
Phoebe Waterman did her phD work at Berkeley and wrote a dissertation testing whether Annie Jump Cannon’s classifications system for stars would hold true for a newly discovered type of hot stars.
It did as she was awarded her doctor in 1913.

[1:13:38] Back at Harvard, Ah, young Englishwoman named Cecilia Payne and rolled it a graduate astronomy program at Radcliffe and began working under Anne Cannon at the observatory.
Her 1925 doctoral dissertation further refined cannons classifications system, and she made the breakthrough discovery that stars are mostly made up of hydrogen and helium rather than iron, oxygen and silicon.
Like the Earth, astronomer Otto Struve would later describe her work as the most brilliant phD thesis ever written in astronomy.
Aaron Space magazine describes what happened when pain shared her work with the world and specifically with a man who was considered a leader in the field.

[1:14:19] Pain Center thesis to Henry Norris Russell of Princeton, a leading expert on stars who rejected her conclusions, admitting to an abundance of hydrogen would have required a full rethinking of the theory of how stars work.
Ah, conclusion, much too radical for a phD student to make pain changed her conclusion to highlight the similarities between the ratios of the elements in the Spectra and in the Earth’s crust rather than focus on the abundance of hydrogen and helium.

[1:14:47] During the next four years, however, evidence in favor of pains findings began piling up.
Finally, in 1929 Russell admitted that her findings were correct, writing his own paper that convinced astronomers everywhere of this monumental change.
Again, a man basically put his name on a brilliant female. Astronomers work Cecilia Payne, later Cecilia Payne. GE Passion spent her entire career at Harvard Observatory.
She worked closely with Annie Jump Cannon until Cannon passed away in 1941 receiving the inaugural Annie Jake Cannon Award in 1934.
At the time, her only title was assistant to the observatory director.
In 1945 she was given the official title of astronomer, then in 1956 she became the first woman to be promoted to a full professorship at Harvard School of Arts and Sciences.
Later, she would be the first woman to chair a department at Harvard so we can draw a straight line from the Scotch made Williamina Fleming to Professor Cecilia Payne, Compassion.

[1:15:58] Fleming and Henrietta Swan.
Leavitt made significant contributions to astronomy but had no title or recognition.
Annie Jump Cannon got the recognition, but never the title or degree.
And finally, Cecilia Payne would throw the door wide open, educating and inspiring the next generation of astronomers of both sexes.
Although Annie Jump Cannon and later generations of women were able to publish their work and get credit for their discoveries, Williamina flooding and the early pioneers in the field were mostly forgotten by history.
For a long time, Fleming’s discoveries were published in scientific journals and articles attributed to Edward Charles Pickering.
Sometimes those articles would mention Williamina is contributions, but often they would not.
A team of archivists at Harvard is trying to change all that.
While digitally scanning glass plate photographs taken at the Harvard Observatory between the 18 eighties in the 19 twenties, Lindsey Smith is all found some long forgotten boxes.
Inside were hundreds of notebooks kept by the human computers of Harvard during the early days of spectrographic astronomy.
They contain calculations, data, tables and notes about star classifications and new discoveries.

[1:17:15] So far, the team has been able to cross reference the initials on the glass plates and notebooks and identify the names of 130 women who worked at the observatory.
Many were computers, somewhere assistance and a handful with wives of male astronomers who went to work at the observatory to help with their husbands. Research.
For decades, the legacy of this work has been forgotten in dusty boxes in the Harvard basement.
But today you can help reestablish the legacy of these extraordinary women.
As awareness of these priceless primary source documents spread, the efforts to preserve and digitize them became a joint effort between the Harvard Library, the Smithsonian and NASA.
Known as Project Phaedra, Project Fader is appropriately named for a Greek goddess, and it happens to also stand for preserving Harvard’s early data and research and astronomy.

[1:18:07] Now that the Harvard Library has scanned the notebook Smith Souls Team found the Smithsonian has put them online, is a crowdsourced transcription project.
Volunteers like you can go to the project site, spend a few minutes learning how to transcribe data tables, star charts and sketches, then start transcribing pages.
Another volunteer will check your work than experts from the Smithsonian will validate it.
The project is expected to take years to complete. When it’s finished, the scientific data collected by the women of the Harvard Observatory will be searchable in the Harvard catalog, the NASA Astrophysics data system and the Smithsonian Transcription Center.
Harvard head librarian Dina Boo Quinn says You’ll be able to do a full text search of this research.
If you search for Williamina Fleming, you’re not going to just find a mention of her in a publication where she wasn’t the author of her work.
You’re going to find her work.
I think it’s only fitting to give Annie Jump Cannon The last word in this week’s episode,
she gave one of her last interviews with World War Two, already raging in Europe and the US on the brink of entering her advice, seems equally valid today.
In these days of great trouble and unrest, it is good to have something outside our own planet, something fine and distant and comforting to troubled minds.
Let people look to the stars for comfort.

[1:19:34] That about wraps it up for this week to learn more about the human computers of Harvard or Boston. Standard time. Check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 158 We’ll have tons of photos and sources to help you make sense of both stories.
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[1:20:33] Music.