ABBREVIATED TIMELINE
c. 1879- Pickering hires a Scottish housemaid, Williamina Fleming, to care for the observatory house, where the directors traditionally live. At the time, Fleming was pregnant and her husband had abandoned her.
1881- Impressed with Fleming’s intelligence, Pickering hires her as a part-time computer at the observatory. Computer Nettie A. Farrar trains her until Farrar leaves to get married in 1885. Fleming is soon charged with the management of the women computers, the organization of the Henry Draper Memorial program and the publication of the Annals. Fleming also develops the Henry Draper Catalogue of spectral classification with Pickering. She works at the observatory for over 30 years.
1896- Annie Jump Cannon begins volunteering at the Observatory while taking graduate classes at Radcliffe. She is mostly deaf due to contracting scarlet fever after finishing college at Wellesley. Cannon is eventually hired as an official computer. She studies stellar spectra and upgrades Fleming’s stellar classification system.
1899- Williamina Fleming is appointed as the first Curator of Astronomical Photographs, making her the first woman to hold an official title at the observatory, and at Harvard University at large. She holds the post until she dies in 1911.
WILLIAMINA FLEMING
Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming (May 15, 1857 – May 21, 1911) was a Scottish-American astronomer. During her career, she helped develop a common designation system for stars and cataloged thousands of stars and other astronomical phenomena. Among several career achievements that advanced astronomy Fleming is noted for her discovery of the Horsehead Nebula in 1888.
After she and her child were abandoned by James Fleming, she worked as a maid in the home of Professor Edward Charles Pickering, who was director of the Harvard College Observatory (HCO). The story was told that Pickering was often frustrated with the performance of the (all-male) "computers" at the observatory and, reportedly, would complain loudly: "My Scottish maid could do better!"
In 1881 Pickering hired Fleming to join the HCO and taught her how to analyze stellar spectra; she was the first of an all-women cadre of human "computers" created by Pickering at HCO. Soon she devised a system for classifying stars according to the relative amount of hydrogen observed in their spectra. (Stars showing hydrogen as the most abundant element were classified A; those of hydrogen as the second-most abundant element, B; and so on.) Later, Annie Jump Cannon developed an improved classification system based upon the surface temperature of stars.
In 1886 Fleming was placed in charge of the dozens of women hired to compute mathematical classifications and edit the observatory's publications. In 1899, she was made Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard, and in 1906, she was made an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, the first American woman to be so honored. Soon after she was appointed honorary fellow in astronomy of Wellesley College. Shortly before her death the Astronomical Society of Mexico[es] awarded her the Guadalupe Almendaro medal for her discovery of new stars. She published A Photographic Study of Variable Stars (1907). She published her discovery of white dwarfs (1910). Also she published Spectra and Photographic Magnitudes of Stars in Standard Regions (1911).
HELPFUL LINKS:
DUNDEE, UNITED KINGDOM (Scotland) -- Where Williamina was born in 1857.