Shapley Reign Spurs Observatory To Lead World in Research

North of the Yard and West of the Cliffe, operating in both hemispheres and recognized internationally, the Harvard Observatory is locally one of the least known fixtures of the University.

Five pioneering directors have been responsible for the Observatory's 113 years of success. But it has been the present Director, Harlow Shapley, Paine Professor of Astronomy, who has outshadowed them all by his work in the last 31 years.

Shapley sometimes reterred to as the modern Copernicus, has not only continued the work of his predecessors in concentrating on vast classification projects, but he constantly furthered individual research throughout his term here.

Shapley's tinest contribution to science was the proof that the Milky Way galaxy is enormously Larger than had previously been thought probable. From this he derived the facts that the solar system is actually at the fringe of the stellar system.

It has not been only individually that Shapley has excelled. When he retires next year he can look back on several major improvements which he has overseen and which have given the Department its important international position.

With his staff Shapley has developed the foremost Graduate School of Astronomy in the country which can boast one-third of the nation's Ph.D.'s over the last twenty years. He has seen the number of Harvard-operated observatories increased from two to eight. His staff has invaded the continent of Africa. He has increased the number of working personnel four times over what it was when he came to Harvard in 1921. He has extended the Department's areas of research into the most numerous and varied phases of current inquiries.

Above all else, he has enticed men from all over the world to the Observatory to gain the wealth of catalogued observation as well as the understanding of new methods and equipment, to contribute and to learn, to solve the questions of the skies that are not local to one continent or one people, but universal.

The Harvard Observatory was originally founded as a Research Institute in Astronomy. This continued until 1925, when Shapley established a number of courses in astronomy on the graduate level. Now the observatory has twenty students who are studying for their doctorates.

Shapley attributes much of the Graduate School's expansion to his able assistants. These include Bart J. Bok, Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy and Associate Director of the Observatory; Cecilia P. Gaposchkin, researcher in Astronomy, Donald H. Menzel, professor of Astrophysics and Associate Director for Solar Research; and Fred L. Whipple, professor of Astronomy.

There is one catch to the Department's excellent instruction. Its own graduates currently working at Berkeley, California, and the California Institute of Technology, as well as Michigan, Princeton, and Indiana are currently threatening Harvard's top position.

The upswing of the younger schools does not worry University astronomers. These schools will soon be able to take up much of the teaching duties that have in the past, been confined to Harvard. This will leave the leading men more time in which to do their research. They are hoping in the future to have only 12 to 15 graduate students each year--a more efficient operating number.

Present Status of Observatory

The Observatory will continue to be America's nerve center for sorting international astronomy developments and passing on recent events to the world at large. Harvard Announcement Cards give detailed facts concerning news developments to subscribing obsevatories and individuals. Telegraph and cable relay to both North and South America with the most significant immediate results. Copenhagen, Denmark, is the clearing house of the Eastern Hemisphere.

Publications also issue with great regularity from the Observatory. Volumes of the Annals of the Observatory along with hundreds of treatises in the circulars, bulletins, and reprints form Harvard's academic contributions. In addition there are the Harvard Observatory Monographs, and the Harvard Books on Astronomy. Sky and Telescope, a magazine, circulated internationally, is also published here.

All Over the World

The only outside station which the Observatory owned in 1921 was a post 8000 feet up in the Andes, at Arequipa, Peru. This one was abandoned because of long periods of cloudy weather. The Astronomy Department now operates from the central observatory on Summer House Hill on Concord Avenue. It also has a subsidiary station at Agassia (Dormerly Oak Ridge station) in Massachusetts two high altitude sites in Colorado, three stations in New Mexico, and at the Boyden station on Harvard Kopje on the high veldt of interior South Africa.

The most recent project of the Observatory in connection with international activities is the 61-inch telescope operated in Africa. Named the ADH and situated at Boyden station, it is an adventure in international co-operation in astronomy. It represents the best in combined planning of astronomers at three observatories: Armagh in North Ireland, Dunsink in Eire, and Harvard.

Fields Explored

There are two ways of working with telescopes, and two main areas of astronomical research. Many of the large observatories base their work on a few of the very large instruments, with numerous accessories. They place emphasis on getting the utmost out of their equipment.

The Observatory's work is chiefly of the second type, however, which is of equal importance and supplements the other work. The instrumental equipment used is of average or even small size, built to emphasize statistical surveys and long range cataloguing program. Although the Observatory has telescopes ranging over sixty inches, the most important work has been accomplished with telescope with lens apertures between eight and twenty-four inches.

The Harvard Observatory has dipped into many qualitative astronomical problems. It is known for research on solar phenomena, the galaxies and nebulae, the Milky Way, meteors and comets, stellar spectra, variable star astronomy, and globular clusters, and it specializen in astrophysics, the science that deals with the constitution of the stellar bodies.

Historical Data

The Harvard College observatory was opened in 1839 with the establishment of a few small instruments in the Data House in Quincy Square. William Cranch Bond, the first Astronomical Observer of the College struggled for a while with insufficient equipment.

While the work carried on at Dana House was confined to magnetic and meteorological observations, the work at the site of the present Cambridge Observatory was what set the Department on the road to its brilliant astronomical research.

Six acres of land on which it now rises remain of the original grounds. Before the coming of the Comet of 1843 the site, on Summer House Hill, just west of Radcliffe dorms, was purchased with the idea of erecting a better building when sufficient funds were available.

Public spirited Bostonians rescued the embryonic Observatory from obscurity, however. In March 1843, the appearance of a bright daylight comet aroused popular interest so that the present Observatory has often been spoken of as being "born of a comet." Funds were raised for a telescope that was to be second to none than operating.

Original Contributors

Contributors to the original telescope and its housing ranged from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to the Revere Copper Company. The lenses for the first telescope then called the Great Refractor, came from Munich in 1846 and 1847 and by June, 1847, the telescope was in use. A transit circle then came from London and the first $100,000 endowment--was received from the Phillips Fund shortly afterwards.

This Great Refractor with which Harvard began its astronomic history was then the equal of the world's largest telescope. It still stands on Observatory Hill with its fine lenses, but pictorially speaking its "mounting is outmoded, its drive antiquated and the dome squeaks with age when disturbed."

The first work that Director Bond undertook, which was continued by his son and successor, Professor George P. Bond was an extensive series of zone observations, elaborate drawings of the planet Saturn, and work on the comet of 1858, and on the nebula in Orion. He and his son also worked to determine terrestrial longitudes for the United States Coast Survey. Cambridge is still recognized as the "Birthplace of American Longitudes."

When Professor Joseph Winlock succeeded the second Bond as the Observatory director in 1866, the pressing need for new equipment resulted in the gift of a spectroscope and meridian circle from friends of the College.

By the end of Winlock's career the first stage in the Observatory's development was completed. The second stage first stage in the Observatory's development was completed. The second stage which lasted up until the age or Shapley, was a time of valuable phometric and photographic studies, extending from 1876 to 1921.

Edward C. Pickering, professor of Astronomy, was the central figure after 1876. He entered with a new attack on astronomy, applying his background as a physicist to the construction of equipment capable of measuring the light of the various stars to determine their magnitudes. He began the photographic survey of the skies, and his work was so extensive that much of it has been used to solve fundamental problems of today.

It was during Pickering's forty two-year reign that Harvard began establishing its distant posts. Picketing set out in search of conditions of atmosphere most favorable in "respect to clearness steadiness, and equability of temperature." He experimented at stations between 6,000 and 14,000 feet in the Rockies in Colorado. Performing work at the higher attitude ever attempted including Pike's peak.

It was Pickering that first sent the Harvard astronomers south of the border. His assistants were not content with the Rockies, but moved to the Peruvian Andes where they explored the entire country for a suitable post location. Their first station was at Mt. Harvard near Lima at an altitude of 6600 feet. But the station that they finally decided to use was on Arequipa, slightly above 3,000 feet. There they found perfect atmospheric conditions in the long winter nights to take photographs not possible at Cambridge. A telescope increases its power by a factor of five, when operated under these circumstances.

Pickering's Achievements

The developments recorded at the Peruvian station pushed Pickering into the limelight as one of the top astronomers in the world. A newspaper of the day stated that. "His discoveries will add another laurel to his great institution."

In his report given in March 1915, Pickering stated. "The Observatory is not known chiefly for the size of its telescopes or for the beauty of its buildings, but the addition it has made to the sum of human knowledge in its particular department of science has been equaled by no other institution of its kind in the United States and by few in the world. Our equipment is the best." Throughout Pickering's time the study of the physical properties of the stars was paramount.

A separate chapter in the annals of the institution is the monumental work done by Miss Annle J. Cannon in compiling the Henry Draper Catalogue. She worked through the terms of both Pickering and Shapley. Her classification of all the stars in the sky down to the eighth magnitude was one of the largest investigations ever conducted in this or any other observatory.

Over 225,000 stars were listed in the nine volumes of the Annals containing her reports the exhausting work lasting from 1911 to 1924. She well deserved the title of the greatest woman astronomer in the world.

Later Miss Cannon published additional classifications of 50,000 faint stars. Much of her work is still stored in the relatively new astrophysical building which now houses the half million phtographs that have accumulated throughout the years.

During the last thirty odd years under Shapley's administration, the Observatory has made its greatest strides forward. It was he who established the Agassiz Station at Harvard, the transfer of the southern station from Peru to South Africa, and with the collaboration of Menzel, the installation at Climax, Colorado. The new headquarters building in Cambridge was built under his direction, and provides fireproof housing for the nearly half million plates which contain Harvard's history of the sky for the past sixty years.

Branch Stations

The Agassiz Oak Ride station was established in 1932 in the midst of 40 acres of heavily wooded land in Harvard township, 25 miles Northeast of Cambridge. It holds many of the instruments removed from Summer House Hill when the northward spread of the city rendered the old location too poor for optimum conditions for astronomical observations. This station contains a 16 inch doublet, a 24 inch reflector, and a 61 inch telescope, the largest east of Ohio. The "Ridge" is now headquarters for Harvard's surveys of the Northern skies. The Harvard seismographic equipment is also at the Agassiz Oak Ridge station along with a dozen astronomical telescopes and patrol cameras. There is no heat in the telescope buildings at the stations, and observers freeze in the winter when the steep roofs slide back and the cameras go into action. The large lenses are too sensitive to allow for quick temperature changes, and therefore the temperature of the buildings is always at the mercy of the weather. Often staff members report for work dressed in heavy furs to survive the bitter nights.

Down in Harvard Chops in Orange Free State, eight telescopes cover the entire southern heaven and visible parts of the northern sky. The equipment currently contained there was transferred from the Peruvian station when it closed down in 1926, and is supplemented by modern material and the ADH instrument.

With the biggest station in the East and one of the oldest in the South, Harvard would not be complete without boasting the highest observatory in the world. This is at Climax, Colorado, at an elevation of 11,520 feet. This solar station is jointly operated with the University of Colorado, and is equipped with a special telescope which completely eliminates or greatly reduces all the deficiencies of ordinary telescopes for coronal photography.

The roof of this station is directly on the Continental Divide, and the peak of the roof, uniquely conical in shape to prevent the gathering of snow, forms the water shed between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet the station sometimes pays a high price for its locations in the discomfort of its personnel.

Youngest Station

Newest of the eight observatories is the station at Sacramento Peak. New Mexico, which is administered jointly by Harvard and the U. S. Air Force. Located at an altitude of 9,200 feet and nine miles by air from Alamogordo, it will be an extremely large solar station. The site has been occupied for five years, but the station is uncompleted.

Research here is carried on with coronographs, flare photometers, and smaller equipment. The coronograph being installed this year is the largest in the world. The principal studies of this station will involve careful observations of the sun.

Shapley's Contributions

After looking at the eight Observatories and the amount of published material accumulated during his reign, Shapley can review the work with pride. Following his many years of acting as administrator, of worrying about endowments and all types of equipment, the 66 year old professor is about to become a bona fide classroom educator.

Shapley has never before taught an undergraduate class at Harvard. When he does the student body will get the chance to meet a man who is not alone a distinguished scientist, but an outstand-humanitarian as well. He will teach an upper level General Education course called Cosmography, the science which teaches the relation of the whole order of nature.

He has honorary degrees from nine American and six foreign universities and colleges, membership in fifteen foreign academies, and medals from numerous other societies and academies.

Nationally he has been president of a dozen scientific organizations, including Sigma Xi, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Involved in the charter writing of UNESCO, he has been a friend to countries entering the organization from infant beginnings and has helped some of them with their scientific works.

At the invitation of Pandit Nehru. Shapley went to India early in 1947 for the general inspection and report on astronomical observatories and other scientific institutions throughout India. This involved travels to all the large cities of India, and since that time Shapley has acted as informal advisor on scientific problems to India. He has also brought four Indian astronomers to the University.

Late in 1946 at the invitation of President Avilla Comache and President-elect Miguel Alomin. Shapley visited Mexico to receive the honors of the government for aiding scientific developments in that country since 1941.

If Shapley were to be given one chance to show what he has done for the Observatory, he would point to the representatives of seventeen different nations that were on his staff at one time.

Throughout his term, Shapley has found it difficult to raise the necessary funds for his Department. Although he has managed to raise endowments from $1,000,000 to $2,250,000 together with gifts of about $50,000 annually, Shapley still tells one story about his past difficulties.

Several years ago the daughter of the president of Colby College and her escort were walking by the spacious Observatory grounds, when a burglar jumped out of the darkness and snatched her purse containing $1.35. Shortly afterwards another man was robbed and the culprit again escaped.

When the victims complained, police examined the grounds but they found no one.

Solemnly, the director assembled his top staff: "Loyalty, gentlemen, is always appreciated. And yes, of course, the Observatory is hard up but really gentlemen really."