The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [43]
Slipher and Lowell were an intriguing mesh of personalities, like a harmony created from two different notes. Flamboyant, aggressive, and driven in his passions, Lowell hated to share the spotlight, especially when it came to announcing a discovery made at his observatory. Slipher was fortunately Lowell's opposite in character, a man who, it was said, “kept himself well insulated from public view and rarely attended even scientific meetings.” He was a peacekeeper at heart and knew it wasn't wise to steal Lowell's thunder. More than that, he didn't want to. An unassuming and dignified man who always wore a suit and tie to work when not observing, Slipher was markedly deliberate and cautious in his pronouncements. A picture of him at the observatory, fresh from the Midwest, reveals a handsome, dark-haired lad with a gaze and smile like that of Mona Lisa. He preferred to correspond with his peers rather than travel and often had others present his findings. Director and underling, consequently, got along famously.
Young Vesto Slipher (Lowell Observatory Archives)
Frequently away from the observatory, either traveling or taking care of business in Boston, Lowell remained in contact with Slipher via a steady stream of letters and telegrams. While Slipher stood in as the observatory's effective director, Lowell offered his pronouncements from afar on matters astronomical (“Don't observe sun much. It hurts lenses”), administrative (“Permit nobody whatever in observatory office”), and personal (“Will you kindly see if shredded wheat biscuit are to be got at Haychaff”). They consulted each other on hires, equipment, budgets, and even vegetables. Lowell doted on his observatory garden and insisted on news of its condition whenever he was away. “How fare the squashes?” asked Lowell one year as fall harvest approached. His letter the following week closed with, “My regards to the squashes.” And finally, “You may when the squashes ripen send me one by express.”
Slipher did not respond. “Why haven't I received squashes? Express at once if possible,” Lowell anxiously telegraphed right after Christmas. Slipher reluctantly had to answer that the poor gourds, alas, had shriveled up and died.
All was forgiven, though, by next spring. “Thank you for taking so much pains with the garden! Just keep on planting and you will get something,” wrote Lowell. Slipher did; by July he was sending Lowell his latest bounty. “Your vegetables came all right and delighted me hugely,” replied Lowell. More were sent in October.
As with his gardening, Slipher made progress on the spectrograph as well, eventually becoming a virtuoso at its operation. He first used it to verify the rotation periods of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. Next was Venus. The planets in the solar system were always Lowell's first priority. Slipher was then directed to use the instrument to analyze planetary atmospheres, an assignment that got him into the thick of Lowell's battles with the astronomical community when he tried to measure whether water vapor was present in the Martian air. Slipher believed he had detected a slight signal, which Lowell immediately publicized as boosting his vision of a watery Mars. But Lick astronomer W. W. Campbell, after conducting the same observation, saw no sign at all of water vapor in the red planet's atmosphere.
Despite the disagreement, Slipher was gaining confidence and improving the sensitivity of the spectrograph through trying out different kinds of prisms and photographic plates. By 1909 he was able to confirm that some gas existed in the seemingly empty space between the stars, a triumph that later won praise from astronomers around the world. These pursuits eventually led Slipher to his greatest discovery of all, an unanticipated revelation that involved the spiral nebulae.