The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [61]
Some old habits from the Victorian era persisted, though. For dinner at the Monastery, linen cloths and napkins covered the table, with all astronomers required to wear coat and tie, which was a trial during hot weather, but they'd be barred from the dining room if they violated the dress code. Not until after World War II did this prim social atmosphere begin to crumble. Today, as soon as twilight beckons, T-shirt-clad astronomers on Mount Wilson dash off to their telescopes to glean every possible second of observing. But back then the dapper astronomers continued to eat dinner, even as it got dark, and got up to amble leisurely over to the scope only when the meal was finished.
Hale took nearly all the best Yerkes men with him to his new astronomical Shangri-la. He had a magnetic aura that drew in people and kept them in awe of him. His second in command at Mount Wilson, Walter Adams, once admitted that he stuck with Hale and astrophysics “partly because of the strong influence of Dr. Hale's remarkable personality…. A very slight change in circumstances might equally well have led me to follow the teaching of Greek as a profession.”
Others on Hale's charter staff did not have a formal education in astronomy but instead trained on the job, bringing with them valuable skills from such fields as photography and mechanical engineering. These included Ritchey and Ferdinand Ellerman, who was first hired to assist Hale at his private observatory in Chicago.
Hale eventually extended his search for employees beyond his Yerkes loyalists. When he heard about a PhD student from Princeton who was impressing everyone, he arranged to meet the young man in New York City. Harlow Shapley showed up fully prepped to discuss all the latest astronomical discoveries. Instead, the two men ended up talking about the operas Shapley had time to catch the day before. The conversation went on for a while, but then Hale abruptly remarked, “Well, I must be going.” Not one word on astronomy had passed between them—and no mention of a job. The Princeton grad assumed he had not passed muster, but to his surprise he soon received a letter from Hale. The message was all he had hoped for: “Please come to Mount Wilson.”
The Solar System Is Off Center
and Consequently Man Is Too
Upon arriving at Mount Wilson, Harlow Shapley had no immediate investigative plans, only a developing interest in variable stars. He had told his Princeton mentor, Henry Norris Russell, that he would probably work on odds and ends. But Shapley's wife, also skilled in astronomy, soon came upon an interesting set of stars while examining photos of a globular cluster. “I have looked at some cluster plates a little,” Shapley wrote Russell, “and found five new variables in the middle of a cluster … or to tell the truth my hausfrau found them but I plan to take the credit for it.” It helped him latch onto a focus; he was going to study the Milky Way's globular clusters, each a dense ball of stars that gleams like a cosmic sparkler frozen in time.
Shapley worked at Mount Wilson from 1914 until 1921, and the best research of his career was accomplished during this time. Shapley was a risk taker. As Hale later noted, “He is much more venturesome than other members of [the Mount Wilson] staff and more willing to base far-reaching conclusions on rather slender data.” Counting up his scientific publications over those seven years, Shapley was the sole author of or a contributor to some 150 notes and papers. Years earlier, none of his childhood friends would have bet on that career outcome, given that Shapley's first job was being a hard-nosed reporter, covering crime and corruption in the Midwest.
Born in 1885, Shapley and his fraternal twin brother, Horace, along with an older sister, Lillian, and a younger brother, John, grew up on a Missouri farm a few miles from the town of Nashville, on the edge of Ozark country not far from where Harry Truman, the thirty-third president, was also born