The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [62]
“The St. Louis Globe-Democrat was our chief contact with the outside world,” recalled Shapley. That may be why, at the age of fifteen, he became a reporter for the Daily Sun in Chanute, Kansas, a rough-and-tumble oil town about sixty miles northwest of his family's homestead. He later moved back to Missouri to work on the police beat for the Joplin Times. All the while he spent his free time reading in the local libraries, for Shapley's ambition right from the start was to save enough money to go to college. He eventually applied to the local high school, in order to work toward the diploma he vitally needed to matriculate, but, refused admission due to his meager educational record, he paid out of his own pocket to catch up on his academics at a collegiate prep school. Finishing up in 1907, at the age of twenty-one, he at last qualified for admission to the University of Missouri, just as his schoolteacher mother had always desired.
Given his years of experience reporting on midwestern mishaps, Shapley had always intended to major in journalism, but upon arriving on campus he discovered that the promised opening of the university's School of Journalism had been delayed. “So there I was,” said Shapley later in life, “all dressed up for a university education and nowhere to go. ‘I'll show them’ must have been my feeling. I opened the catalogue of courses and got a further humiliation. The very first course offered was a-r-c-h-a-e-o-l-o-g-y, and I couldn't pronounce it! … I turned over a page and saw a-s-t-r-o-n-o-m-y; I could pronounce that—and here I am!” Shapley, a lover of tall tales since he was a child, was just joking around. He actually was in need of a job, and an offer from Frederick Seares, head of the university's astronomy department, to work for him at 35 cents an hour was likely the deciding factor. In whatever way Shapley came to major in astronomy, the choice suited him to a tee. Seares was mightily impressed by the former reporter, especially the fact, as he put it, that Shapley “thinks about what he is doing.” Within two years Seares had Shapley teaching the introductory astronomy course. Although starting out with little training in physics and mathematics, Shapley ended up in 1910 graduating with honors.
Shapley spent another year at Missouri to obtain his master's degree and chose to go to Princeton for his PhD when he won one of its distinguished fellowships. One of his recommenders had warned Princeton officials to accept this rising star before their competitors had a chance to steal him away. There in the idyllic midlands of New Jersey, under the guidance of Henry Norris Russell, the eminent astronomer and theoretician, Shapley specialized in eclipsing binaries—two stars positioned in such a way that, as they circle, one periodically passes in front of the other when viewed from Earth, causing the binary's light to dim for a while and then rise back. Shapley became a whiz in handling a slide rule and consulting mathematical tables to compute the stars' orbits, as well as their densities and size, Russell's special area of interest. Such work was immensely valuable in confirming the wide range of stellar types, including the existence of giant stars.
Young Harlow Shapley (Photo by Bachrach,
courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
It was an odd pairing of adviser and advisee: Russell, with his stiff and aristocratic demeanor, the son of a Long Island clergyman, coupled with the “wild Missourian” with the round face and farmboy haircut, who once attended two New York City theater performances in one day and judged the experience as “worse than log tables.” But they came to appreciate each other's professional expertise and industriousness. According to Russell's biographer David DeVorkin, the two were often seen strolling the campus together, with Russell using “his