• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The connections Shapley had made at Missouri proved crucial for his next career step. Seares, his undergraduate professor, had moved to Mount Wilson in 1909 and helped open doors for Shapley to become a staff astronomer at the celebrated observatory. Soon after Hale offered the position in 1912, at a salary of $90 a month plus free board on the mountain. Shapley delayed his start date in order to do some travel in Europe and stay with Russell a bit longer to complete their “crusade” on eclipsing binaries but at last journeyed to Mount Wilson in the spring of 1914. Along the way, he stopped off in Kansas City to marry his University of Missouri sweetheart, Martha Betz, a gifted scholar and linguist he had met in a mathematics class. She took an interest in astronomy once they started dating and even helped him reduce the piles of data he had collected for his doctoral dissertation. On their honeymoon train ride out to California, they together happily computed eclipsing binary orbits. In less than a decade, Shapley had gone from fledgling newsman to professional astronomer, about to look through the eyepiece of what was then the largest telescope in the world.

Conditions at the mile-high observatory were still fairly primitive when Shapley arrived. “Just killed a 3 ft. rattlesnake with 8 rattles lying by our back door,” reported one pioneering staff member. “We had to be rugged in those days,” Shapley later recalled. “We would go up the mountain, a nine-mile hike, sometimes pushing a burro, sometimes not. The new road had not [yet] been put in.” When not on Mount Wilson, Shapley spent his time at the observatory's offices and workshops in Pasadena, a town then in the process of transforming from an agricultural community of lush citrus groves and vineyards to a winter resort town filled with flowers and wealthy visitors from the East.

A sociable fellow, Shapley forged friendships with several colleagues right away, including solar astronomer Seth Nicholson and Dutch astronomer Adriaan van Maanen, the latter of whom first arrived at Mount Wilson in 1911 as a volunteer assistant and remained on as a staff member for thirty-five years. Among these friends and colleagues, Shapley was an incorrigible raconteur. “A discussion with him was like a rousing game of ping-pong, ideas flashing back and forth, careening off at unexpected angles and often coming to earth in a breathless finish,” said Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who knew Shapley later at Harvard. An enormously vain man, Shapley also liked to be flattered and got along best with those who fawned over him. Moreover, he never forgave a slight. “A generous supporter, a stimulating companion, he could also be an implacable enemy,” added Payne-Gaposchkin.

The one person Shapley couldn't sway with his gee-whiz midwestern charm was Walter Adams, the effective leader at Mount Wilson. Hale, prone to nervous breakdowns and bouts of depression, was often gone from Mount Wilson in the 1910s. Sometimes his absences were due to war work, but often because he was recovering from his illnesses. Whenever that happened, Adams was in charge. A proper and dutiful man known for his frugal ways, Adams was so regular in his habits that staffers could “set their clocks by his comings and goings.” An inveterate pipe smoker as well, Adams forged the “Lucky Strike” trail, a shortcut from the observatory to the cigarette stand of the rustic hotel then operating nearby on the mountain. Shapley often grumbled about Adams to his friends. “I feel very sure that if I should go away from here no opportunity would be given me to return so long as Adams has the deciding voice,” Shapley once told a colleague. But the tension between them didn't seem to affect Shapley's innovative work while he was on staff.

The seed for Shapley's groundbreaking research was actually planted before he got to the mountain. While still a Princeton graduate student, Shapley had visited Harvard and there met veteran astronomer Solon Bailey, who suggested to the young man that