The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses

The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses

‍Samia Bouzid: It's 1898, and Annie Maunder, an amateur astronomer from the UK, is at a campsite outside a remote town in India, with a small group of fellow astronomers. It's just after noon, but all around her darkness is falling. The bright greens and blues of her surroundings begin to fade to gray. And then, all at once, Annie is standing in darkness, in the shadow of the moon. For months, she has painstakingly prepared for this very moment. She reaches for her camera and takes a picture.

Katie Hafner: Welcome to Lost Women of Science. I'm Katie Hafner, and today we have the story of Annie Maunder, an amateur astronomer who chased eclipses all over the world at the turn of the 20th century. We're bringing you this episode today because next week, a total solar eclipse is going to pass over North America. So we wanted to celebrate an astronomer who did some of her best science during those brief moments when the moon slid in front of the Sun. I'm here with our producer, Samia Bouzid. Hey, Samia.

Samia Bouzid: Hi Katie. 

Katie Hafner: So I remember seeing an eclipse when I was a little kid growing up in Western Massachusetts and I remember the excitement. We made these little viewing things so we wouldn't hurt our eyes. Does that sound right to you?

Samia Bouzid: Oh yeah, pinhole camera.

Katie Hafner: Pinhole camera. Anyway, clearly I'm not an expert, you are. And as I understand it, you are going to Texas to see this one that's coming up, right?

Samia Bouzid: Yes, this is going to be my first solar eclipse.

Katie Hafner: That's very exciting. And so why Texas?

Samia Bouzid: Yeah, it's a little far, because I live in Philly and the eclipse is actually passing through parts of the Northeast that aren't that far from here, but I know, you know, the drudgery that is April in the Northeast. 

Katie Hafner: Yes.

Samia Bouzid: The chances of seeing the Sun at all are not great, so I decided not to take my chances with that and try Texas. It's definitely a hike, but I think it's going to be worth it. 

Katie Hafner: Okay, so, this leads us to Annie and her trip back in—what year was it?

Samia Bouzid: 1898.

Katie Hafner: Who went all the way to India. Not just that, but the woman does this on her own dime, which gets us into this question of who was she?

Samia Bouzid: Yeah. Annie Maunder was an astronomer who was born in Northern Ireland in 1868, and as far as what we know about her childhood, she grew up in a family of very devout Protestants, also very high achievers, and at some point when she was fairly young, she just developed this absolute fascination with astronomy. She believed that the heavens, as she called them, had a story to tell, and she wanted to find out what it was. She was lucky in that when she was college age, she got a three-year scholarship to Girton College in Cambridge, and she studied math, which kind of encompassed astronomy back then. 

Katie Hafner: And she sat her exams, right?

Samia Bouzid: Yep. She sat her exams. She actually came out at the top of her class. But women weren't allowed to get degrees back then, and given the times, she just, she didn't really have prospects of getting a job as an astronomer. And then shortly after she graduated, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich started hiring what they called lady computers.

Katie Hafner: So we've done quite a bit about human computers, who were basically human calculators. 

Samia Bouzid: Yeah, it was not a glamorous position. Basically they were hiring highly qualified women to fill the lowest ranking roles at the observatory, you know, to take observations, do calculations, nothing fancy. But it was astronomy, and Annie was really excited about the chance to work as an astronomer, so she begged for a job there and in 1891, she got it.

Silvia Dalla: She was employed as a lady computer, and in fact, this is one of the first times that women were employed professionally in astronomy.

Samia Bouzid: So Katie, I talked to a pair of astrophysicists in the UK who actually worked in the same field as Annie Maunder did, and they told me a bit about her story and the context she'd been working in.

Katie Hafner: Nice! Okay.

Silvia Dalla: I'm Silvia Dalla. I'm a professor of solar physics at the University of Central Lancashire.

Lyndsay Fletcher: And I'm Lyndsay Fletcher. I am a professor of astrophysics at the University of Glasgow, but specializing, like Silvia, in solar physics.

Samia Bouzid: So Sylvia and Lyndsay are both experts on the Sun, and they're also both really interested in Annie Maunder and the history of their field.

Silvia Dalla: Her job was to take–e, every day–y, a photograph of the Sun, weather permitting, and to analyze thisthese data and record all the information connected to sunspots.

Lyndsay Fletcher: And Annie Maunder took a pay cut, an enormous pay cut, when she joined the lady computers at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. But obviously she wanted this job so much that she was prepared to live in penury to be able to do it.

Katie Hafner: Oh wow, so she was clearly really passionate about what she was doing at that time in the history of astronomy. Is that right?

Samia Bouzid: Yeah, it seems that way. And it really was an exciting time in the history of solar physics. There was still just a lot of mysteries about the Sun back then.

Lyndsay Fletcher: People really didn't know very much about the Sun at that time at all. They had only just decided–d, kind of in the middle of the 19th century–y, that the surface of the Sun was gaseous, rather than a liquid or a solid. They didn’t know what sunspots were, so they were looking at their shapes, at their motions on the surface of the Sun, you know, in a bid to try and understand what they were looking at.

Samia Bouzid: So this was definitely exciting work, but this arrangement didn't end up lasting long for Annie, and this next part of her story will sound familiar to you, Katie.

Silvia Dalla: She married Walter Maunder, who was also working at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and she had to leave her job because there was a rule in the civil service at the time that married women could not be employed.

Katie Hafner: Oh, that does sound familiar. It's the old double-bind: have a personal life, fall in love with someone, get married, but then you can't do your job.

Samia Bouzid: Yeah, and to be fair, this is a little bit of speculation because that marriage ban wouldn't technically have applied to a job like Annie's, but this is the way things were. It was typical for women to leave their jobs when they got married, and Annie did leave her position shortly before she married Walter in 1865. So...

Katie Hafner: Yeah, connect the dots. All right, and what happened after that?

Samia Bouzid: You know, weirdly enough, not that much actually changed. Annie officially left her job, but really only officially.

Silvia Dalla: In practice, she never stopped doing, doing research throughout her life. Walter was working at the Royal Observatory, so he had access to the photographs of the Sun and all the data. So together, they did a lot of research.

Katie Hafner: And she's doing all of this in her own time, getting paid nothing.

Samia Bouzid: That's right. And, I haven't even mentioned the cherry on top, Katie. When Annie married Walter, she also acquired five stepchildren. So chances are this woman did not have a ton of free time. But she was just really driven to understand the story of the Sun, and it seems like that drive is what kept bringing her back to the observatory. And before long, it also ended up taking her all over the world to see eclipses.

Katie Hafner: So what is so special about a total solar eclipse?

Samia Bouzid: Well, the big thing is that a total solar eclipse is the only time you can see the corona, the atmosphere of the Sun. I mean today, we can do it with some fancy instruments and spacecraft and stuff, but for most of history, an eclipse was our only chance. And there are all these relatively faint features on the Sun surface, or just above the Sun surface, that we just can't see on a regular day because the Sun is so bright.

Lyndsay Fletcher: You know, it's not just a round cloud, it’s got rays, and blobs, and so on. And you know, if you went to many, many eclipses, it turned out that the corona had a different shape.

Katie Hafner: So the Sun has all these things happening on its surface, which normally we can't see.

Samia Bouzid: Yeah, for the same reason that we can't see the stars during the day—the Sun's just too bright. But during an eclipse, the moon passes right in front of the Sun, and this is actually kind of a crazy coincidence by the way, because the moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun, but it's also around 400 times closer. And so for us, they appear almost exactly the same size in the sky, and that means the moon fits perfectly over the Sun. Like a lens cap. And so it blocks out the Sun itself, but you can see all the wispy stuff around the Sun that you don't see any other time. 

Katie Hafner: So why were they so interested in the corona? 

Samia Bouzid: Well, as Lyndsay said, this was really just a time of figuring out what the Sun was, what they were looking at. But astronomers were also interested in the connection between the Sun and the Earth.

Because at this point, they'd noticed a weird relationship between certain features on the Sun, mainly sunspots, but also some of those rays and blobs  Lyndsay mentioned, and certain events on Earth. 

So for instance, if you live high up in the Northern Hemisphere, you'll see the northern lights more often when the Sun is especially active. Back then, there were also times when telegraph communications would mysteriously get disrupted and astronomers were seeing that for some reason, these events seemed to be linked to features on the Sun, which seemed pretty random! So people like Annie wanted to try to understand this, and the only time they could really investigate this was during an eclipse. 

The problem with that is we get at most five solar eclipses somewhere on Earth every year. And they're not all total eclipses, also a bunch of them happen over the ocean…long story short, you can't just sit around and wait for a total eclipse to come to you, you really have to chase them.

Katie Hafner: I see, so that takes us to 1898 when Annie decided to do just that. 

Samia Bouzid: Yeah, 1898 was a big year. An eclipse was going to pass over India, and astronomers were really excited to observe it. But there are two problems for Annie. First of all, it's in India, she's in London, and second, she's not invited. But, Annie’s like, no problem, and she decides to go anyway. 

Samia Bouzid: On December 8th, 1897, Annie and Walter head to the port of London and get on a steamship called the RMS Ballarat with three other astronomers. They've decided to see the eclipse with an amateur group called the British Astronomical Association, which Walter helped found in 1890. Both of them have to pay their own way, but to them, it's worth it. A total of 20 astronomers will be traveling to India as part of this expedition, but the group had trouble figuring out travel arrangements. They've had to split up so they can get a ride to India on mail shipping steamers.

Annie, Walter, and three other men are the first to leave. A second party will follow, two weeks later. As the group boards the ship, they carry telescopes, cameras, and other instruments that they've been carefully assembling for the occasion. But for all their careful planning, they've encountered one major problem that no one could foresee. There's a plague in India. They've just gotten word that the town where they plan to set up camp isn't safe anymore. So they don't know where they're going. But they have to leave. So Annie and Walter and their traveling companions set off from London while their contacts in England and India scramble to figure out a plan B. 

The journey will take nearly a month, and it gets off to a rough start. Shortly after they leave, they pass through a severe storm in the bay of Biscay, off the coast of France. But after they round the tip of Portugal into the Mediterranean sea, it's smooth sailing. Annie and her companions take advantage of this time at sea to study the sky. During the day, they notice a cluster of dark spots on the Sun. Every evening, they look for Mercury at twilight. And as darkness falls, they watch the Milky Way blossom out of the deep black sky. 

As the days pass and the ship continues south through the Red Sea, they notice new constellations appear in the sky. And then finally, on January 3rd, after nearly a month at sea, the steamship arrives in the port at Mumbai. Annie’s group learns that arrangements have been made for them to set up camp in a town called Talni, a few hundred miles east of Mumbai. So two days later, they board a late night train and head east. They ride through the mountains under a nearly full moon. By daytime, the landscape has transformed into a flat dusty plane. It's mid afternoon by the time they finally reached Talni, a small village with mud huts and narrow roads. When the astronomers get off the train, a couple of ox-drawn carts are waiting for them. They climb in and ride just over a mile to their campsite. 

In just two days, local workers have prepared an entire little observing village just for this occasion. 

They've cleared a dozen or so acres of a field and set up four small bamboo huts to be used as observing stations. They've even poured cement floors. Down a short path, they've set up sleeping tents in a shady grove of mango and tamarind trees. Each tent even has a lamppost, so astronomers can safely move around at night. The whole site is guarded by an officer with a sword who paces back and forth. This will be the group's home for the next three weeks.

The eclipse is still two and a half weeks away, but the astronomers spend most of that time getting ready. After all, they've taken this whole journey to witness a moment that will be over in just two minutes. So Annie and her fellow astronomers only have one shot to get everything right. 

By the day of the eclipse, a number of other people, who've been involved in arranging the expedition, join their camp along with more officers guarding the perimeter. Just before noon, the Moon takes its first bite out of the Sun. Annie and the others wait inside their huts as the Moon inches across the Sun. The thin rays of light that leak through their bamboo roofs project crescents onto the ground. The temperature falls as the surroundings dim and the colors fade. As the Sun shrinks to a sliver, Annie and her fellow astronomers get ready. At last, darkness falls. Where the Sun was just moments ago, there now appears to be a hole in the sky. In the distance, they hear the cries and wails of people in Talni. They're in totality. 

With the Moon completely blocking the Sun, the astronomers start exposing their photographic plates. They have just two minutes. 

One member of the camp watches an eclipse clock and counts down the seconds remaining. Annie takes a series of pictures with different exposures to try to capture features with a range of different brightnesses. Then, just as the Sun is emerging once more from behind the Moon, Annie takes one final photo. Then daylight returns, and it's over. 

The astronomers pack up their telescopes and their cameras. They'll have to wait to see what they've captured. That's after the break. 

Katie Hafner: Wow, when you said they were going to camp out, that luxurious campsite was not what I had in mind.

Samia Bouzid: No, me either. When I first read about them going to a campsite to observe the eclipse, I expected them packing tents and going on some rugged adventure or something. I mean, I didn't even know it was a thing that you could like, call ahead to India and have someone clear a field and pour you a concrete floor, just so you can be comfy while you watch an eclipse. 

But for me, the big takeaway in all of this is that all the locals, the servants who were kind of cast into the background, were really just as vital to all of the astronomy that came out of this moment as Annie and her fellow astronomers were.

Katie Hafner: Yeah, let's also not forget that this was at the time of the British Empire.

Samia Bouzid: Right. Right. Exactly.

Katie Hafner: Okay, so we've gone on this months long expedition, taken a bunch of pictures, how long did they have to wait to find out if the entire trip had even been worth it? 

Samia Bouzid: Annie didn't get her photos developed until she got home, so weeks after the eclipse. The good news is it was worth the wait. She ended up with a number of photographs of the corona, and one of them is really fascinating. It's actually that last photo she took right as the eclipse was ending. 

So you see the blotted out Sun, and then there's this long tendrils sneaking out from it all the way to the corner of the photograph. And it probably goes past the frame too, so this thing has gotta be millions of miles long.

Katie Hafner: Okay, so what was this ray?

Samia Bouzid: At the time, nobody was really sure, but Annie hypothesized that it was a stream of charged particles that was flowing out of these turbulent areas in the Sun, and physically interacting with the Earth. And this seems to just have been her intuition, you know, she knew the Sun really well, she'd been studying it for years at this point, and this was just sort of an educated guess. But she was essentially right. Today we know that these coronal rays are streams of charged particles. And what happens is they flow down Earth's magnetic field lines and slam into the atmosphere around the poles. And those collisions are what caused things like the Northern lights and those disturbances in Earth's magnetic field that can mess up communications and stuff.

Katie Hafner: You know what's striking to me as a non-physicist, is that here was Annie who was deeply religious, kind of brought a big level of spirituality to her interest in the Sun, which you'd think that bringing a scientific explanation to bear on something that is, to you, meaning Annie, deeply religious, would be contradictory. But she didn't see it that way? 

Samia Bouzid: No. So years later, Annie wrote a book called The Heavens and Their Storythe heavens and their story. That's where she wrote about this idea that the heavens have a story to tell. And she said in that book that the first story that the heavens have to tell is about the glory of the creator, so this was her reading of the universe. But she herself said that this wasn't the only story that these heavenly bodies had to tell. And her religion didn't really seem to conflict with her interest in understanding the science.

She just had what I think is a beautiful way of seeing the universe both as a scientist, but also as a human who connected with it in a really personal way and also a spiritual way.

Katie Hafner: So interesting and so enlightened, but tell me, what did Annie do after that? After India?

Samia Bouzid: Well for a while, it was just back to ordinary life, back to observing the Sun at the Royal Observatory, but over the years to come, Annie chased eclipses all over the world. She went to Algeria, Mauritius, Canada, and she funded her own travels every single time, except for that final trip, even though at this point, her photos rivaled the ones that professionals were taking. 

Katie Hafner: So what was so special about her photos? 

Samia Bouzid: Well, she planned them meticulously in terms of the timing, the exposure. So they were really well done, really well thought through, and you can see a lot of features of the corona and the Sun surface come through in her pictures. When she was in Mauritius actually, she got one really cool one where you can see these plumes coming off the Sun's surface. And what made this especially interesting was that other people had taken similar photos at different points along the eclipse path, but every picture came out different. And what that showed was that the Sun wasn't just a smooth disc, which is what people had thought for a long time, it was this roiling turbulent place that was constantly changing.

Katie Hafner: Oh wow, that's fascinating. 

Samia Bouzid: And by the way, the pictures that Annie took completely outshined Walter’s, and they were published alongside his, in the official documentation of that eclipse.

Katie Hafner: So, from what I understand, Samia, she had a university education, no degree, but okay. She worked in an observatory, even if it was unofficial, she published papers, she went on these expeditions, so what made her an amateur? I'm having trouble understanding that.

Samia Bouzid: I know, it's hard to think of her as an amateur because we kind of think of amateur these days as meaning subpar, but she really just got that label because during this entire decades-long career, she was largely unpaid and she never got a professional degree. 

Katie Hafner: And did she get any recognition when she was alive?

Samia Bouzid: Yeah. At the time, people in her field definitely would've known who she was because she was publishing papers, she was giving lectures at the British Astronomical Association, she wrote a popular book. And in 1916, the Royal Astronomical Society also elected her as a fellow, which was a fairly important distinction. But Annie died in 1947, and today, most astronomers probably wouldn't know her name. In fact, even Sylvia, who works in her field today, only heard about Annie when she was well into her career. 

Silvia Dalla: When I found out about her, in a way I was kind of surprised. You know, we always talk about women who are involved in research now, as if it's a recent thing, but the important message, I believe, is that women have been doing science for a very, very long time. 

Katie Hafner: Well I couldn't agree with her more, and you know, that's sort of why we even do Lost Women of Science, and yet, of course, this brings up the question, why do you think she got lost?

Samia Bouzid: Well, I think as usual, it's a combination of reasons.

Silvia Dalla: We know that she was active, for example, in Royal Astronomical Society meetings. This is where people present their research. But it seems that she was also quite a shy person, and she didn't like to talk in public. Her voice didn't carry well when she had a big audience, and so most of the time it was her husband, Walter Maunder, who was presenting the results at these meetings.

All indications are that she was a major part of this team, but because he was often presenting at the Royal Astronomical Society, I think maybe her work was not credited as much as it could have been.

Katie Hafner: You know, I don't buy the whole shy person thing, she probably wasn’t born shy. I think the culture of the times, society expected her to be shy, just a speculation on my part, but I just wanted to, to weigh in saying that.

Samia Bouzid: Mmhm.

Katie Hafner: Okay, what were, what might other reasons have been?

Samia Bouzid: Part of the reason might've been that she and Walter were part of the British Astronomical Association, and they publish their work in its journals. But this was an amateur group, these were popular journals, they weren't academic journals, so they didn't have the same weight or the same kind of legacy. And also, it seems like some of the joint work that she did with Walter was only published under his name for whatever reason. But Lyndsay also mentioned one other possibility. 

Lyndsay Fletcher: The way that science was becoming professionalized, from the middle of the 19th century onwards, it became a professional endeavor. You know, there was a time when science was carried out by amateurs and then it evolved to being something that has a degree, and that was to the detriment of male scientists as well as women scientists, but maybe women scientists in particular.

Katie Hafner: You can't see me shaking my head, but it's what I'm doing.

Samia Bouzid: Yeah. I mean, it's maddening to look at someone with the talent and the dedication that Annie had, who essentially never got paid for what she did and never really got the recognition that she deserved. But, you know, it’s interesting to me, Katie, about Annie is that she didn't let herself be defined by this title of amateur. 

She just did the work she wanted to do, and she ended up doing some really important work. One of her biggest accomplishments was this diagram called the butterfly diagram, and it's this plot that shows the positions of sunspots over time, over decades. It was something that she and Walter worked on together that revealed that the Sun goes through an 111-year-cycle, which you might not notice if you're just looking at the Sun from one year to the next, but it took someone like Annie who had been watching and photographing the Sun for decades to actually be able to see this pattern. 

So, my point is that even though Annie was officially an amateur, she did really important work. And I guess the reason this feels so relevant to me is because today it's even more true that we see science as something that happens in an academic silo, but Annie really championed the idea that science can be for any curious person and, you know, obviously we don't all have access to a Royal observatory like Annie did, and she had plenty of privileges that many people don't have. But I think that her success as an amateur, even though she deserved to be more than that, is a reminder of how much science is accessible to people outside of academia. And I really love what Annie herself said about this in her book, The Heavens and Their Storythe heavens and their story.

Annie Voiceover: The heavens are telling stories of interest, stories of wonder. If we but have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. It is not necessary to be a rich man and to build a great observatory in order to become an astronomer. There were great astronomers before ever the telescope was invented. There have been astronomers even in our own days. There are some still living, whose work needs no other instrument than their eyes. 

Katie Hafner: Whose work needs no other instrument than their eyes, that's so beautifully put.

Samia Bouzid: Yeah, she was a beautiful writer. And by the way, while we're talking about amateur astronomers, Lyndsay actually told me about how they can play a role in this upcoming eclipse.

Lyndsay Fletcher: If you can have people observing along totality, then you can look at the dynamics of the inner corona right down to the surface, and that's not something that a professional telescope located at one spot can do. You need the observers all the way along the eclipse path. 

Samia Bouzid: So for this eclipse, that path that Lyndsay’s talking about is going to cut across Mexico first, and then it'll hit Texas and go over my head, and then it'll cut across the Eastern part of the U.S. all the way into Canada. And this whole thing will take about two and a half hours from ocean to ocean. So the idea is that there'll be people all along this path, taking pictures, kind of like they were doing back in Annie's day. And if you put all these pictures together, you basically get a time-lapse showing how the surface of the Sun is changing, more or less in real time.

Katie Hafner: Total eclipse crowdsourcing. 

Samia Bouzid: Exactly. And I love the fact that all these years later, we're still continuing Annie's work and piecing together the story of the Sun. 

Katie Hafner: This special Eclipse episode of Lost Women of Science was hosted by me, Katie Hafner.

Samia Bouzid: And me, Samia Bouzid. I also produced and sound designed this episode. Lizzie Younan composes all of our music. Our fact checker was Lexi Atiya. Thanks to Joan Garahy for voicing the passages you heard from Annie's book.

Katie Hafner: Thanks also to Jeff DelVisio at our publishing partner, Scientific American. And to my co- executive producer, Amy Scharf, as well as our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger.

The episode art was created by Keren Mevorach. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX. 

Samia Bouzid: You can find more information about the eclipse and how to see it on our website, lostwomenofscience.org.

Katie Hafner: And while you're there, don't forget to hit that donate button. Happy eclipsing, and see you next week.

References

The Heavens and Their Story, by Annie & Walter Maunder (Robert Culley, 1908).

Reference for The Heavens and Their Story?