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Williamina Fleming at Harvard College Observatory Plate Stacks, ca. 1900, Harvard University Archives UAV 630.271( 388).
W illiamina Paton Stevens was born in 1857 in Dundee, Scotland, to Robert Stevens, a frame carver and gilder, and Mary Walker Stevens, a dressmaker. Robert Stevens introduced the science of photography to Dundee. 1 Williamina married James Orr Fleming and soon after sailed to America, arriving in New York on December 3, 1878. In the following months, she became pregnant and was abandoned by her husband. Fleming then moved to Boston, likely to be near her brother Robert. There, she sought employment and was hired by Edward Charles Pickering( Lot 3041), the fourth Director of the Harvard College Observatory, to work in his household as a maid. By the end of 1879, Fleming returned to Dundee to give birth to her son, Edward Pickering Fleming, and stayed with her mother to work as a dressmaker until 1881. She then returned to Boston, leaving her son in Scotland with her family. 2
Detail of glass plate B02312. Horsehead Nebula. February 7, 1888. Image: Harvard Plate Stacks. Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
Upon her return, Fleming resumed her connection with the Observatory, this time as an editor for Observatory publications and a secretary for Pickering. Becoming the sixth woman officially hired by the Observatory, she gained knowledge of astronomy and learned about the collection of astronomical photographs, which was burgeoning in this period. 3
This emerging expertise in photography connected Fleming with a crucial scientific movement. The early history of the Observatory was marked by a nearly twodecade-long collaboration— from 1849 until the 1870s— between father-son directors William and George Bond( Lot 1814) and photographers John Adams Whipple and James Black. Using the Observatory’ s Great Refractor telescope, they created numerous daguerreotypes of the moon and the first photograph of a star. Experimenting with newly invented forms of photography, including salt prints and wet-plate collodion photography, they were able to photograph three notable eclipses. The first photographed eclipse was captured in partiality from Harvard in 1851. 4 After the Civil War, they documented the 1869 eclipse from Shelbyville, Kentucky, and the 1870 eclipse in Xeres, Spain. 5
Most objects in the night sky remained elusive, however. Early photographic processes required a lot of light in order to expose the image in a short period of time on a wet surface. The constraints of emulsion sensitivity and exposure time meant that only the brightest objects, such as the sun, moon, some planets, and the brightest stars, could be photographed. It was not until the 1880s, with the invention of dry-plate or glass-plate photography, that unlimited exposure times became possible, finally allowing the capture of stars.
By the end of 1886, Fleming was in charge of examining, cataloging, and caring for hundreds of glass-plate negatives of the night sky. This collection grew to thousands and then to nearly 200,000 by the time of her death. Today, the Harvard Plate Stacks hold almost 600,000 glass-plate