Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin About this episode This 2020 episode covers Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, an accomplished astronomer. She grew up in a society that didn’t really prioritize education for girls, and she was determined and creative about getting around that.
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2:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Saturday. Cecilia Payne, later Cecilia Payne Geposhkin, was born May 10, 1900, or 125 years ago today, if you're listening to this episode on the day it comes out. She made truly revolutionary discoveries about the chemical makeup of stars, and she's really one of my favorite people I've ever learned about on this show.
2:39 Holly Frey? Our episode on her originally came out on November 9, 2020. Enjoy.
2:46 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
3:00 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
3:02 Tracy V. Wilson? A couple of months ago, we got a pile of listener requests for an episode on Cecilia Payne Geposhkin. She was an astronomer who made a lot of firsts, including being the first person to figure out that stars are made of mostly hydrogen and helium. Usually, when we get a whole bunch of listener requests, one right after the other, I can figure out what prompted them. Like, usually, there was a Google doodle, or there's a viral post that's circulating around. This time, it was kind of a mystery, because there is a new biography that came out earlier this year, which is Donovan Moore's What Stars Are Made Of, which is beautiful. I recommend it. And there have been some
3:43 Tracy V. Wilson? viral posts, but none of this lined up with when we got this pile of requests. And then on top of that, when I tried to go through our inbox, so I could make a list of all the listeners that I wanted to thank here at the top of the episode, I found nothing, zero emails. I remember them coming in, yet I could not find them. Honestly, though, this feels like just a mysterious gift from the universe, because by the time I got to this end of the research for this, I just loved Cecilia Payne Geposhkin. I don't love the sexism she faced that we're going to talk about, but like, her whole story. I really delighted in. She grew up in a society that just did not prioritize
4:27 Tracy V. Wilson? education for girls and that regarded women's academic ambitions as suspect. But her determination and her creativity at getting around that just was so delightful to me. So that's what we're going to talk about today.
4:42 Holly Frey? So Cecilia Payne was born in Wendover, England on May 10, 1900. Her father Edward was a barrister and a historian, and her mother Emma was an artist. Cecilia was the oldest of Edward and Emma's children, with a younger brother Humphrey and a sister Leonora. From a very early age, Cecilia was curious and imaginative with a keen memory and sharp observation. Their home was full of music, art, and literature, and they had a large library.
5:11 Tracy V. Wilson? They were a pretty comfortable, middle-class family. They had enough money to afford household help, and that allowed Emma to keep working as an art copyist, even when her children were still really small. But that changed after Edward's sudden death when Cecilia was four. Edward had married Emma somewhat later in life, and he died the day after Christmas 1904 at the age of 60. His body was found in a river where he had apparently drowned. He had been experiencing some heart trouble and some dizziness, which may have contributed to his death, but it's just not clear exactly what happened.
5:47 Holly Frey? Although Emma received a widow's stipend after Edward's death, it really didn't match what his income had been, and money was a lot tighter. Even so, Emma tried to make sure that her children were immersed in culture. She would scrape together enough to travel and attend concerts and go to museums. The children's upbringing also wasn't always conventional. When Cecilia asked for a bedtime story, her mother read her the Odyssey. When Emma decided Cecilia was too old for stories, Cecilia started by telling herself stories at bedtime, before moving on to making up bedtime stories for her younger sister.
6:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Although Cecilia was really bright and driven to learn, when she started school, she had some struggles. The teachers at the little school across the street from their home, which she was attending, they encouraged her. But Cecilia was also left-handed and they taught her to write with her right hand. This really deeply frustrated her, so she taught herself to be more ambidextrous and to do things like write upside down, using techniques and exercises from a pamphlet that her great-grandfather had written. That pamphlet was called Painting with Both Hands.
6:55 Holly Frey? I know so many people who were natural lefties that were forced to write right-handed and it was never delightful for anybody.
7:03 Tracy V. Wilson? No, I, my preschool teachers kept telling me to put the pencil in the hand that felt most comfortable in and I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. So I just imitated what the other children were doing. And like, I to this day don't know if I really should have learned to write with my left hand and that's why my penmanship has been terrible my entire life. Or maybe my penmanship is just terrible for my entire life.
7:28 Holly Frey? You know, everybody scribbly, my dad was a lefty that was pushed to right-handedness. And his penmanship has always been a little bit fraught looking, like it always looks stressed.
7:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:40 Holly Frey? But when Cecilia was eight, she was out in the family's orchard when she spotted a bee orchid growing in the grass. She recognized it, not because she had seen one before, but because her mother had described one to her once. And when she convinced her mother that yes, there really was a bee orchid growing out in the orchard, Emma had the gardener transplant it to a better location. And after this experience, Cecilia decided that the one thing she wanted to do was study nature and science.
8:09 Tracy V. Wilson? It was a few years before she could really do that, though. When Cecilia was 12, the family moved from Wendover, which was a little more rural, surrounded by woods and hills, to the Bayswater neighborhood of London. They moved there for the sake of her brother Humphrey's education to give him access to a better public school. Cecilia was enrolled in a parochial school called St. Mary's.
8:32 Holly Frey? That school was really not a good fit for Cecilia, though. A big part of her school day was religious instruction, which really did not interest her, so much so that she would pretend to faint to try to get out of going to chapel. She also tried to get a bookbinder to make her an edition of Plato in a Bible cover so that she could read classical philosophy during her religion classes. Unfortunately, that brilliant plan was thwarted because the bookbinder said no to it.
8:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, apparently the bookbinder was appalled by that very suggestion. On top of all of that, girls who truly wanted to learn and who excelled at school were viewed with a lot of suspicion. When Cecilia, who was in the youngest class, came in second out of the entire school in a year-end exam, she wasn't praised for her performance. The other students were scolded for allowing her to beat them. Classes for girls were also mostly focused on reading and writing, not on the subjects that Cecilia felt a real passion for.
9:31 Holly Frey? Cecilia turned to the family library to try to make up for what she saw as huge holes in her education. And while she did love theater, opera, music, and literature, which were all represented there, what she really wanted to study was science. And there were almost no books on science on the family shelves. She finally found one book on botany, but it was in German and French, which she did not speak. So she got a dictionary from school and laboriously translated that book into English. She turned to this kind of resourcefulness again and again during her education, including, for example, transcribing an entire textbook from the library by hand before she started at Cambridge because she could not afford to buy a copy of her own.
10:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Eventually, the teachers at St. Mary's started to get really tired of Cecilia's persistence at demanding to study science and to be more challenged in her schoolwork. In addition to trying to teach herself outside of school, she was essentially badgering her teachers into tutoring her in other subjects than the ones that the school offered. Finally, somebody told her that the only way she might be able to study science was as part of training to become a schoolteacher. So she volunteered to teach Sunday School classes to try to prepare herself, although she focused her Sunday School teaching a lot more on science than on the Bible.
10:51 Holly Frey? Today's lesson: dandelions. What?
10:55 Holly Frey? Cecilia spent years at St. Mary's butting up against all kinds of barriers to the education that she wanted for herself and that, of course, was frustrating and exasperating for everyone involved. Teachers and administrators saw her behavior as inappropriate and disruptive, and when she was 17 and had just a year left to go, she was expelled. However, it does seem that the headmistress of St. Mary's wrote a letter encouraging St. Paul's Girls' School, which had been established by the Worshipful Company of Mercers, to allow her to enroll there for her last year.
11:28 Tracy V. Wilson? St. Paul's was far more focused on the academic success of its students than St. Mary's had been, and once she got there, Cecilia was finally encouraged in her pursuit of science. And she excelled in other courses there as well, including polishing her skills in public speaking and studying music, which was actually being taught by Gustav Holst, who was not a famous composer yet. When Holst finished his orchestral suite that's known as The Planets, Cecilia was actually one of the students who got to hear a performance of it.
11:59 Holly Frey? That is the coolest. Later on, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin wrote in her autobiography that the first time she walked through the door at St. Paul's, she thought, quote, "I shall never be lonely again. Now I can think about science." She finally had the freedom to really pursue her ambitions, and one of those ambitions was to go to Cambridge, which we'll talk about after a sponsor break.
12:25 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other? Tune
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15:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Although Cecilia Payne really thrived in the year that she spent at St. Paul's, she still had a huge amount of catching up to do if she wanted to go to the University of Cambridge. It wasn't just the challenge of getting into school there. She could only afford to go if she got a scholarship. And aside from her self-taught knowledge of botany from that book she translated herself out of the dictionary, she was way behind in all the sciences and in math. But she devoted herself to catching up. And in the end, not only did she get into Cambridge, but she also scored well enough on a competitive exam to earn the only scholarship that was big enough to cover all of her expenses in full.
15:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Cecilia started at Newham College, which is a women's college at Cambridge, in 1919.
16:01 Holly Frey? Getting into Cambridge, though, did not mean that she had left behind the kind of sexism that was such a big part of her earlier education. Newham is a women's college, and it had strict rules for students' behavior, from standards of dress to curfews to a ban on male visitors. There were also specific rules for Newham students when they attended lectures or other functions at other Cambridge colleges. And even though all the students at Cambridge were meeting the same academic requirements, regardless of their gender, only men were actually awarded degrees.
16:35 Tracy V. Wilson? There were also expectations about which courses women should take. There wasn't really a barrier to studying the natural sciences in general, but in the first part of their time at Cambridge, women studying the natural sciences were expected to focus on botany. Botany was like the women's science. Students selected two other subjects to go along with that primary focus, and the companion courses for botany were typically zoology and chemistry. So if a woman wanted to study science at Cambridge during this time, it was just generally understood that she would start out studying botany, zoology, and chemistry.
17:15 Holly Frey? Well, of course, because ladies like flowers and animals.
17:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Correct.
17:22 Holly Frey? In spite of Cecilia's childhood experience with the bee orchid and her self-taught study of botany, by this point, she was really a lot more interested in chemistry and physics. At the same time, trying to make either of those her primary course of study seemed incredibly risky, given how shaky her earlier instruction in these subjects had been, and in the math that was required, which she was also behind on, and in the uphill battle she would face as a young woman pursuing either of these subjects. So she initially chose to study botany and chemistry, as expected, but she added physics to that rather than zoology.
17:59 Tracy V. Wilson? But on December 2nd of 1919, Cecilia Payne had an experience that completely shifted her focus, much like the discovery of that bee orchid had when she was a child. This time, it was a lecture by Arthur Stanley Eddington. Eddington had been part of an expedition to view the total solar eclipse that took place on May 19th of 1919, and that expedition was to measure how the sun's gravity affected light from stars. We talked about that expedition in our 2017 episode on historical eclipses. The data gathered during this eclipse supported Einstein's theory of general relativity.
18:37 Holly Frey? And Cecilia was absolutely captivated by this lecture. She later wrote, "The result was a complete transformation of my world picture. When I returned to my room, I found that I could write down the lecture, word for word."
18:52 Tracy V. Wilson? At about this same time, Cecilia was also starting to question her choice of studying botany. Most of the material that she was hearing in lectures was already familiar to her, but at the same time, she was so inexperienced at the more practical side that she made mistakes that caused her to doubt herself. After Eddington's lecture, she really wished she could change her focus to astronomy, but that was flatly impossible. Astronomy was classified under math, not under natural science, and students could not jump into a totally different course of study that way.
19:26 Holly Frey? So she changed her main focus from botany to physics, and since students were allowed to attend lectures outside their particular field of study, she also went to astronomy lectures and spent as much time at Cambridge Observatory as she could. With the help of astronomer LJ Comrie, she also repaired the clock at Noonam's Small Observatory and started spending her evenings there, making observations and recording data.
19:53 Tracy V. Wilson? At one point, she ran into Arthur Eddington again at Cambridge Observatory and told him that she wanted to be an astronomer, when he realized how set she was on this idea and how much study she had already done on her own. He recommended some journals that she could use to continue her studies and also told her that she could use the Cambridge Observatory library.
20:14 Holly Frey? As all of this had been happening, debate had been ongoing about how women's education should work at Cambridge. And on October 24, 1921, the Cambridge Council of the Senate voted that women would be granted titular degrees from the university. This was better than the previous setup, which was that women who completed all the requirements of the degree were awarded nothing, but it also meant that women were to be given the title of the degree, but not the degree itself. This sparked outrage, mainly from men who objected to women being acknowledged at all.
20:49 Tracy V. Wilson? In early 1923, Cecilia Payne was getting toward the end of her study at Cambridge, and she had spent those years dividing her time, adding as much astronomy as she could to her study of physics and natural sciences. She had learned from luminaries like Niels Bohr, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with atoms in 1922. She also studied computing, including joining the computing section at the British Astronomical Association. And she had been elected to the Royal Astronomical Society while still a student as well.
21:23 Holly Frey? She had done all this while facing derision and resentment, not just from her male peers, but also in some cases from the faculty. At lectures, women were required to sit in the front row by themselves. She described how, at the start of his lectures, Ernest Rutherford would very pointedly begin "ladies" and "gentlemen."
21:43 Tracy V. Wilson? She'd also come to understand that she just had no future as an astronomer if she stayed in England. Because of her sex, the only path that was really open to her was still becoming a schoolteacher. LJ Comrie offered to take her to a lecture that Harlow Shapley, who was director of the Harvard College Observatory, was giving in London. Comrie could introduce the two of them, and then maybe that would open a door for Cecilia to continue her education in the United States, where she might have more opportunities than she did in the UK.
22:15 Holly Frey? This worked. Payne told Shapley directly that she wanted to come to Harvard to work for him. Shapley encouraged this idea, casually suggesting that she might replace Annie Jump Cannon, Harvard Observatory's curator of astronomical photographs when she retired. This was more of a reflection on the roles that women filled at Harvard rather than an actual job offer.
22:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, it was sort of like offhanded, "Hey, maybe you could be Annie's replacement." Because obviously, a woman does that job, and a woman would do that job.
22:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway, just as going to Cambridge had required Cecilia to gain admission and also to get a scholarship, going to Harvard also required her to secure some funding. Otherwise, she just would not have the money to do it. On February 26, 1923, she wrote to Shapley about trying to get a fellowship. She also got recommendations from Arthur Eddington, LJ Comrie, and her old headmistress at St. Paul's. It really seems like she got a recommendation from every conceivable person that could give her one. She also applied for as many scholarships and fellowships as she could to try to scrape together enough money to afford her passage across the ocean, to buy appropriate clothing, and to pay for her living expenses while she was there.
23:30 Holly Frey? And once again, she was successful. As she prepared to leave England, astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne suggests that if he were in her place, he would take advantage of the wealth of data available at Harvard to verify an equation that astrophysicist Mignod Saha had developed in 1920. This equation expressed the relationship between a star's pressure and temperature and the ionization of the elements in the star.
23:56 Tracy V. Wilson? We'll get to what she did with that after one more sponsor break.
24:03 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
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26:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Cecilia Payne left Cambridge, England, for Cambridge, Massachusetts in September of 1923. Her fellowship at Harvard College Observatory gave her the freedom to choose the focus of her research. And as E.A. Milne had suggested, she started studying photographic plates of the spectra of stars to try to confirm Sah's equation.
27:16 Holly Frey? To make sense of what she was doing, all the way back in 1666, Isaac Newton used a prism to separate sunlight into a continuous series of colors, using the word "spectrum" to describe what he saw. Later, William Wallaston and Joseph Fraunhofer each observed that if you looked at the sun's spectrum in fine enough detail, there were dark lines within that spectrum. These became known as Fraunhofer lines, or absorption lines. But Fraunhofer did not have an explanation for what those lines were or why they were there.
27:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Then in 1855, Robert Bunson built on earlier designs to develop the Bunson burner. The Bunson burner produced an almost colorless flame, and that made it useful for studying the light that was produced by heating or burning different elements. Not long after, Gustav Kirschhoff suggested that they could use a prism to separate this light into its spectrum. That would make it easier to distinguish the fine differences in flames that have really similar colors. This was an early version of the spectroscope. Through this work, Kirschhoff discovered that each element had its own unique set of spectral lines when it was heated, almost like a fingerprint.
28:29 Holly Frey? We talked a little bit about this when we talked about the discovery of helium.
28:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm-hmm.
28:34 Holly Frey? Emission lines come from the wavelengths of light that elements emit when they're excited, and absorption lines appear when wavelengths of light are absorbed in between when they're produced and when we observe them. Today, we know that the presence of these lines relates to the structure of the atom and what happens when atoms are excited to different levels of energy. But at the end of the 19th century, physicists and astronomers knew that these spectra existed, but they didn't quite know what they meant.
29:01 Tracy V. Wilson? At Harvard College Observatory, astronomers started using these spectra to classify stars. Wilhelmina P.S. Fleming, who had been the housekeeper of Observatory Director Edward C. Pickering, developed a classification system that was primarily based on the strength of the hydrogen lines in these spectra. Annie Jump Cannon later simplified and refined this system into one that still exists today, the types O, B, A, F, G, K, and M, often put into the mnemonic "Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me." That was purportedly coined by Henry Norris Russell. There are also a few other classifications that can be added into that mnemonic and
29:43 Tracy V. Wilson? some other attempts at mnemonics that are less gendered, relying on the idea that, like, you want a woman to kiss you, maybe whether she's really up for that or not. That includes only bad astronomers forget generally known mnemonics.
30:01 Holly Frey? But as was the case with Fraunhofer's discovery of absorption spectra, Cannon didn't really have a sense of why stars fit into these categories, or what those categories meant. She was cataloging, not analyzing or interpreting. But the observatory did have more than 200,000 photographic plates documenting star spectra, organized into these categories, thanks to the work of Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, and other women at Harvard Observatory.
30:28 Tracy V. Wilson? I have Annie Jump Cannon on my list for a future episode, just in case folks are like, "I wish you had an episode on Annie Jump Cannon." After getting to Harvard, Cecilia Payne got to work examining these plates through a jeweler's loop. She worked with an intense and unshakable focus, sometimes going days without sleep, chain smoking the whole time, rarely remembering to empty the ashtray. A lot of accounts of her office talk about the overflowing ashtray. Eventually, she realized that she was seeing four different ionizations of silicon represented in the spectra on the plates. This ultimately led her to the discovery that the variations she was seeing among these spectra were coming from different levels of ionization
31:12 Tracy V. Wilson? of the elements that were involved based on the star's temperature, not on actual differences in the amounts of elements that were present there.
31:21 Holly Frey? Through all of this work, folded into Saha's equation, Payne gradually came to understand that all the stars had roughly the same proportions of 18 different elements, with hydrogen and helium being most abundant. However, this was totally contrary to the theories of the day. Most astronomers and physicists at the time were working from the principle of uniformity, that all the planets and stars were made of the same elements that Earth was, in about the same proportions. And while there were a few elements that did have similar proportions to what was found on Earth, she discovered that helium was 1,000 times more abundant than expected, and hydrogen, which we now know is the most prevalent element in the universe, was a million times more abundant.
32:06 Tracy V. Wilson? So Payne had always been ambitious, but she also realized that it was possible that she had not just discovered something that would completely rewrite our understanding of the stars, that maybe she had just made a mistake. Like, it's a shorter walk to "I made a mistake" than "I have just discovered something that fundamentally changes our understanding of how the universe works." So she painstakingly went through her work over and over, trying to figure out where she had made an error and she could not find one because she had not made one. She was right.
32:37 Holly Frey? At this point, Harlow Shapley was trying to transform Harvard Observatory into a Department of Astronomy at Harvard. He convinced Payne to use her findings to write a thesis, which would allow her to earn the first PhD in astronomy ever to be awarded at Harvard University. At first, Payne doubted that this would be worth her time, but she ultimately agreed.
33:00 Tracy V. Wilson? However, some of the people who were involved with reviewing and approving this thesis doubted her conclusions. In particular, Henry Norris Russell, whose work hinged on the principle of uniformity, demanded that she allow for the possibility that she was just mistaken. Her thesis included the caveat, quote, "The outstanding discrepancies between the astrophysical and terrestrial abundances are displayed for hydrogen and helium. The enormous abundance derived for these elements in the stellar atmospheres is almost certainly not real."
33:34 Holly Frey? Russell would not have accepted Payne's thesis without this concession. So if she hadn't included it, she wouldn't have had a thesis at all, or been awarded a PhD. So including this couching was a pragmatic decision. This wasn't something that she brooded over, but it was something she regretted. She would later say, quote, "As a warning to the young, if you are sure of your facts, you should defend your position."
33:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Even with its downplaying of the most revolutionary of her findings. In 1962, Otto Struve and Veltz Zibergs called this thesis, which was published under the title "Stellar Atmospheres: A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars," they called it, quote, "undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy."
34:24 Tracy V. Wilson? It was also the first monograph ever to be published by the Harvard Observatory.
34:28 Holly Frey? Cecilia Payne was awarded a PhD from Radcliffe College in 1925, as Harvard itself did not yet award degrees to women. Harlow Shapley had thought her work was so obviously profound and worthy that after she took her final oral exam for her PhD, he didn't tell her she had passed. She only found out after astronomer Margaret Harwood found her weeping inconsolably in her office, thinking that she must have failed. I want to time travel and hug her.
34:57 Tracy V. Wilson? I'd want to time travel and yell at Harlow Shapley.
35:00 Holly Frey? Well, I feel like, though, his thing wasn't even, he was just thoughtless. Yeah, he was like, "Obviously you passed. How, what?" Anyway.
35:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Eventually, the field of astronomy did come to realize that Payne's conclusions about the compositions of stars and the abundance of hydrogen and helium in the universe were correct. This included Henry Norris Russell, who acknowledged that fact in 1929.
35:23 Holly Frey? The completion of her PhD meant that Payne no longer had fellowship money to live off of, so she started looking for a job. She got offers from other observatories and universities, but she ultimately stayed at Harvard, where she was hired as Harlow Shapley's assistant. This didn't pay very much, and she had to pawn some of her belongings to make ends meet in the gap between when her fellowship ended and when her job started. But it was enough for her to move out of the dorm and into her own apartment, as long as she had a roommate.
35:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Being Shapley's assistant also meant that Payne no longer had the freedom to choose the research that she wanted to do. And at first, Shapley had her keep working with photographic plates of stellar spectra, even though there was more sophisticated technology becoming available by that point. She was also expected to teach courses for the newly established Department of Astronomy at Harvard, although since she wasn't technically on the faculty, her name was not included in the course catalog. Her students described her as "very intense, sometimes intimidating," and her lectures were both beautiful and memorable.
36:28 Holly Frey? Even though she was not being paid or recognized accordingly, Shapley was definitely aware of what an asset Payne was. In one letter, he described her as, quote, "one of the most outstanding astrophysicists of America of any and all sexes." In 1926, she also became the youngest person to be listed in American Men of Science. She became a US citizen in 1931.
36:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Then in 1932 and 1933, Cecilia Payne experienced a series of tragedies. Her closest friend from Harvard was astronomer Adelaide Ames. The two of them were so close that they had been nicknamed the Heavenly Twins. Adelaide drowned after being swept from a canoe during a sudden storm in 1932. While at Cambridge, Cecilia had been similarly inseparable from her friend Betty Leif, and they had remained very close in the years that had followed. Cecilia learned that Betty had also drowned in 1933. As she later wrote in her autobiography, quote, "Adelaide and Betty. All that I was not, beautiful, delicate, beloved, were dead, and I was alive.
37:35 Tracy V. Wilson? I was absorbed in my work, shy and unattractive. What was I giving? I made a silent resolve. I would open my heart to the world. I would embrace life." She decided to travel, making a trip to the Polkovo Observatory outside St. Petersburg.
37:52 Holly Frey? During that trip, she also went to an astronomical conference in Göttingen, Germany, and there she met Sergei Geposhkin. Geposhkin was from Russia. His parents and most of his siblings had died during a typhus outbreak, and at the end of the Russian Civil War, had left him with no money and no documents that could prove his identity.
38:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Eventually, he had made his way into Germany, where he had earned a PhD in astronomy. But Hitler's rise to power put him in a really impossible situation. He was a Russian, living in Germany, without any papers. Geposhkin traveled by bicycle for four days to get to Göttingen for this conference, with the hope that one of the other astronomers there could help him get out.
38:34 Holly Frey? And the person who helped him was Cecilia Payne. She got Harlow Shapley to offer him a position at Harvard and to contact the American consul in Germany to try to get Geposhkin out of the country. After she got back to the United States, Cecilia personally went to Washington DC to try to get his visa expedited.
38:54 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1934, three months after Sergey arrived in the US, he and Cecilia got married. Most of her colleagues were baffled. It did seem quite sudden, but in a lot of ways, their marriage really made sense. Both of them were dedicated astronomers and Sergey was also an artist. At the time, it was expected for women to leave the workforce after getting married. But Sergey was a refugee and his temporary job at Harvard paid even less than Cecilia's did. If they got married, that meant that he would be dependent on her income to survive. There would be no possible way for her to just leave the workforce because she was a married woman now.
39:32 Holly Frey? In other ways, it made less sense. Over time, Sergey developed a reputation for being opinionated and hard to work with. And he openly flirted with other women in the observatory. He was a capable astronomer, but Cecilia was brilliant. In some accounts, Harvard tolerated his rough edges just to keep Cecilia there.
39:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Between 1935 and 1940, they had three children, Edward, Catherine, and Peter. And Cecilia broke with convention yet again by continuing to teach while she was pregnant. Since they couldn't afford childcare, they pretty much brought the kids with them to work.
40:08 Holly Frey? Cecilia and Sergey also started doing research together, publishing a book on variable stars in 1938. That same year, the American Astronomical Society awarded Cecilia Payne Geposhkin the first ever Annie Jump Cannon Prize, which still exists today and recognizes outstanding postdoctoral research by a woman. Also in 1938, Pain Geposhkin was finally named to the Harvard faculty with the title of astronomer.
40:35 Tracy V. Wilson? In the summer of 1939, Sergey and Cecilia traveled to Paris for a conference in spite of the growing tensions in Europe. But Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was also going to be at this conference and Cecilia wanted the chance to see him again. This actually turned out to be her last opportunity to do so. He died in 1944. Germany invaded Poland just days before Cecilia and Sergei arrived back in the US aboard a ship, the French vessel called the SS Normandy.
41:04 Holly Frey? Cecilia and Sergei continued to work at Harvard during and after the war. Cecilia's name was finally included in the course catalog, starting in 1945. In 1956, she became the first woman to be a tenured professor at Harvard, and soon after, she was also the first woman to chair a department that wasn't specifically for women. At this point, her salary was doubled, but her children were still a fixture around the laboratory. The Harvard Observatory Council formally warned Peter, the youngest, to stop bothering the staff in 1958.
41:38 Tracy V. Wilson? She was away when the meeting happened, when they had this discussion, and was outraged about it. It's very embarrassing. And she was also like, "He's old enough for you to be talking directly to him about these issues?" Anyway, during her career as an astronomer, Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin published more than 150 papers and several monographs, as well as multiple books on astronomy. In addition to the one we mentioned earlier, this included "The Stars of High Luminosity" in 1930 and "Variable Stars and Galactic Structure" in 1954. In 1976, she was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Prize, which is essentially a lifetime achievement award by the American Astronomical Society, and a nice irony, considering
42:22 Tracy V. Wilson? his earlier appearance in this story.
42:24 Holly Frey? Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin died of lung cancer on December 7, 1979. Her daughter published her autobiography, "The Dyer's Hand," along with other collected writings in 1984. Today, there is a portrait of Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin hanging in the faculty room in Harvard's University Hall. It is in the style of Vermeer's 1668 painting, "The Astronomer," and it was painted by Patricia Watwood.
42:50 Tracy V. Wilson? We will end with a quote from Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin, quote, "There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas. Nature has always had a trick of surprising us, and she will continue to surprise us, but she has never let us down yet." I love her.
43:09 Holly Frey? I do too. She's marvelous. I'm so glad you picked this one.
43:12 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm so glad that mysterious people asked for this a couple of months ago, and now I can find no record of it.
43:18 Holly Frey? Maybe, maybe someone will write and explain where they saw it, like what
43:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Maybe.
43:23 Holly Frey? what Facebook group or Twitter thread or whatever it got brought up on that got so many people excited about her story.
43:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I, I tried several different searches to try to try, like, try to find the emails. I tried Just Cecilia. I tried Gaposchkin. I tried her whole name. I remember specifically, somebody said, can you do an episode on the woman who discovered helium? And I was like, I don't think that's
43:49 Holly Frey? Quite right.
43:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Quite what, but I'd like, and I, like, just searching helium, I also didn't find. It was just a whole big mystery.
44:24 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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