The Harvard computers

摘要

A photograph taken at the Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1890, features eight women in what looks like a Victorian-style sitting room. They wear long skirts, have upswept hair and are surrounded by flowered wallpaper and mahogany tables. At first glance they seem to be sampler stitching or reading. In fact these 'human computers' are analysing photographs of the heavens, cataloguing stars. When cameras were first attached to telescopes, with the ability to capture the image of thousands of stars on a single photographic plate, people were needed to trawl through these new data. Observatories hired 'computers' - a term used for human processors since the early 1700s - to do the painstakingly repetitive work of measuring the brightness, position and colours of these stars.