Long before women had earned the right to vote, a few worked diligently in the astronomy department at Harvard, carefully cataloguing the position and color ranges of the stars, which were preserved through photography onto glass slides. Dava Sobel (Galileo's Daughter) has meticulously researched and recounted the history of these early female astronomers, who were used as human "computers" to perform intricate measurements and calculations while their male colleagues manipulated the heavy telescopes and glass slides to capture the night skies.
For over a century, Harvard collected data in this manner, amassing a library of more than half a million individual photographs, which reveal far more than is visible through the telescope, "because the sensitive plate, unlike the human eye, could gather light and aggregate images over time." Thanks to the women Sobel writes about and their industrious and eye-opening analysis of the photographs, much has been learned about the nature of the universe, the stars and galaxies, such as the composition of the stars, the identification of binary and variable stars and the distance between stars. The codes developed by these women to catalog their findings are still in use today; their names have become part of astronomy's history and their work is now being digitized for future research. Rich in scientific details, The Glass Universe is fascinating and enlightening, filled with the personal desires and triumphs of women who were pioneers in the workplace and in the heavens at a time when male dominance was the norm. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer