ROSE
O’HALLORAN
Copyright
2012 Richard Taibi
Rose
O’Halloran (about 1866-about 1930) was determined to
be an astronomer. She informed reporters that she was
fascinatedby the stars ever since she could remember and she read
about them
as a youth. She taught herself the constellations,
surveyed them with an opera
glass, and followed astronomy’s latest
discoveries in the press and books.
O’Halloran
said she was born in Ireland and her father, Edmond, was a man of means, a
Tipperary County land-owner and merchant.
Indeed, the RootsIreland.ie website confirms that an “Edmond Halloran”
was a landowner. But all the rest of O’Halloran’s earliest history is based on
her account, for example, her birth date is not confirmed in either a civil or church document on the website. Her date of birth in this biography is a
matter of conjecture and is estimated from two passenger manifests. O’Halloran said her father educated his
daughters and son at private schools and had them tutored at home as well. When Edmond died, his survivors were in crisis because his estate was too small to
provide a livelihood for them all. Rose needed a means of support and rejecting the dependent role 19th century society ordained for women, she decided to earn a living by teaching astronomy and history.
Intent
on independence, wanting to be an
astronomer, and planning to teach, O’Halloran immigrated to the United States, a country where
self-determination was reputed to be part of the national character. Not only did she take the risk of residence in the U. S. but she decided to live in California, a state less than 40 years old when she
arrived in San Francisco, sometime before 1888.
Still resembling a frontier town, the city was hardly respectable even
decades after the gold rush of 1848-1849.
Beginning in the 1890s citizens joined a progressive movement bent on
reform and reclaiming control of local governance. Women formed clubs dedicated to mutual
support and advancement by encouraging their intellectual and literary
development. However, as late as 1900,
San Francisco’s population of 340,000 struggled with an incompetent and corrupt
government which was said to rival the wholesale malfeasance of New York City’s
Tammany Hall. Politicians were bribed to
be compliant with utility companies and railroads’ schemes and to ignore
rampant prostitution in the Barbary Coast region. Despite these scandals San Francisco offered
refined attractions if a citizen could afford them. Many were wealthy
enough to enjoy fine dining, new hotels and entertainment by prominent
celebrities like Enrico Caruso and John Barrymore. This
was San Francisco at the time O’Halloran was a resident: simultaneously
corrupt and cultured.
Astronomical
career
O’Halloran’s
life became better documented after she began to live and work in San
Francisco. Her residential addresses appeared in street directories and in club
membership rosters and the dates of her public lectures were advertised in the
newspapers. In addition, she wrote
numerous articles in San Francisco’s newspapers about sky phenomena: she left a
paper trail beginning about 1891.
Articles in the San Francisco
Chronicle and the San Francisco Call
consistently report that during the day, O’Halloran taught classes in astronomy
to girls from private schools “and convents;” and at night she opened a floor-to-ceiling window in her top-floor apartment and carried her telescope to an
adjoining roof to watch the stars. She
informed reporters that teaching was only a means to an end: being an
astronomer. Reporters noted that even
while being interviewed her eyes were often fixed in the distance as if gazing
into the heavens that entranced her.
The caption reads: "Rose O'Halloran, the Woman Astronomer and her Pet Telescope"
This image is from a March 10, 1895 issue of San Francisco Call from the Chronicling
America website.
O’Halloran’s
astronomical work was first reported in 1892 when William Wallace Campbell
(1862-1938) described a paper she had presented to the Astronomical Society of
the Pacific. Campbell, a Lick
Observatory staff astronomer, noted that Miss O’Halloran ('Miss' was her preferred title)
had made 70 maps of sunspots. These were
the results of 129 days of solar observations she made from November 1, 1891 to
March 31, 1892. He credited her with
probably being the first American observer to see a giant sunspot emerge at the
limb (edge) of the sun’s disk on February 4, 1892. She anticipated its arrival because she had
seen smaller spots disappear behind the rotating sun in January and she
continued to watch until sunspots reemerged. This was the way an astronomer gained renown: persistent
watches leading to an important result. O’Halloran continued observing sunspots
from 1892 to 1913 and she published 16 reports about them in two national
journals read by professional and amateur astronomers alike: Publications of the Astronomical Society of
the Pacific (PASP) and Popular
Astronomy (PA). Besides individual
years’ observations, her years-long sunspot watch allowed her to make some
general remarks about how the number of spots had waxed and waned during the 1891
to 1903 cycle. Her annual reports and
their summary were useful to professional astronomers who were trying to
understand how the spots formed and what their role may have signified about
radiant processes inside the sun.
Besides
watching the Sun, Miss O’Halloran was an ardent student of other stars: long
period variable stars. Often abbreviated
as LPVs, these stars typically completed one cycle of maximum light to minimum
and return to maximum brightness during a several-month period. Their prototype was one discovered with the
unaided eye in 1596, about 13 years before Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) first
pointed a telescope at the stars. The
changeable star was named ‘Mira’, the Wonderful, because at the time
fluctuating brightness in a star was astounding; stars were believed to be
changeless. Mira was O’Halloran’s
earliest LPV subject for study and publication.
She watched the star’s brightness variations from 1895 to 1907; and in
addition to yearly reports she published a summary of Mira’s maxima in a 1907
article in PA.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, amateur and professional astronomers were discovering LPVs at a rapid pace and Miss O'Halloran was eager to join the ranks of discoverers. An April 1894 San Francisco Chronicle article reported that she had been
monitoring the stars in the constellation Scorpius beginning in 1892. The article described her procedure; she made
a nightly chart of the positions and magnitudes of stars in the target region,
with the goal of detecting those stars whose light varied cyclically during the
three-year watch. Although she apparently
never found a new LPV, she monitored known variables. Unfortunately, in 1896 when she published
results about two LPVs, named R and S Scorpii, her methodology was criticized.
John
Adelbert Parkhurst (1861-1925), an Illinois amateur intent on training other
amateurs to monitor LPVs, faulted O’Halloran for comparing R’s magnitude with
S’s instead of with a star of unvarying magnitude. O’Halloran’s procedure masked finding the
actual dates when each star became brightest. Heeding the criticism, she
improved her technique by consulting charts of unvarying comparison stars
supplied by the editor of PA and by
Edward Charles Pickering (1846-1919) the director of Harvard College
Observatory (HCO). The time period, 1892
to 1909, when Miss O’Halloran published her LPV results was a contentious one,
when prominent astronomers argued about the best methodology to be used in
making variable star observations. Seth
Carlo Chandler (1846-1913) argued that only visual estimates of LPV magnitudes
were to be trusted, whereas the newer photographic methods advocated by
Pickering were touted as the most efficient and reliable way to make these
estimates. Pickering offered and urged
use of charts HCO generated. At the same
time Popular Astronomy printed different
star charts with comparison stars for estimates to be used by amateurs. Miss O’Halloran was cognizant of the
professionals’ conflicts and in an effort to contribute useful variable star observations
she astutely cited the names of the comparison star charts she used in her studies
published in PA. It is difficult to assess the impact O’Halloran’s
LPV data had on variable star astronomy, but her contributions in PASP and PA from 1891 to 1909 added to the accumulated data available to
professional researchers.
City astronomer
Caption reads: "One of Miss O'Halloran's Astronomy Classes"
Image is from the April 8, 1894 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle,
courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library.
Many
San Francisco residents knew of O’Halloran’s teaching career because she taught
astronomy to their daughters. She
broadened the scope of her educational work by seeking to be San Francisco’s
astronomer. She wrote columns in the Chronicle and the San Francisco Call to alert citizens about current celestial events
like the Leonid meteor shower storm expected in mid-November 1900 and about a
solar eclipse on June 8, 1918. In other
articles she described advances being made, for example in a 1905 article how variable
stars’ spectra had revealed new details about the stars’ physical nature. Other articles explained astronomers’ current ideas
about the shape and extent of the Milky Way, and the nature of comets.
Acclaim
and recognition from professionals
Her
outreach to the public through local newspapers made her well known on the West
Coast and locally she was regarded to be San Francisco’s astronomer. Her biography and achievements made for good
copy; an April 8, 1894 Chronicle
article about her, ‘She Scans the Skies’, was reprinted across the nation in
Denton Maryland’s Journal, on May 19
with a new title, ‘Fair Star Gazers”.
It
was not only the media that were impressed with Miss O’Halloran. Her published work earned the respect of
local astronomical professionals. United
States Coast and Geodetic Survey’s George Davidson (1825-1911) and his wife
knew her socially. She borrowed and read
many of his “scientific books and reviews” and he expressed the opinion that “…there
is no doubt about her knowing a great deal more than many men who are
famous…” Davidson assisted O’Halloran by
suggesting a four and one-eighth inch refracting telescope, by John Brashear (1840-1920)
as a suitable instrument for her variable star and sunspot watches. This telescope was her prized possession and
it was the tool she used to gather data for all her publications. Edward
Singleton Holden (1846-1914), first director of Lick Observatory, was so
impressed with her knowledge that he nominated her for membership in the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the only woman to be a member for many
years. O’Halloran’s acumen was
continually assessed too, because an author’s articles required approval by the
ASP’s Board of Directors before they appeared in the ASP’s Publications. Miss
O’Halloran’s reports passed this test 25 times between 1892 and 1906.
O’Halloran’s
career compared to female astronomers of her time period.
The
history of women’s entry into astronomical work is a complex one, to be sure,
but some highlights here may help put O’Halloran’s career in perspective. Women began to be employed in astronomical settings in about the middle of the 19th century. Toward the end of the century, women astronomers were at one of two institutions: professors at eastern women's colleges or assistants at large observatories, usually under male supervision.
Female
professors at colleges usually had heavy teaching loads that often interfered
with performing research, but they could select their research topics, as
long as the topic was one the male-dominated profession deemed to be ‘women’s
work’ such as orbit determination and variable star studies. Women’s college astronomers had previous
academic training by male or female college astronomers. One example was Mary Whitney
(1847-1921) at Vassar College, who had been trained by Vassar’s department
chair, Maria Mitchell (1818-1889).
Whitney earned a Vassar bachelor’s degree in 1868 and then spent the
next two years studying at Harvard. She
received an M.A. from Vassar in 1872 and in 1881, after studying mathematics in
Switzerland she joined the Vassar astronomy department. When Mitchell retired in 1888, Whitney became
Vassar’s observatory director and professor of astronomy where her research was
observing and computing orbits of minor planets (asteroids) and estimating
variable star magnitudes (brightnesses).
Another professor, Anne Sewell Young (1871-1961) was trained by William
Payne (1837-1928) and Herbert Wilson (1858-1940) at Carleton College (site of
Goodsell Observatory and its Popular
Astronomy) and she received a master’s degree there in 1897. Young became professor of astronomy at Mount
Holyoke in 1899 and she later earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1906. Young found time from teaching to monitor
sunspots and contribute the data to an international archive in Switzerland; in
addition she measured the positions of asteroids, computed comets’ orbits and
monitored variable stars at Mount Holyoke.
The
best known female astronomers were assistants to Pickering at Harvard College
Observatory. Director Pickering mapped out extensive data reduction programs in
which photographs made by male astronomers were reviewed by their female
colleagues.
Seemingly
banned from Harvard’s telescopes, the women were confined to desks scrupulously
examining photographs and doing repetitious computational work. Yet, within the bounds of their assignments,
they were able to make some innovative contributions to astronomy that was of
long term value to the science. Two of
the notable women astronomers were Williamina Fleming (1857-1911) who had a
background as a student teacher in her native Scotland and Annie Jump Cannon
(1863-1941), who was an 1884 Wellesley College graduate and who did further
study at Radcliffe in 1895. Fleming
developed a useful classification scheme of stars’ spectra and while examining
photographic plates she discovered many new variable stars and other objects of
interest. Cannon refined Fleming’s
spectral classification system which she personally applied to more than
225,000 stars. The immense task required
her attention for 22 years, 1896-1918.
Rose
O’Halloran’s career was different from these female astronomers’. She attended school
and had some private tutoring but no college training. She was not on the staff
of a college or observatory, but was self-employed as a teacher instead. Beyond her early formal education, her
astronomical training was self-taught. O’Halloran
chose the subjects of her astronomical studies and did not suffer the fate of
female counterparts at colleges or observatories whose research topics were limited
by the day’s concept of what was appropriate work for a woman astronomer. Despite the lack of an institutional affiliation,
she was able to publish her work directly in PASP and PA with only
minimal editorial review. However, her
lack of professional context and advanced academic training may have eventually
limited her ability to publish: her name vanished from Publications of the ASP after 1906 and from Popular Astronomy after 1913.
Academic and observatory astronomers’ names began to displace amateurs’ from
these journals during the first and certainly by the end of the second decade of the 20th century. As astronomy became dominated by academically-trained professionals and research often required advanced training in physics, amateurs were less able to compete for journal space.
Her
career resembled some male amateurs’ of the late 19th Century
Although
Miss O’Halloran’s career was unlike other female astronomers’, it did resemble
that of at least two other amateur astronomers, both male. These men were independent researchers (IRs)
whose sky surveys added to astronomy’s database. Their pattern was like O’Halloran’s: some
formal education, self-tutelage in astronomical observation technique and current
advances in astronomy, solo sky watches, publication in national astronomy
journals, and like O’Halloran they earned a living in an unrelated
occupation. Both men were O’Halloran’s
contemporaries, actively observing and publishing during her career.
The
eldest of the two IRs, Lewis Swift (1820-1913) was a hardware merchant in
Marathon, New York who later relocated his business and family to Rochester. He received a few years of formal education after
he broke a hip in an accident on his family’s farm. Swift studied an astronomy text that he
bought for a few dollars. After
attending some lectures he bought a three-inch and later a four-and-a-half inch
telescope with which he sought comets.
His success in finding them, thirteen from 1862 to 1899, brought him
fame and recognition from professional astronomers. Like O’Halloran, Swift had a gift for
publicizing himself and his avocation.
He lectured Rochesterians about astronomy and showed them the moon and
planets through his telescope. His fame
and public prominence earned him the attention of two millionaires, both of
whom built him observatories to house a 16-inch refracting telescope paid for
by the citizens of Rochester who were eager to equip their astronomer neighbor
with a large telescope. Swift wrote
about his comet and nebular discoveries in PA
and in international astronomical journals like Astronomische Nachrichten.
Edwin
Forrest Sawyer (1849-1937) was the second IR whose career resembled
O’Halloran’s. Sawyer graduated from a
Boston high school and became a bank employee at age 19, a livelihood he
maintained for 64 years. Sawyer taught
himself meteor observation techniques and began watching meteors and plotting them
on star maps from 1872 to1915. His
meteor shower records resulted in two catalogs of the showers’ origin points
(called radiants) in the sky. Sawyer’s
first catalog was published in 1879 in the highly regarded American Journal of Science and the second in 1881 in the
internationally prestigious Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Sawyer belonged to the Boston Scientific Society to which a number of
scientifically sophisticated amateurs belonged, including Seth Carlo
Chandler. Sawyer wrote meteor-related
articles in the Society’s journal Science
Observer, which was well-known locally, and by about 1883 was in demand
over much of the United States. When he
acquired a four-inch refractor in 1883, Sawyer began to observe stars listed in
a catalog of southern stars. He
determined the magnitudes of more than 3000 stars, and in the process
discovered eight variable stars. He
published the results of this telescopic survey in 1893.
O’Halloran,
Swift, and Sawyer were industrious and goal-oriented people who established a
niche in astronomy that still exists today: the role of the amateur as an
independent researcher. In this role
amateurs serve as data providers to professionals and occasionally as
discoverers of new objects and phenomena.
Miss O’Halloran’s career has one important historical aspect: today’s U.S.
amateurs practice an avocation begun by men and at least one woman.
Participation
in local organizations
In
1889 the Astronomical Society of the Pacific was founded, in part due to the
energetic advocacy of Edward Holden. The society assembled professional and
amateur astronomers with the goal of promoting astronomical science and
education on the Pacific coast. Holden
nominated Miss O’Halloran for membership and the organization’s membership
roster first showed her name in 1891, the same year she began her sunspot
study. Her name appeared continuously
until 1920, when the PASP ceased
publishing members’ names and addresses in its February number. O’Halloran maintained an active role in the
organization and advanced to the ranks of the ASP’s Board of Directors in 1896. Three years later she became one of the ASP’s
three vice presidents. She served in
both leadership positions until 1903.
In
1893, San Francisco’s women established a local chapter of the Sorosis Club. In it were women interested in literary and
intellectual issues and who wished to be of mutual assistance to each other. Although
Miss O’Halloran’s name first appears on its 1899 roster, an 1894 newspaper
clipping suggests that she was in sympathy with the club’s purposes years
earlier. The clipping announced that she
attended a meeting of The Women’s Congress on May 3, 1894 at which she
participated in a discussion about ‘women and science’ by reading a paper: ‘Our
Place in the Study of Infinities.’
Disappointingly, there is no information about
O’Halloran’s role in the Sorosis Club.
Her membership was current up to 1930 and suggests that she was
interested in the organization and perhaps was flourishing personally until then.
World-travelling
astronomer
Miss
O’Halloran ignored turn-of-the-century cautions about women attempting solo
long-distance sea travel. She probably
did not need the 1889 precedent of an oceanic voyage by Elizabeth Jane Cochrane
(also known as ‘Nellie Bly’), because O’Halloran had it in her character to go to
the ends of the earth in pursuit of a goal. In 1910 O’Halloran brought her telescope to Auckland,
New Zealand and made a year-long sky survey.
When she returned to San Francisco in 1912, her notes provided the material
for a ten-page observational guide which she
published in a 1913 issue of PA. She illustrated the celestial tour with her sky
map drawings of the southern hemisphere’s ‘alien skies.’ The fact that she took this hazardous
expedition should not surprise us, after all, it was she who risked leaving the staid Old World to seek self-determination in America’s Wild
West.
Copyright
2012 Richard Taibi
July
17, 2012
Selected
References
Anonymous,
The Woman’s (sic) Congress, in Riverside
Daily Press, May 3, 1894, Riverside, CA.
This news clipping was accessed from GenealogyBank’s online database on
June 25, 2012: www.genealogybank.com
California
State Library; Author Biographical Card, 1906.
Ancestry.com online database for ‘Rose O’Halloran’ Accessed June 29, 2012.
Campbell,
W.W.; editor, Observations of the Sun in 1891 and 1892 by Miss Rose O’Halloran,
Publications of the Astronomical Society
of the Pacific, volume 4, 1892, p. 138.
Evelyn,
M., Hopes to Discover a New Star, The San
Francisco Call, March 10, 1897, page 7.
This
article is available on the Library of Congress’s website, Chronicling America
Hoag,
C.C., The Sorosis Club of San Francisco 1899, in Our Society Blue Book, San Francisco: Charles Hoag Pub. Co., 1899,
pp. 295-296. This was posted by Sally
Kaleta in 2006 on
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O’Halloran,
R., Observations of N (sic) and S Scorpii,
Popular Astronomy, volume 4, 1896,
p.275.
O’Halloran,
R., Awaiting belated shower of Leonids, San
Francisco Chronicle, November 11, 1900.
O’Halloran,
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1901.
O’Halloran,
R., Some Details of the Recent Solar Cycle, Popular
Astronomy, volume 12, 1904, pp. 27-32
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O’Halloran,
R., Light Curves of Mira and W Lyrae; Popular
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R., Stargazing Beneath Alien Skies, Popular
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R., Humanity Pauses and Gazes Skyward during Sun
Eclipse, San Francisco Chronicle, June 9, 1918
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J., R and S Scorpii, Popular Astronomy,
volume 4, 1896,
pp. 331-332.
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R., Edwin Forrest Sawyer, WGN, Journal of
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S., A Crack in the Edge of the World:
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Collins, 2005; pp. 206-241, especially 223-225.
Wlasuk,
P.T., “So much for fame!”: the story of Lewis Swift; Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, volume 37,
1996, pp. 683-707.
Wlasuk,
P.T., Edward Singleton Holden, in Hockey, T. et al., Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, volume 1, New York:
Springer; 2007; pp. 518-519.
Copyright
2012 Richard Taibi