Maria Mitchell was born and raised in a Quaker family in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Her father was a schoolteacher and amateur astronomer, and from a young age, Mitchell helped him operating his astronomical instruments. She attended the North Grammar school, and at 11, she transferred to the school her father founded, where she was a student and a teaching assistant. Later, she attended Cyrus Peirce’s school for young ladies, where she also worked as a teaching assistant.
At 17, Mitchell established her own school, allowing nonwhite children to attend, while the local public school was segregated. Mitchell developed unconventional teaching methods, which she applied in all her teaching positions. She did not report grades or absences, she taught in small classes to individualized attention, and she incorporated mathematics and technology in every lesson.
In 1836, at the age of 18, Mitchell began working as a librarian in the Nantucket Atheneum, a job she held for the next 20 years. At nights, she continued assisting her father with geographical calculations and astronomical observations for the US Coast Survey.
On October 1, 1847, using a two-inch telescope, the 29 years old, Mitchell had noticed an unknown object flying through the sky, discovering the Comet 1847 VI. Later, the comet will be called “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.” Following her discovery, Mitchell gained national and international acclaim, becoming a celebrity in scientific circles with hundreds of articles written about her and receiving numerous awards, including a gold medal prize presented to her by the King of Denmark. In the following year, Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the first to enter the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At 31, Mitchell moved to Boston to work as an official “computer” for the US Nautical Almanac Office, becoming one of the first women to work for the federal government.
In 1865, at 47, with no college education, Mitchell was appointed as the first professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at the new Vassar College. Her research varied, studying Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons, as well as nebulae and solar eclipses. Between 1868 to 1873, Mitchell and her students began a daily recording of sunspots, providing the first consistent photographs of the sun. As a professor, she broke social conventions, insisting that her female students will come to nightly observations. During her two decades at Vassar College, Mitchell and her students frequently published their findings in various academic journals.
Mitchell was involved in numerous social issues throughout her life, including the anti-slavery movement and women’s suffrage. She was friends with Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and brought women’s rights activists to Vassar’s observatory to give lectures. Mitchell was a founding member and second president of the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW) and headed a special committee on Science, promoting and analyzing women’s progress in the field. Mitchell died of brain disease at the age of age 70.
Maria Mitchell: America’s First Celebrity Scientist | Big Think
Maria Mitchell: America’s First Celebrity Scientist
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We love citing the big names in science. Einstein. Curie. Sagan. Nye (The Science Guy). But Michelle Thaller of NASA thinks that perhaps the whole so-called 'celebrity scientist' idea makes it more difficult for regular people to think they could ever be one. "The idea that we are led by single, brilliant people is an idea that, I think, has at its core privilege and exclusion," she posits, "And it’s time for us to take back science, imagination, creativity." You can follow Michelle on Twitter here.
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MICHELLE THALLER:
Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit
NASA.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Michelle Thaller: So Jonathan you ask a question that actually gets to the heart of a lot of my ideas about science and culture. And you ask about the celebrity culture. We hear about these famous scientists, it goes Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson; we know of these wonderful kind of larger than life personalities, and does that really reflect what the practice of science is?
And in fact, to me, this is actually a deeper question because I think it’s one of the ways that people are kept out of science. We hold up examples about these incredible, heroic, sort of seemingly perfect people, and then we compare ourselves to them. And this is exactly the same as comparing ourselves to supermodels and then looking at the way we look, or comparing ourselves to athletes or to incredibly famous rock stars. So much of our world right now seems to be set up to keep you dissatisfied with who you are and keep you feeling insecure. And in science I keep being asked by people, is it possible that I am smart enough to be a scientist? Do I have what it takes to be a scientist?
And there’s also this sad corollary of all of the people who contact me and say, “Well I see you on television, you must be brilliant. I couldn’t possibly do what you do. I wasn’t good at math. I don’t have the sort of brain that you have.”
All my life this has made me feel different and strange and not right. The very moment that I started to get interested in science I was a very small kid. I was just very curious about space, about geology and rocks, I started to be told, “Wow you’re really different, you’re not the same as all of us,” and “You’re a girl; Wow, that’s even stranger!” Even when people we’re trying to be kind, what they were doing was telling me that in some way I wasn’t right.
The celebrity culture of science and the idea that you need a special personality, a special type of brain to do science, are some of the most harmful ideas about science that our culture has come up with. I often have to deal with – for example, the idea of Albert Einstein: Albert Einstein was incredibly brilliant and he revolutionized our understanding of the universe. But there’s a myth about him—and you may be familiar with it—that Albert Einstein “wasn’t really part of the scientific establishment,” he was “just working in a patent office,” “he just pulled all of this out of his brain,” “it was just him working alone.” And that wasn’t true at all! Albert Einstein was, in fact, part of science.
He was a professor, he was finishing up his doctorate when he was working in the patent office. He was part of a culture and the establishment of science. And he wasn’t working alone. Some of the major parts of his theory, for example the special theory of relativity that deals with how time and slows down when you go close to the speed of light, had been largely been formalized and set up before by people like Lorentz, and even parts of general relativity, his idea about gravitation and the curvature of space, had been done by people like LeMaitre and others.
Einstein was absolutely brilliant at seeing that different theories that people were working on could com...
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