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This is the grave of Henry and Mary Anna Draper.
Born in 1837 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, Draper grew up wealthy. His father was got a job teaching at NYU and was the kind of scientist figure that dabbled in everything, which was hardly uncommon in the first half of the nineteenth century. His mother had been the daughter of the Brazilian emperor’s personal physician. So it was that kind of wealth. Unsurprisingly, Draper trained to be a doctor. He graduated from the NYU School of Medicine in 1857. Sure he was 20, but it’s not like medicine actually worked yet, or at least not much. The advances over Draper’s life would be astounding, but his training took place just as this was beginning and knowledge of the body was still quite limited. He did his Civil War service too, sawing off limbs in horrific conditions on battlefields while with the 12th New York Infantry, which fought at many of the largest battles of the war.
Draper, like his father, was a jack of many scientific trades. He got super interested in astronomy. In 1857, Draper visited Ireland. While there, he visited the Earl of Rosse, who showed him his six foot telescope. This blew Draper’s mind. He came home and wanted toys like this of his own. He began to mix more in scientific circles. As such, he met a woman named Mary Anna Palmer, who was rich socialite also interested in the stars.
Palmer was born in 1839 in Stonington, Connecticut and her father had made a ton of money in real estate. They married in 1867, at which time Draper was working as a chemistry and physiology professor at NYU. They would make a powerful team in the growing field of astronomy. As per usual, it was his name first in all the conversations because she was placed into the kind of secondary “assistant” role even though she was doing at least as much work as he was. Such remains common today (see Robert Caro completely relying on his wife for everything but her not getting credit on the books, for a contemporary example).
What really made the Drapers legendary was their use of new technologies to create images of space. First, they had to expand the technology of telescopes. Draper had built his own on his father’s estate, but then the mirror split on a cold winter night. So he created a new type of mirror that got the secretary of the Smithsonian, Joseph Henry, interested. Henry convinced Draper to write about it and this got him more attention. Now, the Drapers didn’t exactly invent astrophotography, but they advanced its use in massive ways and effectively are the parents of the idea. Now, Draper’s father actually took the first daguerrotype of the moon in 1840 and naturally people were taking pictures of the sun and moon the best they could. But what Draper did was take the first picture of a star that showed absorption lines, which meant he was taking real photographs of deep space.
He was so excited about this–and thanks to Mary didn’t need the money–that he resigned from active teaching in 1873 to focus on this new research. He soon would photograph Venus as it passed between the Sun and Earth. Then he pioneering photographing the Orion nebula. By 1880, he was photographing the spectrum of Jupiter. In 1882, his work on Orion succeeded and using a 137 minute exposure, he managed to take the greatest picture of the stars ever done to that point. Check it out!
Naturally, Draper was not doing this from his home in the city. He built a special observatory out of town, up in Hastings-on-Hudson. He got what passed for federal funding for science at the time and received a ton of honors for his advances. Unfortunately, Draper was a pretty sick guy. In 1882, he died from pleurisy. He was only 45 years old. This is not the kind of thing likely to kill you today, but back then, death at a younger age was more common.
This left Mary Anna a widow. But she wasn’t one to just while away the years. She wanted to advance science the best she could and her best ability to do this was her money. She soon donated most of his equipment to Harvard. She then gave enormous sums of money to advance his work on astronomy. She stopped doing active research herself, but she frequently visited the institutions where she gave the money to see what they were doing with it.
She made connections with Edward Pickering, the Harvard scientist who was following in Draper’s footsteps. In 1885, he started doing photographic spectroscopy, which of course Draper had pioneered. So she funded a lot of this on one condition–it would be named for her husband. This stuck and much later, the astronomic star catalogue that would be published between 1918 and 1924 would be known as the Henry Draper Catalogue. It has continued over the years and now has well over 300,000 stars classified.
Some of this was also specifically for women astronomers. That’s just so incredibly rare in the late 19th century. But some it was because the women in Draper’s family were also interested in science and her niece Antonia Maury was to be one of the next generation of great astronomers, later being the first person to discover a spectroscopic binary. Women were certainly not treated equally at Harvard when they became clustered there working on astronomy and there was a lot of anger over the years at Pickering, who sounds pretty awful personally. But without Mary Anna Draper, they wouldn’t have been there at all, so that was an important step.
Other things Mary Anna Draper did with the money included creating the Henry Draper Medal at the National Academy of Sciences, which is awarded every four years for someone investigating “astronomical physics.” When scientists needed money to found the Mount Wilson Observatory, they came to Draper and she funded it. Being super rich, she also used her money to develop enormous collections of antiquities, including Egyptian art, as well as tapestries. When she died, she left all that to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mary Anna Draper died in 1914. She was 75 years old.
Henry and Mary Anna Draper are buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
If you would like this series to visit other astronomers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Henrietta Swan Leavitt is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Carl Sagan is in Ithaca, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
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