Sobel - a former New York Times science reporter, and the author of several books on astronomy - traces a remarkable line in American female achievement, beginning with a New York heiress, Anna Palmer Draper, who helped her husband, Henry Draper, pioneer the pursuit of astrophotography. They also helped to establish a scale for measuring distances across space, laying a foundation for the calculations of space travel. Gifted and diligent, they developed classification systems for the stars, along with spectroscopic analyses of starlight - in all its constituent colors - that revealed key truths about the composition of heavenly bodies. This glass universe of some half a million plates was the basis for important scientific discoveries, many of them made by the unsung women Sobel introduces.

There they were employed to interpret the glass photographic plates of stars made by telescope each night. Sobel’s heroines are the privileged yet cloistered 19th-century woman who also toiled as “computers” - that was the word for them in the mid-1800s as well as in the 1960s - at the Harvard College Observatory.

Both books address the conquest of outer space from the perspective of the unsung women who helped make it possible in a white man’s world.

Set almost a century earlier, The Glass Universe (Viking, 266 pp., ***½ out of four stars) is Sobel’s unintended prequel and parallel to Shetterly’s tale. It’s a history rich in social and feminist relevance, given that Shetterly’s heroines worked under the segregationist Jim Crow laws of the day. It’s a welcome coincidence that Dava Sobel’s new book, The Glass Universe, comes in the wake of another recent book - and forthcoming movie - Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures. Shetterly tells the little-known story of the African-American women who worked as mathematicians for NASA in the 1960s, computing the rocket trajectories that would launch the late John Glenn into orbit and solidify America’s space program.

The glass universe review