Columbia’s First Female Academic Was an Astronomer

When we think of a computer, we typically think of the foldable device that fits in a bag and gets schlepped to school, coffee shops, and between the office and home. We’d be lost without its ability to store all our information and perform tasks and calculations.

The University’s astronomy department in the 19th century probably would have been lost without its “computer,” too: Flora Ellen Harpham.

Harpham was hired in 1896 after graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota and teaching astronomy at Smith College in Massachusetts, becoming the first woman on Columbia’s academic staff. As a computer — one of the few ways women could be involved in science in the late 1800s and early 1900s — she was brought on to measure and analyze photographs of astronomical objects using a specialized tool called a micrometer.

Harpham worked on a collection of glass plate photographs of star clusters taken by Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, an astronomer and University trustee who pioneered the use of astrophotography. Rutherfurd donated his photographs to Columbia, and Harpham helped map stars in the Cygnus (swan) and Pleiades (seven sisters) constellations from the images. She eventually became the chief computer, leading a team of women who were mostly graduates of and students from Vassar College. She published articles about her work and methodology in Popular Astronomy magazine.

In 1908, Harpham left New York, but remained a Columbian as a professor of astronomy and mathematics at the College for Women in Columbia, S.C. From Harpham’s hiring in 1896, it would be another four decades until Ruth Benedict GSAS 1923, an assistant professor of anthropology, became the first woman to achieve tenure at the University, in 1937.