Year: Day to Day Men: March 7
Gold Pinstripes
The seventh of March in the year 1837 marks the birth date of American physician and amateur astronomer Henry Draper. Both a professor and Dean of Medicine at City University of New York, he was one of the pioneers in the field of astrophotography.
Born to John William Draper, a professor at New York University, and Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, daughter of the royal physician to the Emperor of Brazil, Henry Draper completed all his medical courses at the City University of New York’s School of Medicine by the age of twenty. Too young to graduate, he toured Europe for a year and became acquainted with the work of Irish astronomer William Parsons, Third Earl of Rosse. Draper’s interest in photography and the Earl of Rosse’s observatory would later become the basis of his career.
On his return from Europe, Draper received his Medical Degree and began working as a physician at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital. In 1860, he received appointment at the City University of New York as Professor of Natural Science. Draper joined the Twelfth New York Infantry Regiment’s S Company in May of 1862 as a surgeon during the Civil War. His brother, John Christopher Draper, joined him as an assistant surgeon; they served together as surgeons until October in 1862. Draper became Chairman of the Department of Physiology at City University in 1866.
Henry Draper met Mary Anna Palmer, the daughter of Connecticut merchant and real estate investor Courtlandt Palmer, and married her in 1867. A well-educated woman, Mary Anna Draper collaborated with her husband in his expeditions, research and photography. Upon her father’s death in 1872, she became heir, along with her three brothers, to her father’s fortune. Henry and Mary Anna Draper relocated to their summer home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where they constructed an observatory with a 71 cm (28 inch) reflecting telescope and began a fifteen-year research partnership.
Interested in the application of photography to astronomy, Draper started making daguerrotypes of the sun and moon; however in 1872, he succeeded for the first time in photographing the stellar spectrum of the star Vega. Draper discovered in 1879 that the newly developed dry-photographic plates were more sensitive and convenient than the older wet-collodion ones. By 1882 with the use of the newer photographic plates, he was able to obtain over a hundred stellar spectra images, including those of the Moon, Mars, Jupiter (1880) and the Orion Nebula. Draper also succeeded in directly photographing the Orion Nebula, first in September of 1880 with a fifty-minute exposure and later with a one hundred-forty minute exposure though the use of a more accurate clock-driven telescope.
In 1882, Henry Draper resigned from City University to concentrate on his astrophotographic work for which he hoped to obtain higher resolution images. On the twentieth of November in 1882, Draper suffered an untimely death at the age of forty-five from double pleurisy, an inflammation of the membranes that surround the lungs and line the chest cavity.
After his death, Mary Anna Draper funded the Henry Draper Award of the National Academy of Sciences for outstanding contributions to astrophysics. She founded the Henry Draper Memorial Fund which financed the famous Henry Draper Catalogue, a nine-volume collection published between 1918 and 1924 that contains spectra details of two hundred twenty-five thousand stars. Draper’s donations enabled astronomer Edward Charles Pickering to continue his classification of stars based on their spectra. She also funded the construction of the Mount Wilson Observatory as well as ongoing research at the Harvard Observatory.