Anna Winlock

Winlock was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 15, 1857, to astronomer Joseph Winlock and Isabella Lane.^[1] Winlock attended the Cambridge Schools as a child and began to develop an interest in both mathematics and the Greek language. By age 10, Anna had watched her father go from Superintendent at the American Nautical Almanac Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the Director of the Harvard College Observatory as well as a professor of Astronomy at the main Harvard College.^[2] Encouraged by her father, she exhibited remarkable abilities in mathematics and took an early interest in observational astronomy. Upon her graduation she received a letter from her principal expressing his appreciation for her Greek and of her character. Her father influenced her interest in astronomy. When she was twelve, she attended a solar eclipse expedition with her father in his home state of Kentucky. In June 1875, Joseph died shortly after Winlock had graduated from secondary school. Winlock quickly followed in her father's footsteps becoming one of the first female paid staff members of the Harvard College Observatory.^[3]

After the death of her father, it fell upon her to find financial support for her mother and four siblings, and soon she approached the Harvard College Observatory seeking a job in calculations. Specifically, she was capable of reducing volumes of unreduced observations, a decades worth of numbers in a useless state, that previously her father had left unfinished. The interim director of the observatory complained that he could not process the data, as "the condition of the funds is an objection to hiring anyone."^[4] Winlock presented herself to the observatory and offered to reduce the observations. She quickly proved invaluable to the observatory, working extensively on meridian circle observations and precise star cataloging calculations.^[5] Having been previously introduced to the principles of mathematical astronomy by her father she seemed like a capable asset to the observatory and could be paid less than half the prevailing rate for calculating at the time. Harvard was able to offer her twenty-five cents an hour to do the computations. Winlock found the conditions acceptable and took the position.^[4]

In less than a year, she was joined at the observatory by three other women who also served as computers; they became known as Harvard Computers, gaining notoriety for leaving an uncomfortable example on the government computing agencies because of the women's low wages and arduous work, even though it was of high quality.^[6] In 1886, Louisa Winlock, Anna's younger sister, joined her in the computing room. ^[7] Anna Winlock found it important the work to be done in astronomy, especially for women. Beyond her calculations, she was also involved in determining asteroid orbits, contributing to early studies of the asteroid Eros, which later became the first asteroid to be closely studied by a spacecraft. By her own development as a scientist and her lasting contributions to the stellar program of the observatory, she served as an example that women were equally capable as men of doing astronomical work.^[8]