The amount of compute required at the Harvard College Observatory was of galactic proportion. Stored inside large brick buildings at Concorde Avenue in Cambridge Massachusetts, in proximity of the Harvard Campus, stood rows and rows of deep cabinets with files of glass plates grafted with dots of varying intensity; a sky full of stars that had etched themselves onto the light-sensitive silver coatings. They were the 'photographs' taken from the nightly heavens — fragile records safely stacked betwixt the specially constructed double walled edifices insulating the panes from earthquakes. Glass plate photometry was the astronomers’ recording method in the year 1908. Dr. Edward Charles Pickering, or as his fellows liked to call, Eddie, stood for the stellar task of analyzing the photos, to catalog and measure the brightness of the stars that had written themselves light years away from Earth on this windowed database. As director of the HCO he controlled the limited budget his department was to spend on astronomy, and he had thought long on how to process the data with the limited resources at hand. To hire additional astronomers was not going to cut the cake, for these fellows were quite expensive. There had to be another way.

       Luckily, from the Department of Mathematics he had heard of a potential solution — computers. These calculators were cheap and could process the plates and finish the task within his lifetime. He didn’t dabble too long on the decision and by the same time next week he had seven computers installed in a little cramped room next to his office. Some criticized Eddie’s experimental choice of assigning scientific labor to these computers. Nobody in his department had ever worked with them before — it was all quite new at the time. But the director did not flinch. It quickly became apparent his decision had been a good one, for the throughput of plates analyzed increased exponentially, and the mathematical accuracy was beyond what any astronomer could ever deliver. At the very least, computers equaled the work of men, at the utmost they outperformed them. Back then in the early 20th century this was considered a disconcerting new reality.       One computer Eddie particularly liked. He called her Henrietta. This calculator was well wired and able to handle complex tasks, but she unfortunately only took written instructions unlike the others. Though this could be considered a troublesome flaw, Eddie believed it had given Henrietta a special power, and the defect ought to help her in canceling out the noise and hone in on the sparse signal.       Henrietta, hence, was assigned with the task of going over the light etchings taken from the Small Magellanic Nebula in the constellation of Cepheus. This gas cloud lies on the edge of the Zone of Galactic Obscurity (ZGO), the part of the sky that is veiled by the stars and dust of the Milky Way and shall remain hidden for as long as humans stay within the bounds of their own solar system. Though on the rim of the ZGO, the nebula still partially lies in a dark dusty haze, resulting in hazy pictures, rendering their analysis practically impossible.       Nevertheless, the computer was fed the glass plates of this reach of dim space of which multiple recordings had been made over the last decade. Henrietta was to investigate the so-called variable stars. These specks changed in luminosity within fixed periods ranging from dim to bright. The task was ludicrous, for the plates were blurry and no astronomer as of yet was able to deduce any pattern from the stellar phenomena. Yet, the computer had no trouble reading the noisy data. And so, night and day, Monday through Saturday, Henrietta shredded through the glass works like a true machine. Until one Saturday night, several moons and thousands of gloomy panes later, structure emerged from the mirk. Somewhere, in a nebula far, far away, the computer had detected something that would upend our view of the heavens forever.

      In the early 20th century there was no way of knowing how distant the stars were in space. For stars up to a hundred light years from Earth could be calculated through parallax, but sources beyond this range were all too remote to determine. There was no way of telling whether a star was close and dim or distant and bright, as they appeared completely the same. For over a century astronomers had been searching for the ‘standard candle’, a particular type of star to be used as a new measure to calculate distances across the Milky Way. For all people knew, we lived in a single galaxy universe, the Milky Way.       But when Eddie arrived Monday morning at the office, the universe as he knew it was shaking. While hanging up his coat, he was notified of Henrietta’s work and immediately dashed into the computer’s room to inspect her discoveries within the obscure zone. Jawed, he understood what she had uncovered — the standard candle. His favorite computer had found a relationship between a variable star’s period and its brightness. If they could parallax one of the Cepheid stars, Henrietta could calibrate her dataset and measure the distance to any variable star so that astronomers would finally have their yardstick to measure the visible universe. Henrietta was on the cusp of a breakthrough. Not only was it an extraordinary find, no computer had ever made a scientific discovery before in history.       In the afternoon Eddie went for his monthly lunch with the directors of the other departments at Pulcinella Italian restaurant on Huron Avenue, a couple of minutes walk from the plate stack buildings. He couldn’t contain his excitement to share the news. After some minestrone and minor formalities, Eddie enlightened his fellows on the discovery prior to their main course. Initially, the men were very excited about a potential standard candle. But when they figured out a computer had made the discovery their enthusiasm turned sour and their faces resembling a customer finding a black hair in their fettuccine carbonara. The suspicious scientists returned derisive words of disparagement. How could a computer ever make a discovery? Science was the field of men. Next thing, computers might ask for voting rights and a decent wage.       Eddie had always believed himself to be part of a progressive institute, but the reactions of his colleagues proved otherwise. When the waitress put his linguini primavera under his nose and he stared at his steamy pasta under the sound of chuckles, it was as if he too had found a hair in his dish. So this was science? It was not about what had been discovered, it was who had found it. Regardless of even wanting to look at the data, scrutinize, verify and repeat the calculations — the work was discarded right off the bat...because a computer had made the discovery. Eddie’s appetite had withered. He stood up from the table, dumped the creamy linguini on his neighbors head, and slammed the door on his way out.

      Back at the office, Eddie instructed Henrietta to print out the charts and tables on the Cepheid variables. Whether the directors liked it or not, Henrietta’s breakthrough study was going to get published and see the light of day.       On Friday everything was ready to be submitted. Since this was Henrietta’s work, the article was under her name. He folded the paperwork into an envelope and posted it to Harvard’s internal mailing system directed at the university’s publication office. If all went well, the American scientific community would soon learn of the novel revolutionary astronomical method.       Next Monday, a letter from Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College lay on Eddie’s desk. With high anticipation he opened the envelope, but when his eyes unraveled the words, his excitement melted like snow before the sun. “Publication Rejection — Computers can't make discoveries.”

      Eddie tried that week numerous times to speak to the publisher, but they weren’t in the space of reconsideration. Nobody would believe it, the editor said, and their reputation as a serious journal would be jeopardized. Eddie telegraphed all the journals across the States who might accept Henrietta’s work, but all of them declined and he was ready to throw in the towel. All his options were exhausted, but one.       Thursday night, after a long day’s work he put on his coat and about ready to go home for supper when he heard noises coming from the computer’s room. When he knocked and slowly opened the door, he saw Henrietta still making calculations after all the other staff had left. Eddie didn’t want to do it, but he made his way across and sat down in a chair next to the computer. He swallowed a few times before reluctantly writing her whether it was alright he’d change Henrietta’s name to his in order to successfully publish her findings. The computer remained still for a moment before she replied that, with regard to scientific progress, this was possibly, at this time, the best solution at hand.       And so it was done. The paper was published under E.C. Pickering. In the abstract Eddie included the work had been performed by Henrietta, but as always, it's only the author with his name on top that is cited. Hence, the computer's name was obscured from history. Her name and study remained in darkness, pulled into the gravity well of the blackhole of collective forgetfulness where she remained for decades. Fortunately, her research would finally shine through the haze and reach a noble astronomer who deeply valued her work.       In 1924, Edwin Hubble, the famous astronomer who from the eponymous telescope in Low Earth Orbit, published a paper in which he calculated the distance to the Andromeda Nebula and concluded, with the use of Henrietta's standard candle, that it wasn't a gas cloud but a whole other galaxy a thousand lightyears away from our Milky Way. Consequently, the nebula was renamed to Andromeda Galaxy and it was the first real proof that we human beings live in a multiverse of galaxies. And like the paradigm shifted once from geocentric to heliocentric, a shift occurred from Milky-centric to multiverse. Not the Earth, nor the Sun, nor the Milky Way stood at the center of the heavens. Hubble's ensuing research showed there was nowhere a center to be found and the universe expanded outward in all directions. All these revelations built on top of the research by a quiet computer that turned Edwin Hubble into a Nobel Prize laureate. The man mentioned many times he couldn't have done without the standard candle and that science owed her one.

      A crater on the Moon, a telescope in Texas and the relationship between a variable star's light curve and its brightness have been named after the computer. Though Henrietta’s work shed light on the size of the universe and our place within it, she remained in the zone of obscurity for another hundred years, and barely now seems to have escaped its eclipse. Unfortunately, she wouldn't witness the success and recognition of her work. Henrietta Swan Leavitt died in 1921 from stomach cancer at the age of 53 and was buried at Cambridge Cemetery — a mile away from the Harvard observatory and plate stacks she had worked at so ardently.       Henrietta was one of the many women back in the day to perform manual calculations when computers were still made of flesh and blood and not yet from silicon.