Caroline Herschel was raised for housework and became the first salaried woman scientist
Typhus left Caroline Herschel barely 1.30 metres tall and blind in one eye, and her mother planned a life of servitude for her. Instead she followed her brother William to England, swept the night sky for comets, found eight of them, and became the first woman ever paid to do science.
Born in Hanover on 16 March 1750, the eighth child of a self-taught oboist, Caroline received little schooling. After typhus at ten stunted her growth, her family assumed she would never marry, and her mother pushed her toward domestic service, even forbidding her to learn French so she could not become a governess. Her father tutored her when he could. In August 1772 her brothers William and Alexander brought her to Bath, where William worked as an organist and music teacher.
At first music was her path. She became principal singer at William's oratorio concerts and was the first soloist in a 1778 performance of Handel's Messiah, earning an invitation to Birmingham that she turned down because she would sing only under William. But William was turning into an astronomer, grinding his own lenses, and she was drawn in, polishing mirrors, copying catalogues and reducing his observations. She remarked sourly in her memoir that she had served him like a well-trained puppy, though she came to love the work.
After William found Uranus in 1781 and became court astronomer to George III, they moved to Datchet near Windsor, a leaky house she called the ruins of a place. William set her to sweep the sky in strips. On 26 February 1783 she found a nebula missing from Messier's catalogue and, the same night, independently discovered the Andromeda companion now called Messier 110. During long nebula surveys she sat at a window writing down what William shouted from the telescope, matching his reference stars against John Flamsteed's catalogue, whose errors and 560 omitted stars she later documented for the Royal Society.
Between 1786 and 1797 she discovered eight comets, one of which William showed to the royal family as My Sister's Comet; the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet bears her name. She is often called the first woman to find a comet, but Maria Kirch did so earlier, with credit going to her husband. Herschel won the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal in 1828 and died on 9 January 1848.
Source: Caroline Herschel
