Caroline Herschelthe HearthISFJ

One day in Bath, around 1775, Caroline Herschel, about 25, stood at her brother's elbow putting food into his mouth a bite at a time, because his hands could not leave the mirror.

William Herschel was making telescopes, and in those days that meant making the mirrors by hand: discs of metal, polished for hours, that could not be left once the work began. To finish one mirror, she remembered, “he had not taken his hands from it for sixteen hours together.”

Someone had to keep the man going while his mind was on the metal. In that house it was Caroline. “By way of keeping him alive,” she wrote, “I was constantly obliged to feed him by putting the victuals by bits into his mouth.”

Picture the arrangement. He polished. She fed him, read to him at the lathe and kept the household turning around the bench. It is the job Hearths end up doing most often, and it rarely earns a line in the record.

She had not come to England for this. Born in Hanover in 1750, she had grown up with little expected of her, and she had dreaded being “turned into an Abigail or housemaid,” a lady's maid. In 1772 she joined William in Bath to train as a singer.

Then the mirrors took over the house, and the singing quietly stopped. She left no complaint about it. She ground mirrors, copied out his work and ran his home, and the household moved with his career to Slough, near Windsor.

By 1786 she had a small telescope of her own. On the night of 1 August, at 36, with William away, she found a faint, round object she did not recognize. Haze came in before she could be sure. The next evening she looked again, and it had moved.

Then she did the thing Hearths find hardest. She wrote that night to Charles Blagden, Secretary of the Royal Society, and reported the comet under her own name. Her letter opened with an apology.

Apology and all, she sent it. It was the first of eight comets she would find. In 1787 the king granted her £50 a year as William's assistant, money in her own name.

In 1788 William married. Caroline, 38, handed over the house she had run for sixteen years and moved out. Whatever she wrote about the next ten years, she later destroyed.

She kept working. In 1798 she published an index to Flamsteed's great star catalog. In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society, which did not admit women, gave her its Gold Medal, and in 1835 it made her an honorary member.

Even so, she described herself in the smallest words she could find: “I am only the tool which he shaped to his use—a well-trained puppy-dog would have done as much.”

No puppy finds eight comets. She died in Hanover on 9 January 1848, at 97. The account she sent from Slough is still in the Royal Society's archive, under her own name.