This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

I'm Lizzie Peabody.

Siblings can be a pain sometimes, especially when you're a kid.

They take your clothes, pull your hair, eat all the cereal.

And in the case of Vera Cooper, living arrangements were the issue.

She was sharing a room with her sister, Ruth, and they had kind of put a line down the middle of the bed in the room.

Classic.

Ashley Yeager is a science writer and author of the book Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter

and Beyond.

She says Ruth was the older sister, so she got dibs on the side of the bed near the window.

But...

Vera would crawl over her every night to look out at the stars.

And Veer just said there was nothing else as fascinating as looking at those stars.

This was the late 1930s, so you could still see the stars from Washington, D.C., which is where they lived.

Each night, Vera would stare up at the night sky in awe.

She just was so enraptured with the night sky and wanted to understand how all the different components of the

sky and the earth and everything in the universe worked. Why are the stars moving? What else is out there?

She read all the books she could get her hands on, but she wanted to know more, see more. So when she was about 11 years old, she made a

plan. But she was going to need some supplies. She got on the bus herself. She went downtown.

She picked up a tube that used to hold linoleum and brought it back. This was the hard tube

inside a roll of linoleum. Imagine the cardboard tube inside a roll of paper towels, but much bigger and a lot stronger.

Now that Vera had her tube, she just needed two more things, lenses.

...