This is the memory palace, I'm late to ma'am.

The observatory on the hill was old even then, in 1877.

And the worn out floorboards would groan when Edward Pickering climbed the dark staircase

to the telescope in the tower. The telescope had done good work. It had found Saturn's eighth moon,

had first spotted that planet's innermost ring. The first agarotype of a star, Vega,

the second brightest in the night sky that hung over Harvard and its old observatory on the

hill, was taken with that telescope. But those discoveries happened long ago, when the old

observatory was now. So what could its new director do with it, with its outmoded telescope,

and with its staff of nattering young man, the Harvard students, who were phoning it in,

or telegraphing it in, or whatever you could say of lazy, entitled grad students in the late 19th

century. These guys drove Professor Pickering nuts. He had worked to do. He had observations to make,

he had data to collect, numbers to crunch. And these bright Harvard men couldn't be bothered

to make a careful calculation. Pickering said his maid could do a better job.

So he hired her.

For 25 cents an hour, William Mina Fleming came to work at the observatory. She swapped a feather

duster for a pencil, a washed up for an inkwell. It did simple mathematics for Mr. Pickering,

adding up columns of figures, filling spreadsheets and leather-bound ledgers,

sitting at a desk in a dusty corner of the observatory's third floor. At the end of her shift,

she turned her work over to her professor, and watched his face light up. At the neatness of the

rows, the clarity of her penmanship. How a one could never be confused with a seven. How even

after long hours, her tired eyes never seemed to mistake a three for a two. And he'd smile at his

best assistant. This woman who had once been his maid. At 25 cents an hour, he hired more maids,

...