Henry M. Parkhurst | |
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| Born | Henry Martyn Parkhurst March 1, 1825 |
| Died | January 21, 1908 (aged 82) |
| Nationality | American |
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| Relatives | Charles Henry Parkhurst (cousin) |
Henry Martyn Parkhurst (March 1, 1825 - January 21, 1908) was an American stenographer who served as Chief Official Court Reporter for the US Senate, an astronomer with pioneering work in Photometry, and an author. [1] [2] [3] Parkhurst was an advocate of "Dianism". [3]
Henry M. Parkhurst was born on March 1, 1825, to Rev. John L. Parkhurst. His cousin was Rev. Dr. Charles Henry Parkhurst. [4]
While typical stenographers record the words spoken, Parkhurst became a "phonographic recorder", writing not the words but rather the sounds which were spoken. [5] Parkhurst devised a modification of Pittman's phonography which Parkhurst called "Stenophonography". [1] An advocate for spelling reform, Parkhurst published The Plowshare for forty years, using a special alphabet "in which each character stood for a single sound and each sound was represented by a single character." [1]
In 1847, he served as reporter for the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem. [6] [7] From 1848 to 1854, Parkhurst was the Chief Official Court Reporter for the US Senate. [1] [8]
At a young age, Parkhurst observed the Great Comet of 1843. In the 1870s, he published a journal article describing a new photometric mapping device that could record the location and magnitude of stars. In 1893, ten years of his observations were published in the Harvard Annals. [9] [10] From 1883 to 1907, he conducted research into long period variable stars. [11] Beginning in 1887, he conducted a survey of asteroids. [11]
In 1867, Parkhurst investigated purported-clairvoyant Mollie Fancher, and after which he wrote multiple statements attesting to her abilities. In 1878, Parkhurt publicly attested to Fancher's abilities in a letter to the editor of the New York Herald . [12] [13] [14]
In 1887, Henry M. Parkhurst anonymously published 'Diana', a pamphlet that taught the practice of Dianaism. [15] [16] [17] The pamphlet was written in "reform spelling". [18] Parkhurst named his practice after the goddess of chastity. [17] Parkhurst drew inspiration from radical religious philosopher John Humphrey Noyes. [17]
Parkhurt later took credit for the pamphlet, authoring "Why I Wrote 'Diana'". [15]
Elmina Slenker was a "prominent promoter of the 'Diana method' of continence and distributor of the pamphlet Diana which explained to readers how to practice sexual expression without fears of conception". [19] She was arrested under obscenity laws. Parkhurst briefly took the stand in her defense at her trial. [15]
Sex reformer Ida Craddock advised study of "Alpha-ism" and Dianism [20] [18] "Diana", a pamphlet by "Prof. Parkhurst, the astronomer, and published by the Burnz Publishing Co., New York". [18]
In 1908, Parkhust died. That year, an in-depth profile of Parkhurst was published in Popular Astronomy, penned by Yerkes Observatory astronomer John Adelbert Parkhurst (no relation). [11]
Percival Lowell was an American businessman, author, mathematician, and astronomer who fueled speculation that there were canals on Mars, and furthered theories of a ninth planet within the Solar System. He founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and formed the beginning of the effort that led to the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death.
Henry Norris Russell ForMemRS HFRSE FRAS was an American astronomer who, along with Ejnar Hertzsprung, developed the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (1910). In 1923, working with Frederick Saunders, he developed Russell–Saunders coupling, which is also known as LS coupling.
Sandra Moore Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming was a Scottish astronomer. She was a single mother hired by the director of the Harvard College Observatory to help in the photographic classification of stellar spectra. She helped develop a common designation system for stars and cataloged more than ten thousand stars, 59 gaseous nebulae, over 310 variable stars, and 10 novae and other astronomical phenomena. Among several career achievements that advanced astronomy, Fleming is noted for her discovery of the Horsehead Nebula in 1888.
Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types. She was nearly deaf throughout her career after 1893, as a result of scarlet fever. She was a suffragist and a member of the National Women's Party.
Helen Battles Sawyer Hogg was an American-Canadian astronomer who pioneered research into globular clusters and variable stars. She was the first female president of several astronomical organizations and a scientist when many universities would not award scientific degrees to women. Her scientific advocacy and journalism included astronomy columns in the Toronto Star and the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. She was considered a "great scientist and a gracious person" over a career of sixty years.
Edward Charles Pickering was an American astronomer and physicist and the older brother of William Henry Pickering. Along with Carl Vogel, Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. He wrote Elements of Physical Manipulations.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved that she was correct. Her work on the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.
Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. In 1847, she discovered a comet named 1847 VI that was later known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet" in her honor. She won a gold medal prize for her discovery, which was presented to her by King Christian VIII of Denmark in 1848. Mitchell was the first internationally known woman to work as both a professional astronomer and a professor of astronomy after accepting a position at Vassar College in 1865. She was also the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer. Her discovery of how to effectively measure vast distances to remote galaxies led to a shift in the scale and understanding of the scale and the nature of the universe. Nomination of Leavitt for the Nobel Prize had to be halted because of her death.
William Henry Pickering was an American astronomer. Pickering constructed and established several observatories or astronomical observation stations, notably including Percival Lowell's Flagstaff Observatory. He led solar eclipse expeditions and studied craters on the Moon, and hypothesized that changes in the appearance of the crater Eratosthenes were due to "lunar insects". He spent much of the later part of his life at his private observatory in Jamaica.
Ellen Dorrit Hoffleit was an American senior research astronomer at Yale University. She is best known for her work in variable stars, astrometry, spectroscopy, meteors, and the Bright Star Catalog. She is also known for her mentorship of many young women and generations of astronomers.
Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Maury was an American astronomer who was the first to detect and calculate the orbit of a spectroscopic binary. She published an important early catalog of stellar spectra using her own system of stellar classification, which was later adopted by the International Astronomical Union. She also spent many years studying the binary star Beta Lyrae. Maury was part of the Harvard Computers, a group of female astronomers and human computers at the Harvard College Observatory.
The Bright Star Catalogue, also known as the Yale Catalogue of Bright Stars, Yale Bright Star Catalogue, or just YBS, is a star catalogue that lists all stars of stellar magnitude 6.5 or brighter, which is roughly every star visible to the naked eye from Earth. The catalog lists 9,110 objects, of which 9,095 are stars, 11 are novae or supernovae, and four are non-stellar objects which are the globular clusters 47 Tucanae and NGC 2808 (HR 3671), and the open clusters NGC 2281 (HR 2496) and Messier 67 (HR 3515).
The Harvard Computers were a team of women working as skilled workers to process astronomical data at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The team was directed by Edward Charles Pickering and, following his death in 1919, by Annie Jump Cannon.
The women were challenged to make sense of these patterns by devising a scheme for sorting the stars into categories. Annie Jump Cannon's success at this activity made her famous in her own lifetime, and she produced a stellar classification system that is still in use today. Antonia Maury discerned in the spectra a way to assess the relative sizes of stars, and Henrietta Leavitt showed how the cyclic changes of certain variable stars could serve as distance markers in space.
Ida Barney was an American astronomer, best known for her 22 volumes of astrometric measurements on 150,000 stars. She was educated at Smith College and Yale University and spent most of her career at the Yale University Observatory. She was the 1952 recipient of the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy.
Dianism is a 19th-century American spiritual sexual practice consisting of "sexual satisfaction from sexual contact" but without ejaculation. The practice was named for Diana, the Roman goddess of chastity, by American court reporter and astronomer Henry M. Parkhurst in his 1882 pamphlet Diana. In the 1890s, sexual mystic Ida Craddock included Dianism as part of her teachings. In the 20th century, the practice found favor with American followers of Aleister Crowley, most notably C.F. Russell.
Elmina Drake Slenker was a 19th-century American author, leader in the Freethought movement, and early sex reformer. A regular contributor to anarchist journal Lucifer the Lightbearer, Slinker advocated a sexual practice called Dianism. In 1887, Slenker was arrested for violating the Comstock laws which criminalized use of the US postal service to deliver sexually explicit content. She was jailed for several months, subjected to jury trial, and found guilty before finally being freed on a technicality.
Nan Dieter-Conklin, also known as Nannielou Reier Hepburn Dieter Conklin, was an American radio astronomer.
Frank Parkhurst Brackett was an American professor of astronomy who taught at Pomona College.
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