Maria Mitchell was born August 1, 1818, in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the third child of William and Lydia Mitchell, a Quaker family with ten children. Although she did attend the Cyrus Peirce School for Young Ladies for a time and was taught by her father, she was primarily self-educated.
At the age of sixteen she was already a teaching assistant to Cyrus Peirce, founder of the first normal school in America. (A normal school trains teachers, and would be called a teacher’s college today.) The following year, she decided to open her own school, renting a room and advertising in the newspaper. The following year, Maria was offered a job as a librarian of Nantucket's Atheneum Library, which she accepted, so she closed her school. Besides providing a great salary, the job also gave her time to read and study.
Around this same time, her father also accepted a position as cashier of the Pacific Bank. The new job included living quarters attached to the bank. Mr. Mitchell installed an observatory on the roof with a brand-new four-inch telescope. Using the observatory, he performed star observations for the United States Coast Guard. Maria helped with the measurements.
Often making her own observations, Maria practically memorized the sky. On October 1, 1847, she was making observations when she saw a star five degrees above the North Star where there had been no star before. The possibility that this might be a comet occurred to her. She recorded the presumed comet's coordinates. The following evening, the star had moved. Now, she was sure it was a comet.
Mr. Mitchell contacted Professor William Bond at the Harvard University observatory, telling him about Maria's discovery. The professor sent Maria's name to the king of Denmark who had offered a gold medal to a person who discovers a comet seen only through a telescope. In the meantime, Father Francesco de Vico of Rome spotted the same comet two days later than Maria. Being closer, his information arrived first and the decision was made to award him the prize. Once the king learned of Maria, and after some negotiations she was awarded the medal for this discovery a year later. The comet was named "Miss Mitchell's Comet."
Although she kept her librarian position after this, she began receiving letters of congratulations from scientists around the world. Also, tourists were visiting to see the woman astronomer. American Academy of Arts and Sciences voted her the first woman member in 1848 and The Association for the Advancement of Science followed suit in 1850. In 1849 the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office offered her a job by as a computer (Not like the one you’re reading this on, but a person who does computations.) of tables of positions of the planet Venus. She also began to travel scientific meetings.
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