A Stellar Student, He Transformed Our Understanding of the Stars

“There was a time when it was supposed to be beyond human power to find out what the sun and stars were made of,” wrote Princeton astronomer Henry Norris Russell 1897 *1900 in a 1941 issue of Scientific American, for which he wrote a monthly column for more than 40 years chronicling advances in the study of the cosmos. “We all know how the ‘hopeless’ problem was suddenly solved.”

Russell knew the solution because he had played a critical part in determining the sun’s composition using the discipline of spectroscopy, the study of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation. Because each element gives off its own configuration of wavelengths in the form of solar radiation, if astronomers could record the spectrum emitted by the sun, they could determine its composition. Among his many astronomical innovations, in 1929, Russell proved that the sun was mostly made up of hydrogen, a revelation that informed the later determination that the element was the building block of much of the known universe.

By comparison, Russell’s universe started out small within a family of vast intellectual horizons. Growing up in the affluent Long Island community of Oyster Bay, his father was a minister whose congregation included future president Theodore Roosevelt. Despite his spiritual upbringing, Russell came from a mathematical family — his grandmother had won an award for her mathematics prowess at Rutgers Female Institute in New York, and his mother had been recognized for her math ability at the University of Edinburgh.

In 1882, when Russell was 5 years old, his parents showed him the transit of Venus, an influential moment that informed his interests going forward. Sensing his potential, his parents enrolled him in Princeton Preparatory School. While attending, he lived with his aunt Ada Norris in her house at 79 Alexander St., a home he would eventually inherit and inhabit for the rest of his life.

Entering the University in 1893, Russell developed a passion for astronomy under the magnetic professor Cyrus Young. A workaholic, Russell didn’t play cards, smoke, or drink beer as a student. He graduated with the rare distinction of insigni cum laude (with extraordinary honor), and his class yearbook dubbed him “Our Bright and Shining Star.”

However, after receiving his Princeton doctorate in astronomy in 1900, Russell’s overwork caught up with him and he suffered a nervous breakdown. Sent to the Italian island of Capri to recover, he went on to pursue postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge. He returned to Princeton in 1905 to join the faculty; six years later, he was appointed director of the Princeton observatory, where he’d stay on until his 1947 retirement.

As an instructor, Russell was enthusiastic and erratic. According to biographer David DeVorkin, Russell’s lectures frequently exceeded the class window by hours, during which he would fiddle with his chair nonstop. “Russell would stumble over it, climb on it, [and] declaim for a minute or so from the summit,” wrote former student Donald Menzel *1924.

The field of astronomy was transitioning from strict observation of celestial objects toward astrophysics, paving the way for the physical and chemical understanding of celestial movements and processes. Starting in 1921, Russell split his time between Princeton and the Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California. According to DeVorkin, he was recruited to “serve as an interpreter and as catalyst” between physicists at Caltech and the astronomers atop the mountain, enabling better collaboration between the theorists and the observers.

Through his regular columns in Scientific American, Russell also represented an antecedent of popular science communicators like Neil deGrasse Tyson, chronicling the rapid leaps astronomy made in the first half of the 20th century.

Upon the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system in 1943, Russell wrote that “this latest discovery completes the work which Copernicus began four centuries ago,” explaining that the idea that the Earth was at the center of the universe was now long dead. “There is no longer a basis for supposing that either this world or its inhabitants are unique,” Russell wrote. “The realization of this should be good for us.”