AIP archivist Allison Buser has just published an article in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, “Data Collection from the Periphery: Women and Obscured Roles in the Antebellum Smithsonian Meteorological Project.” It shows how many women volunteers contributed to the development of an early “big science” project to collect weather observations from across America. While not marked into Smithsonian ledgers, their contributions survive in correspondence, which Buser expertly mined for new stories and insights.

Vince Femia: You first began research on the Smithsonian Meteorological Project for your master’s thesis, if I’m correct. Take us through how your research began. What did you first make of the large correspondence network at the heart of the SMP? And what initial questions fascinated you?

Allison Buser: My thesis research began with questions about the American public’s relationship with the early Smithsonian Institution and how public understandings of scientific work shaped the institution’s development. I first encountered the meteorological project while reading about its beginnings in the Smithsonian’s early annual reports to the Board of Regents. I was immediately struck by the geographical extent of the project’s correspondence network and its continuous expansion across US states and territories. Coordinating such an immense and geographically dispersed network seemed an extraordinary logistical and technical undertaking, particularly given the limited staff and resources of the early Smithsonian. I was intrigued by what this work meant not only for the institution’s pursuit of scientific research but also for the individuals who volunteered to participate.

I was drawn to the extensive meteorological correspondence preserved at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the National Archives in College Park. I was particularly interested in discovering who volunteered for this work and what their correspondence revealed about their motivations for participating in a scientific enterprise coordinated by an institution they had likely never visited and knew primarily through their own information networks. The correspondence proved to be an exceptionally rich resource, illuminating not only the daily operations of the project but also aspects of the personal lives, interests, and experiences of individuals who incorporated meteorological observation into their everyday routines. These glimpses often appear incidentally, embedded within otherwise administrative correspondence. Yet, when considered collectively, such details begin to reveal patterns in the experiences and relationships of participants across the network.

One pattern that quickly emerged was the presence of women at multiple levels of the project. I was excited by these initial discoveries, although I was not immediately certain whether the scattered letters and often brief, passing references to women would accumulate into a substantial body of evidence from which meaningful patterns or hypotheses could emerge. I nearly set these letters aside to concentrate on my original research questions, but I was reluctant to allow these traces of women’s participation to disappear once again into the larger archival record. Instead, I began photographing the letters and maintaining a separate collection of references while continuing to investigate the broader relationships between the Smithsonian and its correspondents.

Previous research had begun to establish the broader contours of women’s involvement in the early Smithsonian’s research projects. However, I became increasingly interested in what the correspondence could reveal beyond the identification of women as observers or contributors: such as the different forms their participation took, what interests could be detected, the relationships that facilitated their involvement, and the ways their scientific labor was acknowledged, obscured, or recorded only indirectly. These questions suggested that the correspondence network could illuminate not only the history of the project itself but also the broader social relationships through which scientific knowledge was produced in nineteenth-century America.

Femia: One strong aspect of the paper is the elevation of the women’s voices who took part in the SMP. Women faced exclusion from the social, physical, and textual spaces of science in the nineteenth century, and men often downplayed or ignored their contributions. But how did the women meteorological observers characterize their own work, and why? And what can their voices tell us about science, labor, and gender in the nineteenth century?

Buser: In most cases, women were not afforded the opportunity to characterize their own scientific work in ways that are directly preserved in the archival record. Women were frequently excluded from the spaces that would have enabled their voices to appear in the correspondence in a manner more commensurate with their actual contributions to the project. Although their labor was often essential to its operations, their personal interests, motivations, and reflections on their scientific work are largely absent from a correspondence network dominated by exchanges between men.

When women did communicate directly with the Smithsonian, their descriptions of their work were often shaped by the need to navigate the social conventions and gendered expectations of nineteenth-century scientific society. This frequently involved characterizing their roles as assistants or substitutes to their husbands or fathers or emphasizing the practical benefits of their work to male members of their households. Such framing can make it difficult to distinguish women’s independent scientific interests and intellectual curiosity from the supporting roles they were expected to occupy. Nevertheless, evidence of these interests emerges in several statements made by women themselves, as well as in correspondence written by men on behalf of their station.

I actually open the article with a letter from a woman who sought to correct the attribution of her meteorological observations to a male observer. Although the data tables had been submitted under her employer’s name, she explained to the Smithsonian that she, a clerk, had independently collected and submitted the observations for some time.

Femia: Labor is an essential theme in your paper. Notions of “men’s work” and “women’s work,” especially the “domestic sphere,” dictated how women participated in the SMP. Did you find other examples of somewhat unexpected observers, such as children, domestic workers, or enslaved people?

Buser: One of the more difficult questions to answer through the correspondence is precisely how scientific labor was distributed within participating households. Who was responsible for conducting observations and collecting data? Who prepared the meteorological registers and accompanying correspondence? Who read the Smithsonian’s publications and followed the broader scientific developments of the project? Who participated out of personal scientific interest, and who was drawn into the work through existing household responsibilities and labor relationships?

It was not unusual for observers to enlist other individuals in their households and/or research stations. One correspondent quoted in the article, for example, described his sons and daughters as essential to maintaining his observations (although it is difficult to determine whether these individuals were children or young adults). Some of the clearest evidence of children’s participation comes from two ten-year-old girls discussed in my article: Celestia Wattles of Moneka, Kansas, and Mary Hoffer of Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. In both cases, their fathers deliberately involved them in meteorological observation for educational purposes. Celestia’s father, in particular, expressed his hope that cultivating her interest in natural philosophy would deepen her spiritual appreciation of the natural world, reflecting a religious understanding of scientific inquiry that was prevalent during this period.

Domestic workers were also likely involved in the project, although their status is difficult to identify. Correspondents occasionally referred to third-party “assistants,” but the nature of these individuals’ relationships to the observers, including whether they were employed as domestic workers, is rarely clear. The correspondence provides only limited glimpses of their labor beyond their immediate involvement in meteorological observation. A fuller understanding of scientific households would require more extensive examination of census records and other local historical sources. I undertook some of this comparative research for my thesis, particularly when individual letters raised questions about household composition or observers’ movements over time, but there remains considerable potential for further investigation.

Although I do not explore this dimension as extensively in the article, the project’s operations also raise important questions about the relationship between scientific labor and slavery. At Southern observation stations operated by enslavers, participation in the Smithsonian Meteorological Project cannot be entirely separated from the exploitation of enslaved labor. One example is Eliza Young, the first woman included in the Smithsonian’s published list of meteorological observers in 1849, whose “untiring attention” to her observations was specifically acknowledged. Yet her ability to devote time and attention to scientific work depended, at least in part, on the labor of approximately forty African Americans enslaved by the Young household, who maintained the household and the 800 acres of farmland listed under her husband, Lawrence Young’s, name.

Taking this question further, I encountered a particularly intriguing letter from Richard T. Gibson, an observer and enslaver operating a meteorological station on a plantation on Whitemarsh Island, Georgia. In 1852, Gibson explained that his frequent absences made it difficult to maintain regular observations, particularly because he was unmarried. Nevertheless, he reported that he had managed to maintain his meteorological registers “by the aid of an intelligent servant.” Taken with census data, the evidence is not conclusive, but it raises important questions about the extent to which enslaved people contributed scientific labor that was subsequently attributed to the enslavers.

Femia: You frame the SMP as “big science,” a term that many historians might associate more with the World War II and Cold War eras. What were the “big science” qualities of the SMP? And how can thinking in terms of “big science” change our assumptions about science in the nineteenth century?

Buser: Applying the term “big science” to a project operating in the 1850s might seem somewhat anachronistic, much like referring to earlier practitioners of natural philosophy as “scientists” before the term entered common usage. Nevertheless, the Smithsonian Meteorological Project exhibited many of the basic characteristics of what historians now understand as big science. It coordinated an extensive nationwide network, with some international participation, through standardized systems of observation, data collection, and computation (this computational work performed by human computers, including women whose contributions have been explored in Sara Grossman’s scholarship). The systematic publication of scientific datasets and analysis was also a central objective of the enterprise.

The project also exhibited the institutional infrastructure and financial demands associated with later big science endeavors. It operated under the auspices of a national scientific institution governed by a Board of Regents with significant federal oversight. Within its first decade, the project’s expanding scale and resource requirements compelled Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry to accept federal funding, despite his preference for maintaining the institution’s financial independence from the government. The program was eventually transferred to federal administration entirely under the US Army Signal Service, with its work subsequently evolving into what became the National Weather Service.

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Vince Femia
American Institute of Physics
vfemia@aip.org

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