A postcard bearing no publisher's name which was posted on Tuesday the 12th. August 1919 to:
Mrs. G. Arnell,
42, Lawrence Road,
East Ham,
London E6.
The message on the back of the card was as follows:
"Dear Mrs. Arnell,
We are enjoying the change
and the weather.
We should benefit greatly
by it.
Yours sincerely,
Mrs. Smith".
Kit's Coty House
Kit's Coty House is the remains of a Neolithic chambered long barrow on Blue Bell Hill near Aylesford in Kent.
Samuel Pepys visited it and wrote:
'Three great stones standing upright and a great
round one lying on them, of great bigness, although
not so big as those on Salisbury Plain. But certainly
it is a thing of great antiquity, and I am mightily glad
to see it'.
It is one of six Medway Megaliths which were constructed near the River Medway. The other chambered long barrows are called the Coldrum Stones, Addington Long Barrow, Chestnuts Long Barrow, the Countless Stones, and the Coffin Stone.
Margaret Burbidge
So what else happened on the day that Mrs. Smith posted the card?
Well, the 12th. August 1919 marked the birth of Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey). She was a British-born American astrophysicist, noted for original research and holding many administrative posts, including Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
During her career, she served at the University of London Observatory, the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, and the California Institute of Technology.
From 1979 to 1988, Margaret was first director of the Center for Astronomy and Space Sciences at the University of California San Diego, where she has worked since 1962.
-- Margaret Burbidge's Career
Burbidge started studying astronomy in 1936, at University College, London. She graduated in 1939, and received her Ph.D. at University College in 1943.
She was turned down for a Carnegie Fellowship in 1945, because the fellowship would have meant that she would have had to observe at Mount Wilson observatory, which was reserved only for men at that time.
On the 2nd. April 1948, Margaret Peachey married Geoffrey Burbidge, also a theoretical astrophysicist. Their daughter, Sarah, was born in late 1956. Geoffrey Burbidge died in 2010.
In 1950, she applied for a grant at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and went to the United States in 1951. Her research interests focused on chemical abundances in stars.
Margaret returned to England in 1953 and started research in collaboration with her husband Geoffrey Burbidge, William Alfred Fowler, and Fred Hoyle.
Based on experimentation and observational data initiated by Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, the team produced a hypothesis that all chemical elements might be synthesized in stars by nuclear reaction (known now as stellar nucleosynthesis). This theory has been the basis for a substantial field of research in astrophysics.
After ten years, in 1955, Margaret finally gained access to the Mount Wilson Observatory by posing as her husband's assistant. When the management found out, they eventually agreed that she could stay, if she and her husband went to live in a separate cottage in the grounds, rather than staying in the dormitory that had been designed for men alone.
In 1972 Margaret became director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. This was the first time in 300 years that the directorship was not associated with the post of the Astronomer Royal, which instead, was awarded to radio astronomer Martin Ryle. She attributed this to continued sexism in the field.
Burbidge left this post in 1974, fifteen months after accepting it, when controversy broke out over moving the Isaac Newton Telescope from the Observatory to a more useful location.
Experiences such as those turned Burbidge into one of the foremost and most influential personalities in the fight to end discrimination against women in astronomy.
Consequently, in 1972 she turned down the Annie J. Cannon Award of the American Astronomical Society because it was awarded to women only:
"It is high time that discrimination in
favour of, as well as against, women
in professional life be removed".
Twelve years later the Society awarded her its highest honour, regardless of gender, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship.
At the University of California San Diego, she served as its first director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Science. At UCSD she helped develop the Faint Object Spectrograph in 1990 for the Hubble Space Telescope. With this instrument, she and her team discovered that the galaxy M82 has a massive black hole at its centre.
Burbidge has contributed to over 370 articles on astronomical research.
Margaret died after a fall in San Francisco at the age of 100 on the 5th. April 2020.
