The Bruce Medalists

 

  Photo c. 1916, Yale University, courtesy Dr. Dorrit Hoffleit 
Frank Schlesinger
11 May 1871 1929 Bruce Medalist 10 July 1943

Born in New York City, Frank Schlesinger was educated at the College of the City of New York and Columbia University. After five years measuring latitude in Ukiah, California, he went to Yerkes Observatory, where, with the encouragement of director George E. Hale, he pioneered in the use of photographic techniques to determine stellar parallaxes. He soon showed that photographic methods could give more precise results than visual ones, and with less than one hundredth as much time at the telescope. Schlesinger served as director of Allegheny Observatory from 1905 to 1920 and of the Yale University Observatory from 1920 to 1941. He designed instruments and mathematical and numerical techniques to improve parallax measurements. He published ten volumes of zone catalogs, including some 150,000 stars. He compiled positions, magnitudes, proper motions, radial velocities, and other data to produce the first edition and, with Louise Jenkins, the second, of the widely-used Bright Star Catalogues, making Yale a leading institution in astrometry. He also did spectroscopic work, determining orbits of spectroscopic binary stars. He established a second Yale observatory in South Africa and personally supervised its construction. He was an influential leader in the astronomical community and held several offices in the American Astronomical Society and the International Astronomical Union.

Presentation of Bruce medal
Moore, J.H., PASP 41, 8-15 (1929).

Other awards
French Academy of Sciences, Valz medal, 1926.
Royal Astronomical Society, Gold medal, 1927, presented by J.H. Jeans, MNRAS 87, 340-47 (1927).

Some offices held
American Astronomical Society, President, 1919-22.
International Astronomical Union, President, 1932-35.

Biographical materials
Brouwer, Dirk, Biographical Memoir of the National Academy of Sciences 24, 105 (1943-46) [pdf].
Hoffleit, E. Dorrit, Dictionary of Scientific Biography 12, 176-77.
Smith, Horace A., Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (Springer, NY, 2007), pp. 1024-25.
Tenn, Joseph S., “Frank Schlesinger: The Twenty-Fourth Bruce Medalist,” Mercury 23, 3, 26 (1994)

Obituaries
Alden, H.L., “Dr. Frank Schlesinger, 1871-1943,” Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of South Africa 3, 16-17 (1944).
Barney, Ida, Popular Astronomy 51, 409-12 (1943).
Mitchell, S.A., PASP 55, 209-16 (1943).
Slocum, Frederick, Ap.J. 98, 241-43 (1943).
Spencer Jones, H., MNRAS 104, 94-98 (1944).
More obituaries

Portraits
AIP Center for History of Physics
Yale University: photo, 1921 [with W. de Sitter]

Named after him
Lunar crater Schlesinger
Minor Planet #1770 Schlesinger

More references

The Bruce Medalists

Please send comments, additions, corrections, and questions to
joe.tenn@sonoma.edu
 JST
2013-01-24