50 Years Ago

“Dr. Josephine Macalister Brew, C.B.E.” — It is hard to believe that Dr. Macalister Brew is dead; for if any one adjective could have described her it would have been the hackneyed word 'vital'... [but it] was not surprising that she was worked to death. Government departments, charitable trusts, bodies as varied as the Marriage Guidance Council and the Educational Drama Association all made demands on her strength; and to none of them did she give half-measure.... there must be scores [of boys and girls] who remember this odd little figure who knew what they were thinking before they did and, more, could put it into intelligible words.

From Nature 13 July 1957.

100 Years Ago

The problem of determining the motion of the sun amongst the stars has undergone a great change in consequence of Prof. J. C. Kapteyn's investigations... These researches indicated that the stars surrounding us do not form a simple system, but a dual one. From a discussion of the motions of the stars of Bradley's catalogue, Prof. Kapteyn demonstrated the existence of two great streams of stars passing through one another, and found the directions of motions of these streams relative to the sun and to one another. The Bradley stars, numbering about 2600, are mainly stars visible to the naked eye; they cover nearly three-quarters of the celestial sphere, and throughout the whole of this area Prof. Kapteyn found the two streams prevailing, and it seemed probable that all the stars he examined belonged to one or other of the two streams... In conclusion, whilst Prof. Kapteyn's theory accounts in a simple manner for the very anomalous and unsymmetrical way in which the directions of motion of the stars are distributed, it is still awaiting the verdict of the spectroscopic determinations of line-of-sight velocities. A. S. Eddington

From Nature 11 July 1907.