Selina Cranch Bond (1831-1920) worked at the Harvard College Observatory from 1879 to 1906. She was the fourth woman computer hired by the observatory, and she performed mathematical computations for a variety of projects.

Bond joined the HCO staff four years after the initial trio of Anna Winlock, Rhoda G. Saunders, and Rebecca Titsworth Rogers.¹  She assisted with the meridian circle observation project that Harvard was conducting in collaboration with several foreign universities and which was led at Harvard by Professor William Rogers and Anna Winlock.² Bond did calculations that took into account atmospheric effects and orbital variations to fix the exact positions of stars located by the meridian circle instrument.³

Bond worked in-person at the observatory until approximately 1900, and then she spent several years doing computing work for the HCO director Edward Pickering from her home in Maine, where she fiercely maintained her independent, self-sufficient spirit.⁴ In 1906, when Bond was age 75, her nieces Catherine Bond and Elizabeth Lidstone Bond worked with Edward Pickering to appoint her an “Assistant Emerita” to the observatory, which allowed her to retire from work and continue to get a pension from the observatory in recognition of the longtime dedication of herself and her family members.⁵

Bond was the daughter of William Cranch Bond (1789-1859), the first director of the HCO, and his wife, who was also named Selina Cranch Bond (1798-1831). She was the younger sister of George Phillips Bond (1825-1865), the second director of the HCO. She died at age 90 in Rockport, Maine.⁶

Written by Elizabeth Coquillette, 2022

Citations:

^{1-Paul A. Haley, “Williamina Fleming and the Harvard College Observatory.” The Antiquarian Astronomer: Journal of the Society for the History of Astronomy, no. 17 (June 2017): 3; Solon I. Bailey, The History and Work of Harvard Observatory, 1839 to 1927; an outline of the origin, development, and researches of the Astronomical observatory of Harvard College together with brief biographies of its leading members (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), 279.↩
2-Mary E. Byrd, “Anna Winlock,” Popular Astronomy (1904): 254-258.↩
3-Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took Measure of the Stars (New York: Viking, 2016), 9. ↩
4-Sobel, The Glass Universe, 120.↩
5-Ibid., 121 ; “Miss Selina Cranch Bond,” The Cambridge Tribune vol. XLIII, no. 40, Dec. 4, 1920.↩
6-“Miss Selina C. Bond Dies at Rockland, ME,” Boston Daily Globe, Nov. 27, 1920.↩}