Abstract
Henry Norris Russell was born on 25 October 1877 at Oyster Bay, New York. Like so many starred American scientists he was a son of the manse, his father being the Rev. Alexander G. Russell, born in Nova Scotia of Scottish stock. His mother was Eliza Norris, who came of a line of New England sea captains; she was born at Para in Brazil where her father was temporarily United States consul. Russell came to Princeton, the home of his mother’s family, at the age of twelve. He graduated A.B. at Princeton University at the age of nineteen
insigne cum laude
, ‘the only time in recent Princeton history that this ultramaximum honour has been granted’. Working under A. C. Young in astronomy he graduated Ph.D. in 1900. He had already published several papers (on a new graphical method of determining the elements of a binary star orbit, on the densities of variable stars of the Algol type, on the elements of Planet DQ and of Eros, on measurements of the diameter of Jupiter, and on perturbations of the major axis of Eros by the action of Mars) before he proceeded in 1902 to King’s College, Cambridge as, what was called in those days, an advanced student. In the following year he worked with A. R. Hinks at the Cambridge Observatory as a Research Assistant of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, using the Sheepshanks telescope on photographic parallaxes of stars. A serious illness prevented him from carrying out the full observational programme which was completed by Hinks. The material was later forwarded to Russell at Princeton for measurement and reduction.