The first American woman to win distinction in astronomy was Miss Maria Mitchell. Born in the island of Nantucket in 1818, she, at an early age, displayed remarkable talent for astronomy and mathematics. Her first instructor was her father, who, besides being a school teacher, had from his youth been an enthusiastic student of astronomy, and that, too, at a time when very little attention was given to its study in this country, and when the observatory of Harvard College consisted of only a little projection to an old mansion in Cambridge, in which there was a small telescope. At the age of thirteen little Maria counted seconds by the chronometer for her father while he observed the annular eclipse of the sun in 1831; and from that time on she was his assiduous co-worker in the study of the heavens. After teaching school for some years, she became the librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum, a position which she held for nearly twenty years. Here she continued the study of her favorite science, and read all the books on astronomy which she could obtain. It was during this period that she read Bowditch's translation of Laplace's _Mecanique Celeste_ and Gauss's _Theoria Motus Corporum Caelestium_ in the original. On the evening of October 1, 1847, she was the discoverer of a comet that attracted great attention because it secured for her a medal offered by the King of Denmark in 1831 for the first one who should discover a telescopic comet. The same comet was observed by Father de Vico in Rome two days subsequently, by Dawes in England on October seventh, and by Madame Ruemker, wife of the director of the observatory of Hamburg, on the eleventh of the same month. As there was no Atlantic cable in those days, it was not known who was the fortunate winner of the prize until nearly a year afterward, when word was received from Denmark announcing that the priority of Miss Mitchell's discovery had been recognized and that she would be the recipient of the prize, which, for a while, it was thought would go to De Vico or Madame Ruemker.[149] In 1849 Miss Mitchell was appointed a compiler for the _Nautical Almanac_, a position she held for nineteen years. During the same period she was employed by the United States Coast Survey. When Vassar College was opened in 1865 for the higher education of women, Miss Mitchell was called to fill the chair of astronomy and to be the first director of the observatory. In this position she soon succeeded in giving astronomy a prominence that it never had had before in any other college for women, and in but few for men.