The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [27]
Inspiration arrived on May 10, 1773. On that day Herschel, then thirty-four years old, bought a copy of a popular astronomy textbook. “When I read of the many charming discoveries that had been made by means of the telescope,” said Herschel, “I was so delighted with the subject that I wished to see the heavens and Planets with my own eyes thro' one of those instruments.” By the autumn he was beginning to handcraft metal mirrors for a reflecting telescope. He became obsessed with his new hobby, soon shifting his interests from the music of the Earth to the music of the heavens. So passionate was his commitment to astronomy that his younger sister, Caroline, who had earlier joined him in England, fed him morsels of food by hand, so that he would not have to pause while grinding and polishing. Pointing his home-built instruments toward the sky, he came to memorize the heavens and in 1781 climactically spotted Uranus, the first planet discovered since the dawn of history. He was promptly elected a fellow of the Royal Society and procured an annual stipend from England's King George III, a pension that at last allowed Herschel to devote himself to his astronomical interests, especially building ever-larger telescopes (the largest he ever constructed was forty feet long).
Herschel was far ahead of his time, as he used his telescope to examine the universe much the way an astronomer would today. While other astronomers in his day focused solely on the motions of the stars and planets, he was determined to discern nothing less than the “construction of the heavens,” the title of one of his most notable papers. He wanted to reach out into distant space, far beyond the realm most studied by his contemporaries. Wright and Kant had done the same, but they were merely theoretical speculators, not practicing astronomers. Herschel insisted that his ideas be “confirmed and established by a series of observations.” Photography was still decades away, so to do this he had to spend hours at his eyepiece, awkwardly perched on a platform at the top of his telescope. So skilled did he become at fashioning telescopes that his instruments were the only ones at the time capable of seeing out to cosmological distances. His tireless assistant Caroline was often with him, jotting down the positions and descriptions of the many nebulae he came upon during his scans of the heavens.
Drawings of nebulae by astronomer William Herschel, 1811
(From Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
101 [1811]: 269-336, Plate IV)
“I have seen double and treble nebulae, variously arranged; large ones with small, seeming attendants; narrow but much extended, lucid nebulae or bright dashes; some of the shape of a fan, resembling an electric brush, issuing from a lucid point, others of cometic shape, with a seeming nucleus in the center;…when I came to one nebula, I generally found several more in the neighbourhood,” he reported. At one point, Herschel even imagined other beings residing within those nebulae, looking back at us: “The inhabitants of the planets that attend the stars which compose them must likewise perceive the same phænomena. For which reason they may also be called milky-ways by way of distinction.” He seemed to be confirming the Wrightian and Kantian visions: that the universe is vastly larger and more complex than previously imagined. The Milky Way was a cohesive system of stars and beyond that was a limitless universe, populated by other stellar systems, comparable to our own.
Astronomers might have become quite comfortable with and accepting of the idea that other galaxies existed, more than a century before Hubble proved it conclusively, if not for the fact that Herschel abruptly