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By Root 413 0

Frost, an astronomer who had personally witnessed the transition at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. “[It] was truly a Victorian age drawn to a close with the end of the century.” When Frost was growing up in the 1880s, Europe was the touchstone in matters of literature, painting, and science. “Even steel rails for the trunk-lines were imported from Britain as late as my college days,” he said. “Then Andrew Carnegie and others found that rails could be made better and cheaper in America… The child was rapidly getting out of its infancy.” Discoveries and inventions were on the rise. Seemingly overnight, there were electric lights, heating by coal, hot-air furnaces, indoor bathrooms, and automobiles smoothly traveling down asphalt-paved roads.

Astronomy blossomed within this atmosphere of teeming innovation. Cameras became standard equipment on telescopes, enabling observers to gather light over an entire night and so generate images of faint stars and nebulae never before seen. And spectroscopes, devices that separate starlight into its component colors, allowed astronomers to figure out what the stars and other celestial objects were truly made of. Suddenly the very chemistry of the heavens was in their grasp. Meanwhile, prominent industrialists, enriched by the bounty of the Gilded Age, provided the money that allowed big dreamers to construct the large telescopes they had so long desired.

Given the swift emergence of these technological improvements, dry textbook accounts, reduced to a discovery's most essential elements, make it appear as if Hubble's historic achievement had taken place overnight. He goes to the world's largest and best-equipped telescope and, voilà, he reveals a cosmos populated with myriad galaxies spread over space as far as the telescopic eye could see. The Milky Way suddenly becomes a minor player in a much larger drama, and Hubble is anointed cosmology's “prime architect” for making this astounding breakthrough. But that is not the case at all. In reality, Hubble stood on the shoulders of a series of astronomers farsighted enough to tackle a problem others had been ignoring. Answers did not arrive in one eureka moment, but only after years of contentious debates over conjectures and measurements that were fiercely disputed. The avenue of science is more often filled with twists, turns, and detours than unobstructed straightaways.

Astronomers trained in the older, classical ways, who dwelled on calculating the motions of the planets and measuring the positions of stars to the third decimal place, had not been distressed at all by the mystery of the spiral nebulae. They figured that once the matter was resolved it would not greatly change their perception of the overall structure and contents of the heavens. Simon Newcomb, the dean of American astronomy in the late nineteenth century, remarked at an observatory dedication in 1887 that “so far as astronomy is concerned…we do appear to be fast approaching the limits of our knowledge… The result is that the work which really occupies the attention of the astronomer is less the discovery of new things than the elaboration of those already known, and the entire systemization of our knowledge.”

Within ten years James Keeler, director of the Lick Observatory, in California, proved Newcomb was exceedingly shortsighted. Against everyone's advice, Keeler got a troublesome reflecting telescope—the first of its kind at high elevation—back in working order and demonstrated its power with singular panache. Even though the telescope's mirror was relatively small, it allowed him to estimate that there were tens of thousands of faint nebulae arrayed over the celestial sky, ten times more than had been known before. In the 1910s Lick astronomer Heber Curtis followed up on Keeler's findings and gathered additional evidence to suggest that these many spiraling nebulae were nothing less than separate galaxies. At the same time, a few hundred miles south at Mount Wilson, near Los Angeles, Harlow Shapley resized the Milky Way, measuring it as far larger