The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [49]
In August 1914 sixty-six astronomers from around the United States gathered at Northwestern for their annual meeting, four days of scientific talks, official business, concerts, and social excursions to Lake Michigan. It was the conference when the astronomers unanimously voted to change their title from the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America to simply the American Astronomical Society. At the same time, a young man named Edwin Hubble, a graduate student at the Yerkes Observatory, in Wisconsin, was elected for membership.
The presentations were made in the lecture room of the university's Swift Hall of Engineering. Slipher's paper, one of forty-eight read at the meeting, was titled “Spectrographic Observations of Nebulae.” At the start of his talk, Slipher told the audience that he began his investigations simply to obtain a spiral nebula's spectrum, but went on to say that the exceptional velocity of the Andromeda nebula made him shift his attention to the velocities themselves. The average speed of the spirals, he reported, was now “about 25 times the average stellar velocity.” Of the fifteen spiral nebulae he had observed so far, three were approaching Earth, the rest were moving away. The velocities ranged from “small,” as it was recorded on his list, to an astounding 1,100 kilometers per second. That was the greatest celestial speed ever measured up to that time.
When Slipher finished delivering this remarkable news, his fellow astronomers rose to their feet and gave him a resounding ovation. No one had ever before witnessed such a spectacle at an astronomical meeting. And with good reason: Slipher had alone climbed to the top of the Mount Everest of spectroscopy. Even Campbell, his relentless competitor, came to both accept the finding and respect the tremendous effort behind it. “Let me congratulate you upon the success of your hard work,” he wrote Slipher after the meeting. “Your results compose one of the greatest surprises which astronomers have encountered in recent time. The fact that there is a wide range of observed velocities—some of approach and some of recession—lends strong support to the view that the phenomena are real.”
Astronomers at the 1914 American Astronomical Society meeting
in Evanston, Illinois. Vesto Slipher is circled on the left,
Edwin Hubble on the right. (From Popular Astronomy,
“Report of the Seventeenth Meeting,” 1914)
Soon after, Slipher was notified that the National Academy of Sciences in the United States was about to begin publication of a periodical titled Proceedings, aimed at displaying the nation's best scientific work. Slipher was asked to contribute an account of his groundbreaking research. “I am…glad to have your kind offer to present my papers to the Academy,” he replied. “It only remains for me to do something worth sending.” Slipher, as usual, was being modest to a fault.
Over the next three years, after he had gathered more spectra, Slipher at last came around to Hertzsprung's view. He, too, began to envision the Milky Way as moving among other galaxies just like itself. He first made this view public before the American Philosophical Society, when he was invited to give a key address at its 1917 annual meeting, one of the nation's most important scientific gatherings. Keen to report on his most up-to-date findings, Slipher even enlisted the help of a mathematician—Elizabeth Williams, in Boston, who had long worked as Lowell's top computer—two weeks before the lecture to help him double-check