The Day We Found the Universe (29 page)

Harlow Shapley at his wheel-like desk at the Harvard Observatory
(Harvard College Observatory, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè
Visual Archives)

Despite their differences in cosmic outlooks, Curtis and Shapley remained cordial over the years and kept in touch through correspondence. More than two years after the debate, Curtis looked back on the event—what he called their “memorable set-to”—with good humor. “I have always thought that the clubs we wielded at each other were all the more effective because politely padded,” he told Shapley, “and regard with approbation the viewpoint of the old lady who warmed the water in which she drowned the kittens…. I fancy we both are as stiff-necked as ever; am sure that I am; cant
[sic]
see that my views have changed in the slightest.” With his new responsibilities at Allegheny, though, Curtis had to remain on the sidelines, resigned to simply “watching the strife with interest,” as he put it.

A few years later, a friend from Lick asked Curtis what he would have done with the Crossley if he had stayed on Mount Hamilton in 1920. Curtis replied that he would have just kept “photographing, photographing, and yet more photographing.” He had in mind a “program of about 30 min. exposures of all the larger spirals at frequent intervals, to hunt for novae and variables.” In a nutshell, he would have done everything that Edwin Hubble later carried out at Mount Wilson using its 60-and 100-inch telescopes, but with a few years' head start. Was the Crossley up to the task? Curtis had total faith in his beloved telescope: “I am copying that instrument in my design far more than any other,” he said. “Could a ‘race’ be run between the 60″ and the Crossley, would bet on the Crossley every time.” Others, too, later judged the Crossley as having had a fighting chance at clinching the distance to Andromeda. But once Curtis left for Pennsylvania, no other Lick astronomer was interested in photographing the spiral nebulae. In effect, once Curtis left the Lick Observatory, it handed the baton over to Mount Wilson.

Adonis

F
rom the mile-high summit of Mount Wilson, you can look a dozen miles to the southwest, across a wide valley, and catch sight of Hollywood and its lower-lying hills. The movie studios situated there in the 1920s were rapidly growing in allure and generating their mythic aura. This enchanted atmosphere must have somehow wafted over to the San Gabriel Mountains, for the man who eventually solved the mystery of the spiral nebulae looked as if he had come straight out of central casting.

In the eyes of his friends Edwin Hubble was an “Adonis,” a tall and robust figure with compelling hazel eyes, a cleft chin, and wavy brown hair that glinted of reddish gold. Pronounced cheekbones cast attractive shadows in his photographs, lending his face a movie-star look. A woman screenwriter considered him too handsome for his occupation, comparing him to box-office idol Clark Gable. “Had we been casting [the role of a scientist] at M.G.M., Edwin Hubble would have been turned down as ‘unrealistic,’” said Anita Loos, author of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

Raised in a solid middle-class household, Hubble somewhere along the line acquired a profound yearning to be singular and distinct. Fiercely determined to rise in the ranks, he reinvented himself upon reaching adulthood—adopting a British accent, dressing like a dandy, and adding dubious credentials to his curriculum vitae. The young man was seemingly intent on burying the most boring aspects of his midwestern family heritage and over time crafted a persona as big as the silver screen. By marrying into a wealthy southern California family, Hubble attained many of his lofty social and financial goals, and his wife, Grace, became his accomplice. She idolized her husband and, long after his death, propagated the legend he established, of which numerous details were highly edited or demonstrably wrong. She put him on a pedestal. And the longer time went on, said astronomer Nicholas Mayall, who had once worked with Hubble, the higher the pedestal got. Hubble's discovering the modern universe didn't seem to be glory enough.

Born on November 20, 1889, in Marshfield, Missouri, Hubble was the third of seven surviving children and christened Edwin Powell, although he generally avoided using his middle name or initial. His father, John, who grew up in Missouri, was trained in the law but earned a living working in his family's insurance business. When not traveling, he ruled his domestic realm with a firm puritanical hand, a strictness that was balanced by the more forgiving and accessible mother, Virginia Lee (“Jennie”) James, daughter of a local physician.

It was in Missouri, the “Show Me” state, that Hubble began his love affair with the heavens. His maternal grandfather, William James (a distant relation to the famous outlaw Jesse James), had built a telescope, and as a present on his eighth birthday young Edwin was permitted to stay up past his bedtime and use it to peruse the pinpoints of light, sparkling like brilliant gems, in the nighttime sky. The impression made on him that pitch-black winter evening, the starry wonders he beheld, lasted a lifetime. Two years later his family moved to the Chicago area, eventually settling in the village of Wheaton, Illinois, just west of the city. In high school Ed, as he was known to his friends, blossomed, regularly maintaining an A average and excelling in track, football, and basketball. The two areas in which he was downgraded a few times came in “application” and “deportment,” as he wasn't afraid to argue with his teachers in class. With his peers, he remained aloof and at times arrogant—both a dreamer and schemer. “He always seemed to be looking for an audience to which he could expound some theory or other,” recalled a childhood friend. Two years younger than most of his classmates, he may have been putting on a knowing front to appear older and more self-assured.

Graduating in 1906 at the age of sixteen, Hubble was awarded a scholarship to the University of Chicago, partly due to his superb athletic skills. But what he would major in became a contentious issue. Never forgetting his childhood experience with his grandfather's telescope, Hubble earnestly desired to study astronomy, but his father, a practical man, wanted his son to take up the law. According to one of Hubble's sisters, John Hubble considered being an astronomer an “outlandish” career choice. Hubble compromised by taking science classes—mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology—as well as the prerequisite courses in the classics, including heavy doses of Greek and Latin, that would prepare him for a legal career.

In regard to learning science, the timing for Hubble was perfect. Though a relatively new institution, the University of Chicago had already attracted two top physicists, Albert Michelson and Robert Millikan, who would go on to receive Nobel Prizes for their seminal work. And the Yerkes Observatory, affiliated with the university, offered one of the best telescopes then in existence. The early 1900s was a time, Hubble later recalled, when the world was astir: “Motor cars, at last, were successfully competing with horses. Airplanes were trying their wings. Bleriot had just flown the English channel, and…the wireless was groping its way over the map. Marconi…transmitted a message from Ireland to Buenos Aires, 6000 miles away… Technology strides across the modern stage like some gigantic, streamlined god.”

Edwin Hubble (left) in 1909 with a teammate on the
University of Chicago track team
(Reproduced by permission
of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Hubble inhaled the charged air of this exhilarating era deeply. A classmate described him as being a “whiz” at calculus, who “often utterly dumfounded” the professor. By the end of his sophomore year he was singled out as the best physics student. He also participated in track (though seldom winning) but did better in basketball, as his exceptional height for the day (six feet two inches) gave him an advantage playing center. He and his teammates were national champions in 1909. Moreover, Hubble did some boxing at an off-campus gym, becoming so good as an amateur heavyweight that Chicago promoters were eager for him to turn professional (or so he claimed). Such diverse activities and coursework may have been all part of a plan, for early on he had set his sights on obtaining a Rhodes Scholarship. Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist who made his fortune mining South African diamonds, had set up the program to strengthen the relationship between Great Britain and the United States. Every year, in each state, a young man was chosen to attend Oxford University in England for postgraduate studies. In his will Rhodes stipulated that Rhodes scholars should be bachelors between nineteen and twenty-five, good in academics but not “mere bookworms.” Each was to be a manly chap, exhibiting a “moral force of character” and proficient in both athletics and leadership. Hubble made sure that his accomplishments in college covered all the bases. In his senior year, he even served as vice president of his class, a position he acquired with ease as he shrewdly knew he would be running unopposed.

After passing the initial Rhodes examination, Hubble became one of the two finalists in Illinois. He may have won the slot once the judging committee saw the glowing letter of recommendation written by Millikan. Hubble had served as a laboratory assistant in Millikan's elementary physics course at the University of Chicago. To Millikan, Hubble was a “man of magnificent physique, admirable scholarship, and worthy and lovable character…. I have seldom known a man who seemed to be better qualified to meet the conditions imposed by the founder of the Rhodes scholarship than is Mr. Hubble.”

Hubble arrived at Oxford in October 1910, living for the next three years on an annual stipend of fifteen hundred dollars. There he walked the very halls where Edmond Halley once strode and joined a cozy club of privileged young men from England's wealthiest families, who were training for select positions in the military, banking, industry, government, and diplomatic services. With continued pressure from both his father and grandfather, Hubble dutifully studied the law and completed the jurisprudence coursework in two years instead of the usual three. He received second-class honors. But, always in the background, astronomy beckoned. He couldn't let it go, so deep was his passion for the celestial specialty. Sensing it would create a ruckus, he didn't let his parents know that he was cozying up to Oxford's top astronomer, Herbert Turner, visiting his home several times.

A Rhodes official jotted in Hubble's record that he showed “considerable ability. Manly. Did quite well here. I didn't care v[ery] much for his manner—but he was better than his manner. Will get A.” His “manner” had become decidedly British, but in an exaggerated, almost cartoonish way. It was during his Oxford sojourn when Hubble underwent his bewildering metamorphosis, adopting a distinct style that he maintained for the rest of his life. Becoming a full-fledged (some might say rabid) Anglophile, Hubble began to regularly speak with an upper-crust accent, smoke a pipe, brew a proper cup of tea, and wear a black cape with great flourish. Some were not impressed, including Rhodes scholar Warren Ault, who believed that Oxford “had transformed [Hubble], seemingly, into a phony Englishman, as phony as his accent.”

This theatrical transformation clearly signaled that Hubble was desperately in search of an identity, as well as a profession in which he could make a lasting mark. In his third year at Oxford he chose to specialize in Spanish, a respite from his grueling law curriculum. “I sometimes feel that there is within me, to do what the average man would not do,” Hubble had earlier written his mother, “if only I find some principle, for whose sake I could leave everything else and devote my life.” His ambition was unmistakable. When a classmate declared he'd rather be first in the provinces than second in Rome, Hubble snappily replied, “Why not be first in Rome?”

In January 1913, Hubble's father died, after years of fighting nephritis, a disease of the kidney. When first hearing of his father's declining health, Hubble had wanted to return home, but his father ordered him to stay. Though a devastating event to any child, his father's passing was in many ways a liberation for the Rhodes scholar. He was no longer shackled by the career path preordained by his stern father, although a full emancipation took some time. Upon finishing his studies in Great Britain at the end of May, Hubble first returned to Louisville, Kentucky, where his widowed mother and siblings were now settled, to help out his family and figure out what he would do next.