Edwin Hubble

Mariner of the Nebulae

G.E Christianson

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351453851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae is both the biography of an extraordinary human being and the story of the greatest quest in the history of astronomy since the Copernican revolution. The book is a revealing portrait of scientific genius, an incisive engaging history of ideas, and a shimmering evocation of what we see when gazing at the stars.Born in 1889 and reared in the village of Marshfield, Missouri, Edwin Powell Hubble-star athlete, Rhodes Scholar, military officer, and astronomer- became one of the towering figures in twentieth-century science. Hubble worked with the great 100-inch Hooker telescope at California's Mount Wilson Observatory and made a series of discoveries that revolutionized humanity's vision of the cosmos. In 1923 he was able to confirm the existence of other nebulae (now known to be galaxies) beyond our own Milky Way. By the end of the decade, Hubble had proven that the universe is expanding, thus laying the very cornerstone of the big bang theory of creation. It was Hubble who developed the elegant scheme by which the galaxies are classified as ellipticals and spirals, and it was Hubble who first provided reliable evidence that the universe is homogeneous, the same in all directions as far as the telescope can see.An incurable Anglophile with a penchant for tweed jackets and English briars, Hubble, together with his brilliant and witty wife, Grace Burke, became a fixture in Hollywood society in the 1930s and 40s. They counted among their friends Charlie Chaplin, the Marx brothers, Anita Loos, Aldous and Maria Huxley, Walt Disney, Helen Hayes, and William Randolph Hearst. Albert Einstein, a frequent visitor to Southern California, called Hubble's work "beautiful" and modified his equations on relativity to account for the discovery that the cosmos is expanding.

CHAPTER ONE
MARSHFIELD

I

Fifty years earlier, a young and powerfully built Martin Jones Hubble had first ridden into what was then the village of Springfield, Missouri, with the aura, almost, of a magus. Now, puffing on an ancient pipe made from a real cob, with a stem more than a foot long, the seventy-year-old pioneer was bent low over his oak desk, deeply absorbed in a much contemplated labor of love. In the interests of authenticity, Martin had chosen to write out each of the ten dinner invitations with a goose-quill pen on a sheet of foolscap, which he then carefully folded into the shape of an envelope, as was the custom before envelopes became commonplace. These he sealed with red wax and posted in late March 1906. They read:

On the last day of March, 1856, I rode into Springfield on a red sorrel horse having four white feet and a white nose, a flax mane and tail. The tail touched the ground and his mane reached his knees. I sold him to Hugh T. Hunt, who knew his stock, for $250.I was twenty years old, and now at the end of fifty years, I want all of the men who lived in the city or county then, and live in the city now, to take dinner with me on that anniversary.

There will not be many of you, so I urgently ask you to dine with me at my house at 12 o’clock noon next Saturday, the 31st day of March, 1906.

	MENU
Turnip Greens		Hog’s Jowl
Corn Bread		Buttermilk
Boiled Custard		Pound Cake^1

Martin later described the thirty-first of March as a “beautiful, sunshiny day,” with all of the invited guests in attendance. The next morning the host was met on the street by the Reverend J. J. Lilly, who suggested that those at the dinner preserve the early history of the city and county. Reverend Lilly was added to the guest list as toastmaster the following year, and a stenographer was engaged to take down verbatim the personal reminiscences of those present. After the eighth such gathering of old men, who by 1914 ranged in age from seventy-eight to ninety-four, Martin Hubble saw the oral history of Springfield, Missouri, through the press, then sadly declared an end to the round-table discussions which the participants had affectionately dubbed “pulling taffy.”²

Broader at his bearded jaw than at his forehead, with a nose rather too large and eyes wide-set, Martin was an imposing, if not a particularly handsome, presence. He stood six feet and, along with his impressive height, had inherited his father’s massive shoulders, bull neck, and expansive girth. In addition to his abiding sense of history, he was remembered by his grandson Edwin as a man of unshakable opinions: the finest novel ever written was Great Expectations; the loveliest song was “Annie Laurie”; the only political party worth its salt was the Democratic Party; the consumption of alcohol was the direct road to perdition; the most beautiful things in the universe were the planets and the stars.³

Martin’s upbringing and aspirations had been quintessentially American. His forebears came from England, Ireland, and Wales, with “no strains,” as one family member later wrote, of foreign blood. The first among them to reach American shores five generations earlier was Richard Hubball, an officer of the Royalist army who fled to Connecticut in the early 1640s, after the beheading of Charles I. The colonial squire fathered fifteen children by three successive wives and died rich in land and other property. Hubbells (the “e” having replaced the “a”) served on both sides in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; in times of peace they moved west, laying claim to an abundance of land never dreamed of by their yeoman ancestors. They lived and worked in the old America of Jeffersonian democracy—a rural community of cooperating individualists, with a passion for self-government, combined with pure and fervent patriotism. Later generations, equally patriotic but more urbanized, entered the professions, including law and medicine, while others became public servants. Martin liked to stress the fact that the family had never known the stigma of a divorce.⁴

It was to Justice Hubbell, a signer of the Articles of Association protesting the closing of the port of Boston by the British in 1775, that Martin traced his ancestry when applying for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, as would his daughters on joining the D.A.R. He also knew that it was Justice Hubbell’s son Joel, a Virginia slaveholder of Seven Mile Ford, who changed the spelling of the family name to Hubble for reasons unknown. Martin’s father, John B. Hubble, was Joel’s son, and had migrated from Virginia to Boone County, Missouri, where he practiced medicine near Columbia until his early demise in 1847, at age thirty-six. Twelve-year-old Martin, together with his four younger brothers, was taken by his mother, Sarah Lavinia Jones Hubble, to Giles County, Tennessee. There the boys grew up on the plantation of Martin’s grandfather and namesake Martin Jones, a prominent cotton farmer and slave owner.

Having been reared in a culture where human bondage was taken for granted, Martin underwent a crisis of conscience on the eve of the Civil War. The Missouri to which he had returned following his mother’s death had been admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1821. In 1854 the issue of slavery was exacerbated by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leaving the question of slavery in these territories to the settlers themselves. Proslavery forces in Missouri became active in trying to win “bleeding Kansas” for the slave cause and contributed to the violence and disorder that tore the territory apart in the years just prior to the Civil War. Nevertheless, Missouri also had leaders opposed to slavery, including its prominent senator, Thomas Hart Benton, and Free-Soil congressman, Francis P. Blair, who later distinguished himself as a major general of the Union Army in the Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Atlanta campaigns. A state convention meeting in March 1861 voted against secession, and in August the Union general John C. Fremont issued a proclamation instituting martial law and freeing all slaves. An appalled Abraham Lincoln immediately countermanded this order with another bringing Missouri into conformity with existing federal law.

While their Grandfather Jones yielded to the inevitable and freed his slaves, the five sons of John and Sarah Hubble were deeply split on the issue of war. One died while fighting in the Confederate ranks; the youngest, redheaded George Washington Hubble, became a standard-bearer of the Stars and Bars. Shot through the leg, he was wrapped in the same flag he had carried into battle by his friend the regimental drummer boy. The youths were subsequently captured by Union troops and spent the remainder of the war in Libby prison. George carried his battle scars for life, walking with a limp, a disability which sparked the imagination of his great-nephew Edwin.⁵

Though a Democrat and no supporter of a besieged Lincoln, Martin eventually opted for the Union. In February 1861, the Greene County Court appointed him a member of the three-man “patrol” for Campbell township, responsible for keeping order among the slaves for the next twelve months. He was elected clerk of the circuit court in 1863 and began taking an active part in the Union League, whose stated objective was to “aid and abet by all honorable means the Federal government in its efforts to put down the rebellion.” Emboldened by his modest political success, Martin ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket in November 1864, only to be crushed by his Republican foe, 1,129 to 288. Months later, the Confederates briefly reappeared in force under the leadership of Missouri native Sterling Price, causing enlistments to soar. In Springfield, over the vehement protests of Confederate sympathizers, the Enrolled Missouri Militia was organized in August 1864. Martin was commissioned captain and quartermaster on September 28, and served until March 12 of the following year, when the Confederacy was in its death throes. Though he saw little or no action, he was destined to remain Captain Hubble in the minds of his fellow citizens until his death fifty-five years later.⁶

II

The only woman known to have contributed to the reminiscences of the Springfield pioneers was the diminutive but gritty Mary Jane Hubble. Little is known of the background of this Springfield matriarch, who, during a span of twenty-one years, had given birth to four sons and five daughters, eight of whom survived infancy. Mary Jane was born on a farm four miles east of Springfield in 1840, the daughter of General George Joseph Powell, a veteran of the early Indian Wars, and Jane Massey, whose father, Captain James Massey, had emigrated from Ireland and fought in the War of 1812. Mary Jane was orphaned at an early age and moved into the household of her uncle, W. H. McAdams, one of Springfield’s leading pioneer merchants. After completing grammar school she attended the local Christian College and was baptized by immersion in the cold waters of Fulbright Spring, just west of town. Her attraction to Martin must have been instantaneous and compelling, for their marriage had taken place less than six months after his grand entrance on horseback, and only three weeks after Mary Jane’s sixteenth birthday.

The Hubbies’ first child, Mary Lavinia, was born in May 1858, but died a short time later. Mary Jane’s second pregnancy culminated in the birth of a healthy son on April 3, 1860, little more than a year before Confederate commander P. G. T. Beauregard ordered the firing on Fort Sumter. Keeping with tradition, John Powell Hubble, father of the future astronomer, was given a previously used Christian name, followed by the maiden name of his mother.

Tradition also dictated that the first son of a Hubble receive special consideration in terms of education and moral grounding, an attenuated form of entitlement reaching back to the Middle Ages, when the family was known by its menacing crest bearing three leopard heads and a wolf. And while John would grow up in the new Missouri that rose out of the war, its semi-Southern atmosphere and river life of steamboating in decline, the flavor of antebellum nostalgia lingered in the works of his favorite American writer and Missouri’s most celebrated son, Mark Twain.

The earliest surviving picture of John seems to have been taken during his college or university days, sometime in the late 1870s or early 1880s. Handsome and dashing, he has perfectly trimmed hair parted in the middle and complemented by an equally well-groomed mustache, adding a touch of hauteur to a refined, aesthetic face. Though more slender than Martin, at six feet three inches John towered over his father and three younger brothers, Marshall, Levi, and Joel. As in later photographs, he is meticulously arrayed in a crisply starched collar, fashionable suit, and deftly knotted tie.

John attended Springfield public schools and then enrolled in Drury College, within walking distance of the family home. The newly founded institution boasted an enrollment of 225 undergraduates and a faculty of eleven full-time instructors. Though Drury was nondenom-inational, its mission was unequivocally set forth in the college catalogue: “The founders of Drury College do not wish to disguise the fact that instructing youth in the Sacred Scriptures and the principles of the Christian religion has been a ruling motive in undertaking the work.” Education divorced from the inculcation of Christian principles “is, at best, only half done, and likely to prove dangerous to society.” To this end, students were required to attend morning chapel, in addition to Sunday services. “The use of profane, vulgar, or unbecoming language” was punishable by expulsion, as were the consumption of intoxicating liquors and the patronage of billiard halls and saloons. The principles of nonsectarian puritanism also barred “scuffling, noisy sport, and disorderly company”; above all, gentlemen were not to visit the rooms of the lady students, nor the ladies the rooms of the gentlemen.⁷ If John was ever in danger of a moral lapse, his father was present to remind the youth of his duty. Martin had not only pledged $150 toward Drury’s fledgling endowment fund in 1875, he was also celebrated as the man who had single-handedly saved Drury for Springfield. When a financial misunderstanding resulted in a threat that the institution would be located in Neosho, Martin saddled his horse and rode back and forth among the quarreling parties, negotiating a modus vivendi.⁸

Fifteen-year-old John opted for the three-year Classical Preparatory Course, which, if successfully completed, would gain him admission to the department of his choice and, eventually, a degree. Arithmetic, English grammar, and Latin filled the first term; United States history, natural philosophy, and more Latin the second. He next marched and died with Caesar before graduating to Greek grammar, history, and Latin prose composition; algebra, quadratics, Virgil, Cicero, Xenophon, and Homer’s Iliad rounded out the course of instruction.⁹

Martin’s ambitions for his son exceeded the then limited financial benefits that could be expected from a Bachelor of Arts degree. The burgeoning city of Springfield, which boasted a population of some 8,000 in 1875, promised great opportunity to a young man in the right profession. After attending Drury for three years, a degreeless John headed northeast to St. Louis in September 1878. At eighteen, he was a year too young to qualify for entry into Washington University’s prestigious law school. Thus, John spent the year enrolled in the advanced class at Smith Academy, one of two preparatory schools run by the university.¹⁰ He was able to meet the age requirement one year later, and succeeded in passing the law school entrance exam. The aspiring attorney was now faced with a curriculum requiring only two years of study.

Exactly what happened next is impossible to determine. The name John Powell Hubble does not appear on the list of first-year (junior) law students in the 1879–80 catalogue, as would be expected. However, John is listed among the members of the senior class the following year. One thing is certain: he left Washington University, as he had Drury College, without a degree, perhaps having failed his final exams in June 1881. Had he finished, he would have been awarded the L.L.B. and granted automatic admission to the Missouri bar. If John still wanted to practice law he would have...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Author
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• EDWIN HUBBLE
• 1. Marshfield
• 2. “An Awful Moment”
• 3. “A Thing So Outlandish”
• 4. A Son of Queen’s
• 5. Heaven’s Gate
• 6. Reconnaissance
• 7. The Cosmic Archipelago
• 8. Uncharted Waters
• 9. Mariner of the Nebulae
• 10. “Your Husband’s Work Is Beautiful”
• 11. “Almost a Miracle”
• 12. “Now Whom Do We Want to Meet?”
• 13. Landlocked
• 14. Dark Passage
• 15. Home Is the Sailor
• Epilogue
• Notes and Abbreviations of Frequently Used Sources
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index