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At Oxford, Hubble was charmed by English common law, which he still considers one of the great achievements of the human mind. He returned to the U.S. with a British accent (traces still remain), and became a member of the Kentucky bar. After one year of law practice (very dull), astronomy called with unmistakable loudness, and Hubble went to the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin to make friends with the sky.
He had published one scientific paper and prepared for his doctorate examinations when the U.S. entered World War I. After enlisting in the Army, Hubble sat up all night, finishing his doctorate thesis, and took his examination next morning. His Ph.D. from the University of Chicago caught up with him at Fort Sheridan, Ill.
The tall young astronomer rose quickly from private to major. (Some of his friends still call him "Major.") After the war, astronomy called as loudly as ever, and Hubble took a long-promised job at Mount Wilson.
Weary Waiting. Mount Wilson's 100-inch telescope showed him the exploding universe, but it raised more questions than it answered. Bubble's theory needed the 200-inch to prove or disprove it conclusively. The Rockefeller Foundation had agreed to finance the great new instrument as long ago as 1928, but 500-ton telescopes cannot be ordered from a catalogue. The blank glass disc for the mirror was not cast until 1934. The whole project lagged.
Meanwhile Hubble, Humason and their colleagues did the best they could with the 100-inch telescope, which had passed the peak of its effectiveness for many kinds of work. When Mount Wilson Observatory was founded in 1904, Pasadena was a quiet village, attractive to rich old ladies. Los Angeles was a distant, smallish city, not yet a great industrial center. But eventually, Los Angeles' suburbs sprawled over the whole mountain-surrounded plain. A strange, white, acrid haze (locally called "smog") rose from the city. Often the smog climbed over Mount Wilson, dimming the nebulae.
The Deadly Lights. The lights, of all colors, which Los Angeles uses with a showman's abandon, flowed out like glittering lava toward Mount Wilson. The sky turned from velvety black to grey, fogging the sensitive photographic plates. The most striking feature in Humason's recent spectrographs is a strong black band (mercury light from the advertising signs of Los Angeles).
Professionally, Hubble hated the city lights, but he often took visiting astronomers out to the brink of Mount Wilson to admire them. The great plain between Mount Wilson and the ocean is covered with a Persian carpet woven of colored glitter. The nearer lights twinkle like stars. There are usually some streaks of luminous fog, as in the Milky Way. Far off, blurred by haze and distance, lies the downtown district, the dense nucleus of the Los Angeles nebula. Says Hubble: "An astronomer is like a man up here who can never go down to the valley, and who tries to find out, by observing these lights, all that goes on in Los Angeles."
Slow Grind. As the city's lights crept toward Mount Wilson, the 200-inch telescope project also made progress. An ideal site had been found for it at Palomar Mountain, a 6,000-ft. plateau 90 miles to the south. No sea of lights would overwhelm the new observatory; the nearest sizable city, San Diego, is 50 miles away.*