During the past 100 years, astronomers have discovered quasars, pulsars, black holes and planets orbiting distant suns. But all these pale next to the discoveries Edwin Hubble made in a few remarkable years in the 1920s. At the time, most of his colleagues believed the Milky Way galaxy, a swirling collection of stars a few hundred thousand light-years across, made up the entire cosmos. But peering deep into space from the chilly summit of Mount Wilson, in Southern California, Hubble realized that the Milky Way is just one of millions of galaxies that dot an incomparably larger setting.
Hubble went on to trump even that achievement by showing that this galaxy-studded cosmos is expanding--inflating majestically like an unimaginably gigantic balloon--a finding that prompted Albert Einstein to acknowledge and retract what he called "the greatest blunder of my life." Hubble did nothing less, in short, than invent the idea of the universe and then provide the first evidence for the Big Bang theory, which describes the birth and evolution of the universe. He discovered the cosmos, and in doing so founded the science of cosmology.
Hubble's astronomical triumphs earned him worldwide scientific honors and made him the toast of Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s--the confidant of Aldous Huxley and a friend to Charlie Chaplin, Helen Hayes and William Randolph Hearst. Yet nobody (except perhaps Hubble) could have imagined such a future when the 23-year-old Oxford graduate began his first job, in New Albany, Ind., in 1913.
Hubble majored in science as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. A tall, powerfully built young man, he excelled at basketball and boxing (fight promoters reportedly tried to talk him into turning pro), and his combination of academic and athletic prowess earned him a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. In England, Hubble kept up his muscular pursuits: he fought, ran track and played on one of the first baseball teams ever organized in the British Isles.
His official academic focus shifted, thanks to a promise made to his dying father that he would study law rather than science (he also took up literature and Spanish). On his return to America, he took a position as a high school Spanish teacher. Though he was popular with students--especially, according to Hubble biographer Gale Christianson, with the girls, who were evidently charmed by his affected British diction and "Oxford mannerisms"--Hubble longed to return to science.
After a year, he signed on as a graduate student at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin and embarked on the work that would one day make him famous: studying faint, hazy blobs of light called nebulae (from the Latin word for cloud) that are visible through even a modest telescope.
Hubble's skills as an astronomer were impressive enough to earn him an offer from the prestigious Mount Wilson Observatory. World War I kept him from accepting right away, but in 1919 the newly discharged Major Hubble--as he invariably introduced himself--arrived at observatory headquarters, still in uniform but ready to start observing with the just completed 100-in. Hooker Telescope, the most powerful on earth.