In 1923, Vesto Slipher of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona discovered that, of the 41 nearest spiral galaxies, 36 were moving away from US. When other astronomers learnt of Slipher's measurements, they found it hard to believe that our Milky Way just happened to be located at the centre of the universe. For this reason, the German astronomer Carl Wirtz suggested that is wasn't galaxies that moved, but rather that it was space itself that was expanding. Soon afterwards the cosmologist Howard Robertson showed, on the basis of Slopher's and other's calculations, as well as precise distance data produced by astronomer Edwin P Hubble, that more distant galaxies moved away from us at a faster rate than closer ones-just what we might expect to see if space was expanding.
Hubble backed up these findings a year later with additional measurements-and in the end took all the credit. Robertson had made the mistake of publishing his results in an obscure scientific journal for physicists and not, ah Hubble did, in an astronomical publication.
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