The Pioneering Welshman

Isaac Roberts was born in 1829, in the village of Groes, North Wales

Up until the mid to late 1800s, no one knew anything about galaxies or further than the furthest star which Galileo and those who followed after could see in their telescopes. The known Universe was all that could be seen.

There were however, some strange things in the night sky. in 1730 Charles Messier was born, and soon became famous for hunting comets. He observed many fuzzy looking objects that at first, he thought were comets, until he saw that they did not move. Annoyed, he discarded these fuzzy unknowns, listing them so that if anyone came across them again they would know they were not comets. This listing eventually became known as the Messier Catalogue, one of the most important in modern astronomy. Messier died in 1815, just 14 years before Isaac Roberts was born, leaving a legacy of celestial objects which would set the scene for the next massive mind numbing astronomical revolution.

These fuzzy objects grew in number as more astronomers acquired telescopes. What were they? A welsh man called Isaac Roberts, fascinated by the heavens, and one of the cleverest engineers of the time, began to develop in 1883 a way of taking photographs of celestial objects which allowed these fuzzy objects to be viewed in detail. He did something no one had done before, found a way of taking long exposure photographs of extremely faint celestial objects.

Here is his most well known photograph of the Adromeda Nebula M31. The first long exposed photo of M31 ever taken was by Roberts in 1887 from his own observatory in Sussex.

Messier had in 1764 catalogued the Andromeda Nebula as M31. 

Taken from A Selection of Photographs of Stars, Star-clusters and Nebulae, Volume II,

The Universal Press, London, 1899.

As Roberts looked at this photo, what did he think? We will never know, yet we know he mused over it enough to wonder at what exactly it was he had in front of him. The fuzzy object now huge in the frame, swirling mass of what? gas? particles?  Did he ever think "could they be stars?" the current view is that he thought it was a nebula within our Galaxy and a new 'solar system' being formed.

In the mid 1920s Edwin Hubble along with several others finally concluded without any doubt the mind blowing realisation that this was, in fact, completely outside our Galaxy, and that our Galaxy was, itself, an island universe - one of we now know at the very least one hundred billion!

Isaac Roberts died on July 27th 1904, 21 years before this new astronomical revolution. Yet his contribution began the journey to this discovery.

By the mid 1920s then, the Universe had just increased in size to a mind meltingly unimaginable space. Our Galaxy - one of billions, each containing around a hundred to three hundred billion stars. This was a much greater shock in some ways than the shock of Earth orbiting the Sun! Yet the really strange thing is and was that this information never really filtered down to the general public.

The mid 1920s is not even one hundred years ago!