Henry Norris Russell and the Expanding Universe
  Henry Norris Russell, one of the most influential American astronomers of the
first half of the 20th Century, had a special place in his heart for the Lowell
Observatory. Although privately critical of the founder for his pronouncements
about life on Mars and the superiority of the Mars Hill observing site, he
always supported the Observatory in public and professional circles. He
staunchly supported Tombaugh's detection of a planet as leading from Lowell's
prediction, and always promoted V. M. Slipher's spectroscopic investigations of
planetary and stellar phenomena. But how did he react to Slipher's puzzling
detection of the extreme radial velocities of spiral nebulae starting in 1912,
and how did he regard the extension and interpretation of those observations by
Hubble and others in following decades? Here we describe the arc of Russell's
reactions, dating from Slipher's first detection, as an indicator of how
mainstream stellar astronomers reacted to the concept of an expanding universe.
