Robert McNees
Astronomer Milton Humason was born #OTD in 1891.
He dropped out of the *eighth grade* and had little formal education, but a knack for difficult observations helped him collect much of the data used to establish what we now call Hubble’s Law.
Image: Emilio Segrè Archives
Robert McNees
Humason was born in Minnesota but moved to California with his family as a teenager. At 14 they sent him to summer camp on Mount Wilson. He loved mountain life, and it was an exciting time to be there. Preparations for a new observatory were underway.
Humason took a year off to work on the mountain. He never went back to school – his last year was 8th grade. He took a job leading wagons up the mountain. Drawn by mules, they carried lumber for buildings and parts for the massive 100" telescope.
Robert McNees
Humason worked there for 5 years. After marrying Helen Dowd, daughter of the observatory's chief engineer, he took a job as a ranch hand. But he missed the mountain and observatory. When the opportunity arose he took a job there as janitor.
From there he applied for a job as "night assistant" helping astronomers run the equipment and dome. He became very good at it. In fact, he was so good at running the equipment that George Hale, the observatory's director, promoted him to scientific staff.
Robert McNees
Some of the staff protested. After all, Humason had never made it past 8th grade, and now he was a member of the scientific staff?? It was an outrage!
But Hale recognized a rare talent in Humason, and ignored the staff's complaints.
In just three years, Milton Humason went from the janitor of Mount Wilson Observatory to a member of its scientific staff.
Robert McNees
Humason had a knack for difficult measurements and became an expert at establishing the redshift of distant galaxies.
He measured the redshifts of over 600 galaxies, data that Hubble used in his work on the relationship between distance and radial velocity. Later measurements then supported Hubble's proposed relation.
LizzieMaeLuBob
@mcnees Your writing reads like a novel.
Robert McNees
Here's the velocity-distance plot from Humason’s 1931 paper with Hubble. The dots near the origin are the data used in Hubble's 1929 paper.
(Hubble relied on Humason's expertise to obtain the data for the 1929 paper as well, though he was the lone author on that one. Imo it’s proper to credit them both for that work.)
Ref: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1931ApJ....74...43H/abstract
Robert McNees
@Lizette603_23 Thanks!
LizzieMaeLuBob
@mcnees Welcome! Let us know if you DO write a novel. Srsly
Robert McNees
Besides working with Hubble, Humason collaborated with Fritz Zwicky, Allan Sandage, and many other noted astronomers.
Humason also famously *missed* discovering Pluto eleven years before Clyde Tombaugh!
He captured it on four plates in 1919 but didn’t realize a tiny planet was sailing across his photographs.
Robert McNees
Humason was widely considered by his peers to be an outstanding observer, and was responsible for the data behind what is arguably the most famous result of 20th century astronomy.
Not bad for a kid who quit school at 14 to go live on a mountain.
LizzieMaeLuBob
@mcnees Some of us also need a pic of the tweed jacket. Just sayin....
Robert McNees
@Lizette603_23 I leave the novel writing to my wife, but if I ever do write a book I will talk about it so much on here that people will ask me to stop :)
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