Heber Doust Curtis
Curtis was born on June 27, 1872 in Muskegon, Michigan, the son of a
one-armed Union veteran named Orson Blair Curtis and his wife Sarah Eliza
Doust. His early education had little to do with astronomy. He attended
Detroit High School and went on to the University of Michigan. He
studied there for three years to receive his Bachelor of Arts degree and
another year to receive his Master of Arts degree, both in classical
languages. In his four years at the University of Michigan, he never
stepped foot into the observatory there.
Upon graduation he returned to Detroit High School as a Latin instructor
and six months later moved to Napa College, a small Methodist
institution near San Francisco, where he taught Latin and Greek. He
discovered astronomy as a hobby there with Napa College's small
refracting telescope.
In 1895, he married Mary D. Raper and they went on to have four
children. In 1896, Napa College merged with the College of the Pacific
in San Jose and in the next year Curtis switched to become a professor
of mathematics and astronomy. Curtis spent the summers of 1897 and 1898
at the Lick Observatory to further his astronomical studies and returned
to the University of Michigan in the summer of 1899 to study celestial
mechanics.
In 1900, Curtis attended the eclipse in Georgia as part of the Lick
expedition. There, astronomers from other institutions, including the
University of Virginia, encouraged Curtis to attend graduate school at
UVa. That fall, Curtis, with his wife and two small children, moved to
Charlottesville, where he studied as a Vanderbilt fellow under Ormond Stone. Curtis and his family managed to get
by with only his fellowship to live on and his wife later remarked to
McCormick Observatory director Samuel
Mitchell that their days at Virginia were "the happiest of
their lives."
He received his Ph.D. from UVa in 1902 and the Lick Observatory
immediately hired him, where he stayed for the next eighteen
years. While at Lick Observatory, he composed his paper on spiral
galaxies. It was the presentation of that paper, before the National
Academy of Sciences in 1920, that erupted into a debate with Harlow
Shapley now known as the "Great
Debate." Edwin Hubble would later prove Curtis's theories
correct.
In 1920, Curtis left the Lick Observatory for the University of
Pittsburgh to serve as the director of the Allegheny
Observatory. Unfortunately, the growing industrialization in
Pittsburgh proved detrimental to astronomical observation. In 1930,
Curtis returned to the University of Michigan one more time to serve as
the director of its observatory.
Sadly, Curtis spent much of his last years suffering from a severe thyroid disease and he passed away in Ann Arbor on June 9, 1942. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and remembered as a well respected astronomer.
