American Hibber Daust Curtis embarked on a strange inner journey. In the late 19th century, he studied Latin, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Assyrian at the University of Michigan. In 1894, he was teaching Latin and Greek at Napa College, north of San Francisco, when he discovered a small telescope in the college hall and began to “play” with it.

The college has merged with the University of the Pacific, headquartered in San Jose, near the Lick Observatory. Curtis looked up and saw Leek’s large telescope.

A change began to take place in him. Instead of bowing down to ancient words, he gazed at ancient stars, even showing an enviable talent for observation, so much so that the University of Virginia offered him a scholarship for his doctoral dissertation in celestial mechanics.

“As impressive as the concepts of astronomy are, this new idea transcends them all, it staggers the imagination.”

In 1900, he offered Leak’s astronomers William Campbell and Charles Perrin help in observing a solar eclipse. His talent showed up, and after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Virginia, he was hired as deputy director of the Lick Observatory. From there, Curtis observed in 1910 the passage of Halley’s comet, as well as … the destruction of San Francisco by the terrible earthquake of 1906.

First of all, Curtis turned his attention to the mysterious nebulae that astronomers then considered to be other galaxies (they still considered our galaxy to be the only one in the universe), convinced that these were not just nebulae lying within our own galactic web. . Looking back on his knowledge of ancient languages, he wrote that one of these nebulae appeared to be in the shape of the Greek letter Φ, as reported by the excellent Marsa Bartusak in the treasure book The Day We Discovered the Universe (trans.: Themistocles Galikias, ed. Torque).

When Curtis later sees two supernovas (stars that died in a colossal explosion), he will realize that they are millions of light-years from our galaxy. In a 1919 lecture, he would mention the musician-astronomer William Herschel’s wonderful distaste for “universal islands.” “As impressive as the concepts of astronomy are, this new idea transcends them all, it truly boggles the imagination,” he says.

It would take Edwin Hubble to document the vastness of the universe. But already the classical philologist Curtis, from the Greek letter F to the Andromeda galaxy, traveled as much as anyone else.