1868-1938
Astrophysicist

Early Life.

Born in Chicago, George Ellery Hale developed an early interest in astronomy. While still in high school he was fascinated with solar spectroscopy, a method of determining the chemical components of the Sun through the observation of its light. He was a physics major at Massachusetts Institute of Technology but spent his spare time at the Harvard Observatory working as an unpaid assistant. Among the many phenomena that interested him were solar prominences, clouds of gas above the surface of the Sun, which up to that time had only been observed and photographed during eclipses. At the age of twenty-one he devised an instrument, which he called the spectroheliograph, to photograph them in the light of day.

Astrophysics.

In 1892 Hale became associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Until the late nineteenth century, astronomers had been mainly interested in...