William Herschel, 1785 IN THE DECADES following Galileo’s observation that the Milky Way is made up of myriads of stars, few astronomers followed up on his discovery. There was plenty to keep them occupied within the solar system. Not until the middle of the 18th century is there a record of anyone suggesting that the stars also might be arranged in some sort of ‘system’ – or systems. Even then it was not astronomers who introduced the idea. There was no observational evidence to support it. We are told that the French court thought about it and found it an interesting topic of conversation. No one otherwise recorded their conclusions. Thomas Wright of Durham, England, who called himself a philosopher, not an astronomer, was one of the first to propose a larger arrangement. Wright spent most of his teenage years, while apprenticed to a clock-maker, immersed in astronomy. His father found that so distasteful that he burned young Thomas’s astronomy books.
