When Hubble was nine, his family moved to Wheaton, Illinois, near Chicago. He attended public schools and graduated from Wheaton High School in 1906. He was an outstanding athlete rather than a scholar and participated in football and track. At one time, he held the Illinois state high jump record.
He went on to the University of Chicago and received a BS in astronomy and mathematics in 1910. Still the athlete, he played basketball and boxed. His scholastic abilities shone in college and he received a Rhodes scholarship to read law at Queens College, Oxford. He returned to the United States in 1913 and passed the bar. He taught high school for one year in New Albany, Indiana.
Knowing he was unhappy with law, he returned to the Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago to begin graduate studies in astronomy. He received his Ph.D. in 1917.
World War I was raging, and Hubble entered the struggle as a captain in the Infantry on the morning after he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation. He left as a major in 1919. He immediately traveled to Pasadena, California, to accept an appointment on the Mt. Wilson staff. Mt. Wilson boasted the world's biggest telescopes, a 60-inch and a 100-inch Hooker.
Hubble first gained public attention in 1924 when his measurement of the distance to the Andromeda nebula showed that there were galaxies beyond our Milky Way. His work was remarkable, not only because he redefined the universe but also because he formed this theories based on actual observation. Nineteen-twenty-four also marked his marriage to Grace Burke.
In 1929, his work led him to postulate that the farther away a galaxy is from earth, the faster it's moving away from earth. This became known as Hubble's Law and formed the basis of the Big Bang Theory. Hubble became the father of cosmology and an international star. His visitors at Mt. Wilson included Albert Einstein. His circle of friends included Aldous Huxley, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Hayes, and William Randolph Hearst.
Hubble was instrumental in the design of the Hale telescope on Mt. Palomar. This telescope would be the largest in the world for forty years.
The only time Hubble left the Mt. Wilson Observatory was during World War II, when he joined the group working at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. He won the Medal of Merit for his work there.
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