William Huggins, born in London, England, on February 7, 1824, went from looking through the eyepiece of a microscope to that of a telescope.

Huggins was intrigued with the concept of spectroscopy developed by Gustav Kirchhoff, and fully realized its use for astronomy. While it is impossible to place a piece of star under a microscope for study, it is possible to analyze the light given off by a star. With his friend, W. A. Miller, Huggins built his own observatory in 1856 and eagerly studied every source of light he could.

In 1863 he made the astounding announcement that the spectra of stars revealed the same elements as those on the Earth. For example, when Huggins noticed that the lines of a star's spectrum matched those of the spectral lines of oxygen on earth, he concluded that there was oxygen in that star. This disproved the hypothesis made by Aristotle 2,100 years...