For some 15 years in the early years of the twentieth century, V.M. Slipher’s
mastery of the Lowell spectrograph enabled him to do extremely significant
research in a range of areas. It is now generally agreed that his most important
findings centered on the spectral shifts of spiral nebulae, results that were to
be crucial to the development of ideas about the expanding universe. In this
talk I will place Slipher’s redshift researches into the context of the
contemporary debates on the nebular hypothesis and the nature of the spirals,
but I will also briefly examine what brought him to Lowell, his route to mastery
of the spectrograph, and briefly discuss some of his findings in other areas
in order to better understand his studies of redshifts and their reception.