  Arthur Stanley Eddington was one of the leading astronomers and theorists of
his generation and a prominent proponent of the general theory of relativity.
Yet when his former assistant Georges Lemaitre sent him a paper in 1927
suggesting that the well-known redshifts of the spiral nebulae might be a
manifestation of a cosmic expansion predicted by relativity, Eddington paid no
attention for three years. In this paper, we consider the reasons for this
oversight. We find that conventional explanations (such as Lemaitre's status as
a relatively junior researcher and his decision to publish in a lesser-known
Belgian journal) do not convince. We propose an alternative explanation that
has not been considered in the literature - namely that the observational data
cited by Lemaitre in support of his model were of a preliminary nature and
would not have been sufficiently convincing for Eddington and others to
consider non-static cosmologies.
