Lord Kelvin in 1901 tested an “old and celebrated hypothesis” that if we could see far enough into space the whole sky would be occupied with stellar disks all of perhaps the same brightness as the Sun. Kelvin was the first to solve quantitatively and correctly the riddle of a dark night sky, a riddle that had been previously solved qualitatively by Edgar Allan Poe, and is now known as Olbers' paradox.
