The Expanding Universe, Published in the Wrong Journal

In 1927 Lemaitre published a paper in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels showing that the equations of general relativity permit a universe of constant mass and increasing radius, and deriving from it the relation between a galaxy's distance and the speed at which it recedes. He estimated the constant of proportionality from data then available. Two years later Edwin Hubble published the observational relation, and it carries Hubble's name.

The Brussels journal was not read. Einstein, when Lemaitre described the work to him at the 1927 Solvay conference, is reported to have said that the calculations were correct but the physics abominable. Arthur Eddington, who had supervised Lemaitre at Cambridge, arranged for an English translation in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1931.

That translation is missing the paragraph containing the velocity distance relation and the estimate of the constant, and for eighty years the omission was widely assumed to be an act of suppression by someone protecting Hubble's priority. In 2011 Lemaitre's own correspondence with the journal settled it: he removed the passage himself, telling the editor there was no point reprinting a provisional estimate when much better observational data had since become available. He does not appear to have cared who got the credit, which is unusual enough to be worth recording.