Large Scale Structure. The seventies & Forty years later: From Clusters to Clusters

Understand

I describe the beginning, ~ 1970, of the spectroscopic redshift surveys and the discovery of the superclusters filamentary structures and voids.

• This changed the view of the distribution of luminous light from the way we knew it at the end of the sixties, a uniform distribution of galaxies with clusters superimposed, and the way we understood it during the seventies, clusters imbedded in filamentary structures.
• We planned in brief to understand the distribution of galaxies and the effect of their environment since to learn about the formation and evolution of the Universe, we need to know first how it is now.
• The very large surveys, first among these the CfA, started in the eighties thanks also to dedicated telescopes; during that period, the distribution of mass on large scales was also measured.