Random Questions Involving Herschel

I have been flipping through a 1904 history book and looking at how they viewed the fantastic discoveries Sir William Herschel.

• Discovered Uranus doubling the size of the Solar System
• Discovered that the Sun was just another star.  The stars were around the same size as our Sun and some were bigger.  
• He discovered what he considered as Nebula that were 2 million light years away.  These Nebula were later discovered to be other galaxies by Hubble.

The Universe of our Founding Fathers was at least 4 million light years in diameter with thousands of stars that they knew were the size of our sun or larger. They knew the approximate escape velocity needed to send objects into earth orbit. Knowing all this, I wonder what it must have been like to be President when the fastest thing you have seen is a cannon ball. How did you teach in a classroom the Age of the Universe and teach that light would have taken millions of years to reach the classroom? Darwin did not start these issues.[1]