Not explained at length in the article, Poe’s “Eureka” gives answer to Olbers' paradox, formulated in 1823, intuitively conjecturing the finite age of the universe more than a century before that the non steady-state model of cosmology was starting to be accepted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

Sadly, the Salon article garbles Poe’s correct resolution of the paradox, but it is correctly stated in Alberto Cappi’s paper that it refers to.