Nope, it's not the first I've heard of the expansion of the universe.
I remember the epicycles and geometrics of a past age too.
It's pretty clear to me that we're in one of those "epicycle phases" of our knowledge, where what we're seeing is odd and doesn't work very well with something else we think, but all we've got is the model so we have to soldier on until someone has a brilliant insight that makes the thing simpler and rational.
The farther they appear to be from our own galaxy (measured by indications such as brightness of certain kinds of objects compared to intrinsic brightness of those classes of objects), the faster they appear to be moving, by reading the same spectra.
Until a better theory emerges, we will continue to assume that most of the large objects in the universe are receding from each other.
This expansion of the universe has nothing to do with the inflation that Guth and others have proposed.