The COBE 'DMR' instrument, based on a complete 4-year study of the cosmic background radiation detected a 'quadrupole' signal in the microwave data with an amplitude of 18 +/- 1.6 micro Kelvins. This is in comparison to the 2.725 +/- 0.020 K obtained from fitting the DMR radio data. The quadrupole term is extremely small by about 1 part in 10,000 of the 2.7 K mean value for the whole sky. Why is there such a quadrupole emission? Presumably it was put there by processes that occurred in the universe when it was less than a second old. Many of the older cosmological models popular in the 1960's and 1970's investigated the anisotropic expansion of the universe and the effect it would have on the emission of the cosmic background radiation. These often led to increased 'quadrupole' emission in the background radiation. Today, Inflationary cosmology says that the anisotropies we now detect in the background radiation were put there by quantum mechanical fluctuations in the 'fabric' of space-time which were amplified by the expansion until they can now be seen as large deviations in the uniformity of the background radiation...the quadrupolar emission.