The Perfect Machine

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by Ronald Florence


  Farmers worked the land with draft animals. Only in the cities had auto exhausts replaced manure as the hazard of the streets. Speed limits in most cities were still twenty miles per hour. A few who happened to live near the railroad tracks could watch the speedy trains bridging the land; to most the whistles of the trains were as remote as the contrails of jet planes to a later generation.

  Nights were quiet time. The wireless wasn’t in many homes yet, although Westinghouse had broadcast early results of the elections in November. Victrolas were a luxury that plain folk considered showing off. It wasn’t unusual for a family to spend a summer evening outside, on the porch or in the yard, sitting on rockers or swing benches, staring at the stars. With no city lights, no highways with nightly columns of trucks and cars, and electric power unavailable beyond the fringes of the cities, families could enjoy the glories of dark skies that revealed the Milky Way not as an occasional lucky sight but as a regular evening spectacle.

  The stars were a nightly wonder. Some accepted the canonical explanations of the Bible and thought of the heavens as one more impenetrable miracle of Creation. Others contented themselves with the thought that pretty soon scientists, using those big new telescopes out in California, would know what it was all about.

  From the vast prairie land of the Midwest and the sharecropped farms of the Mississippi River Valley, the travelers rode on into the industrial belt of the eastern states, the largest single concentration of heavy industry in the world. The United States prided itself on superlatives—the most railcars of coal extracted from a mine in a day, the most tons of steel produced, the most feet of rail rolled. Corporations, armed with their new public relations departments, eagerly joined the chorus of hyperbole, issuing press releases to announce the largest electrical network ever built, the biggest turbine, the largest milling machine.

  Some Europeans saw the American habit of superlatives as a sign of collective insecurity, but to Americans there was a comfort in the concrete symbols of achievement. From the lonely farmers on the boundless prairies, to the factory workers of the mill towns, to the men of untold wealth who were not ashamed to describe themselves as capitalists, Americans held up industrial might as a challenge and a response to the alleged sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and grandeur of Europe. The United States was on a roll. Business was booming. The smokestacks were going full-time. Although no one bragged about it, the United States could also claim the smokiest skies and dirtiest rivers in the world. What another generation would see as threats to health and the future were symbols of progress and prosperity in 1920.

  In this America of the biggest, the grandest, and the greatest, science was on its way to a new, elevated status. Already hucksters, journalists, teachers, and advertisers were cavalierly tossing off the claim that “Science tells us” or “Science teaches us” as a preemptive answer to arguments. Einstein had not yet visited the United States, but already his name had entered the common vocabulary as a synonym for genius. The mysteries of the General Theory of Relativity were widely touted as the most important scientific discovery of the century. A myth circulated that only twelve men in the world could understand the theory, but the alleged limits of comprehension didn’t stop editors and soapbox orators from extolling the importance of relativity, tossing off a casual E = mc2, or announcing that “there are no absolutes, everything is relative” to prove that they too were part of the great age of science.

  Yet the intellectuals and poseurs who revered Einstein were a tiny minority of the American public. For much of the country formal science was too abstract, so obscure that it was somehow un-American. In 1914 a congressman questioning a witness at an appropriations hearing said: “What is a physicist? I was asked on the floor of the House what in the name of common sense a physicist is, and I could not answer.”

  Even the august National Academy of Sciences enjoyed less than universal prestige. Andrew Carnegie typified the American reaction when he dismissed a request for funds for the academy: “Oh,” he said. “That’s just one of those fancy societies.”

  Americans had their own science. To the ordinary folk of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, science meant know-how, the ability to make cars, vacuum cleaners, electric irons, light bulbs, radios. America was the country that could build anything. Americans believed that they had won the Great War in the shipyards and mills and factories as much as the trenches, and few doubted that there was any problem of science that couldn’t also be solved by the same commonsense engineering that brought invention after invention out of the laboratories of Thomas Edison and car after car out of the factories of Henry Ford.

  In 1920 few Americans had ever heard of Harlow Shapley or Heber Curtis. Most would have named Edison as the greatest living scientist. But the United States was a land of newspaper readers, and the newspapers had discovered the art of turning the commonplace into the kind of stories that readers demanded. A mine cave-in that killed seventy men earned a brief mention in the paper; a single man trapped in a mine was a story that could be developed and enhanced to hold readers for days. A good murder trial could hold them for months. The National Academy of Sciences wasn’t a usual newspaper beat, but then Albert Einstein in the audience wasn’t the usual lead. If there was ever a science story that would get readers, this was it. On April 26, 1920, the newspapers promised, at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, held in the central hall of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in the august presence of Professor Albert Einstein, the most basic questions about our universe would be answered.

  By the second day of the journey, the travelers on the train were weary. The steady click-clack of the bolted rails, reassuring the first day, was monotonous. The view through the miasma of black smoke from the soft coal that fueled the engine was no longer exciting. The panorama outside the windows, hour after hour of wheat or rice or woods or bottomlands, became tedious. Those who hadn’t prepared for the journey with reading material or games were soon bored.

  Heber Curtis, an amateur classicist as well as an astronomer, had brought Latin and Greek texts with him. Reading the classics was a gentleman’s avocation. Hour after hour he would sit with a familiar, leather-bound volume open on his lap, as if he were in a club chair in the Atheneum. Harlow Shapley was fascinated by Curtis’s choice of reading material. He had been educated a generation later, when the classics had already faded in high school and college curricula.

  There was no room for extraneous reading in Shapley’s life. He thought of himself as a modern man, with a modern education. His avocation when he couldn’t work on astronomy was nature studies. He was an amateur naturalist, but he approached nature as he approached astronomy problems, carrying a notebook with him wherever he went. If he couldn’t be near the observatory and its instruments, he cataloged the species of insects or plants he found, writing notes as methodically as his logbook of observation runs on the sixty-inch telescope at Mount Wilson.

  On one nature walk in California he had stumbled on a colony of ants, scurrying to and from their nest. Shapley timed how fast they were moving. What factors determined the speed of their travel? he asked in his omnipresent notebook. He gathered enough data to hypothesize that the ants’ speed of travel was determined solely by the ambient temperature. Armed with a theory, Shapley needed data. Wherever he went he would search out an ant colony and accumulate more measurements to bolster his theory.

  Less than a day from Washington, on the east side of Birmingham, Alabama, the train broke down, close enough to the city that the passengers could still see the smoke-darkened skies from the steel mills. The conductors made the rounds of the cars, reassuring the passengers, but as the day went on and the train stood still under the broiling sun, the passengers grew restless and hot inside the cars. Curtis took one of his classical texts and lay down in the shade to read. As he read he could see Harlow Shapley—notebook, stopwatch, and thermometer in hand—chasing through the jasmine and the new kudzu vines that had been pl
anted to control erosion, in pursuit of a colony of ants.

  For a while, the Scale of the Universe seemed far away.

  2

  Washington

  Washington was a sleepy town in 1920, more like the capital of a small state today than the full-time capital of a great nation. Congressmen and senators spent most of the year in their home districts, commuting to congressional sessions of limited duration. The staffs of Congress and the president each numbered a few people. It would take a dozen years before there would be a telephone on the desk in the Oval Office. The British Foreign Office classified the city as a semitropical hardship location. Even the press wasn’t there in droves yet: Washington politics weren’t considered important enough to attract permanent press bureaus or hordes of lobbyists.

  April was one of the better months, before the oppressive heat and humidity of summer. The hundreds of cherry trees around the Tidal Basin, a gift only eight years before from the mayor of Tokyo, were in bloom, a welcome relief from the dank mosquito infestations that had once marked the area. Relations with the Japanese weren’t as friendly as they had been in 1912, but most Americans, after the experience of the war to end all wars, weren’t interested in other countries.

  The headlines on the newspapers at Union Station were depressing. Warren Harding had replaced the ailing Woodrow Wilson, who had spent the last years of his presidency sequestered in the White House. Wags who had speculated whether Mrs. Wilson or Colonel House was running the Wilson White House now wondered whether anyone was running the government. The “Red scare” was in full swing. In the pages of the Dearborn Independent Henry Ford attacked what he called the “International Jews”; the revived Ku Klux Klan blamed the woes of the nation on the triad of Jews, Roman Catholics, and blacks; police chiefs like William Francis Hynes in Los Angeles sent squads of officers to break up union and leftist meetings; and almost everyone seemed willing to take a swipe at the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies.

  Fortunately there were diversions from the pall of politics. Babe Ruth, who had pitched and played occasional outfield for the Boston Red Sox, was in his first season with the New York Yankees and proving he was worth the astonishing $125,000 they had paid to get him. Man o’ War was the Babe Ruth of the racetrack, and handsome, charming Jack Dempsey seemed equally unbeatable in the boxing ring.

  In the bookstores the talk was of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s daring This Side of Paradise. Readers turned down the corners of the pages on which one of Fitzgerald’s heroines confessed: “I’ve kissed dozens of men. I suppose I’ll kiss dozens more,” or, “Oh, just one person in fifty has any glimmer of what sex is. I’m hipped on Freud and all that, but it’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine percent passion and one little soupçon of jealousy.”

  A few adventurous women had started wearing short-sleeved or sleeveless dresses in the evening, sometimes showing their knees and stockings rolled below the knee. A risqué few even smoked in public and went out in the evenings without corsets because, as the whispered saying had it, “Men won’t dance with you if you wear one.” They were the fringe exception, the radicals who attracted sensational press and wagging fingers from the guardians of morality. Still, it wasn’t hard to imagine that before long there would be bathing-beauty contestants in skin-tight suits with naked legs, cheek-to-cheek dancing, people getting “blotto,” and necking and petting in parked cars—exactly the stuff the moralists most feared.

  The National Academy of Sciences didn’t even have a building of its own in 1920, which was why its annual meeting that year was scheduled to be held in the strange, turreted, brick castle of the Smithsonian Institution in the middle of the empty mall that ran from the Capitol to the Potomac. On the evening of April 26 a steady stream of motorcars drove up to the sheltered portico of the castle. The founders had modeled the institution after the long-established academies of Europe. They wisely stopped short of the formal dress that might have evoked protests of outrage from those who would be sure to insist on American plains pun. In France or England plumes and sashes were de rigueur. The men who came to the annual meeting of the American academy—science was not yet a proper pursuit for a woman—dressed in dark wool suits for the occasion. Even science was supposed to be democratic in America.

  The ticket George Hale had gotten for Shapley entitled him to a seat at the head table, among the notables. He sat next to W. J. V. Osterhout of the Botany Department at Harvard, but the banquet had been served before Shapley had a chance to talk about his nature studies. They were still eating when the speeches began.

  Stylized elocution was fashionable in 1920. A parade of long-winded speakers followed one another to the podium, first to honor the Prince of Monaco for his support of oceanographic studies, then to praise the achievements of a bureaucrat named Johnson, who had devoted his life to hookworm control. To keep his own nervousness in check, Shapley silently cataloged the speeches: “Johnson the Scientist,” “Johnson the Operator,” “Johnson the Man.” Out in the audience he could see heads nodding off.

  Einstein was at one end of the head table, next to the secretary of the Netherlands Embassy, there to accept a prize on behalf of the Dutch scientist Pieter Zeeman. During one of the speeches Einstein leaned over to whisper something to the Dutchman. Reporters later rushed to ask what Einstein had said. He said, the Dutchman reported with a grin, “I have just got a new Theory of Eternity.”

  Finally it was time for the much-publicized symposium. Shapley came to the podium first. He had never before addressed a large audience of non specialists.

  As Shapley looked around the room, one of the few faces he could recognize was that of his mentor at Princeton, the legendary Henry Norris Russell, the dean of American astronomy. Russell was a shy and formal professor, given to strolling the Princeton campus with his cane in hand, brushing aside students in his way and addressing even his best graduate students as if they were servants. For all his formality, Russell was an inspiring teacher, and he had been profoundly appreciative of the superb graduate student who had come his way. As Russell put it years later: “I had this struggle with darkening at the limb of an eclipsing binary. All these observations had to be worked over; it looked hopeless, and then the good Lord sent me Harlow Shapley.”

  Shapley’s diligence and success studying eclipsing binary stars at Princeton earned him the prized postdoctoral appointment at the Mount Wilson Observatory, in the hills above Pasadena, California—then the home of the world’s largest telescope. Shapley, brashly self-confident, was sure “that I could do something significant at Mount Wilson if the people there gave me a chance…. My desire, almost from the first, was to get distances.”

  Distances—how far away the various objects in the heavens were from our vantage point on the earth—seem an obvious question for the astronomer. In 1914, when Shapley came to Mount Wilson, there were few convincing answers. From our perspective, in an era of powerful telescopes on earth and in space, and after a remarkable revolution in the sciences of astronomy and astrophysics, it is astonishing to realize how limited man’s understanding of cosmology was earlier in our own century. When Shapley arrived at Mount Wilson astronomers could pinpoint the location of objects within a few arc seconds,* but they had few tools or techniques to determine the distance to the objects they saw in the night sky. Kepler and Newton had provided the mathematics to calculate the orbits of planets, and refined observations made it possible to calculate the distance to the planets with remarkable precision. But even the most sophisticated observatory equipment presented objects beyond our solar system to the astronomer as they appeared to the casual observer: like pinpoints of light on the inside of a great black sphere overhead—as if they were all at the same infinite distance away. Without a method of determining distances, the myriad objects the astronomer could see or photograph in his or her telescope were effectively a two-dimensional frieze.

  The methods we use to measure distance on earth are useless for
astronomical distances. We obviously can’t use a tape measure or yardstick. We can’t scale the size of a familiar object the way a hiker estimates the distance across a valley by comparing the apparent size of known objects like a fellow hiker, because stars appear as pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescopes. Triangulation—calculating distance to a remote object by measuring angles to the object from two widely separated points—is an inviting technique, but in 1914 no equipment on earth had the resolution to measure the parallax of a star from two points on earth. Even the longest baseline available to an earth-born observer—the span of the earth’s orbit around the sun—is tiny compared to the distance of the closest stars. Measurements taken six months apart show a parallax shift of the star against the background of other stars only for the closest stars.

  Many astronomers reluctantly accepted the limitations of the available technology. The energy of astronomers went into the laborious and unrewarding task of cataloging data: measuring positions, spectra, and apparent brightness of stars. Columns of numbers accumulated at observatories; generations of women scribes tested their vision on the tables of copperplate numbers. The data would all, someday, be invaluable, the secrets to understanding the most basic questions of cosmology—as soon as someone figured out how to use it.

  Shapley chose the problem of distances precisely because it was a bold enough problem to make a mark in the world of astronomy. To his good fortune, just about the time he came to Mount Wilson, there was an unexpected breakthrough in the techniques of astronomy from what many in the world of early-twentieth-century science would have thought the least likely source—a woman.

 

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