The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  Even Saint-Gobain, which had successfully poured the 60-inch blank, did not have crucibles large enough to melt the five tons of glass required for the new disk. They calculated that the mold would have to be filled with three successive pours of plate glass of one and a half tons of glass each—a technique that had never been tried. After preliminary trials Saint-Gobain produced a glass disk 101 inches across and 13 inches thick, weighing more than four and one-half tons. It was the largest plate glass casting ever poured.

  The disk was annealed for a full year before Hale received notice that the blank had been successfully cast. Three months later, when the blank was shipped to Hoboken, New Jersey, the New York papers called it the most valuable single piece of merchandise ever shipped. From Hoboken the disk was reshipped to New Orleans and then brought overland to Pasadena, where it arrived on December 7, 1908, the very day the 60-inch telescope was set in place on Mount Wilson.

  Hale and Ritchey watched impatiently as layer after layer of packing materials were stripped off the disk. Finally the crating was gone, and the two men got their chance to examine the immense mass of glass.

  They were appalled at what they found. There were heavy sheets of bubbles between the layers, where the glass from successive pours had not fused completely. Preliminary tests with a light source and a polarimeter (a device to measure strains in the glass) indicated that the long annealing process had resulted in partial devitrification, a breakdown of the internal structure of the glass. The disk appeared to have lost both strength and rigidity. Hale and Ritchey agreed that it was unlikely that the disk would take, let alone retain, a good surface figure. After hearing Ritchey’s verdict, Hooker announced that he would not pay for the blank.

  Hale called on Hooker to urge patience and to persuade the businessman that if he withdrew his commitment of funds it would never be possible to build the great telescope. Hooker refused to receive him. Hale came back again and again, presenting his card to Hooker’s butler. Each time Hooker refused to see him, and Hale was left to make small talk with Mrs. Hooker. Mrs. Hooker collected books and supervised the plantings, fashioning her gardens in what she called a “palazzo style.” With his slight mien and oval glasses, George Hale radiated a boyish energy. He was well read and willing to talk about Mrs. Hooker’s hobby of collecting fine book bindings in the Italian style. He asked her to teach him Italian. Unknown to Hale, Hooker was fiercely jealous of his wife. He got angrier with each visit Hale made.

  Hale estimated that he would need another five hundred thousand dollars from the Carnegie Institution or other sources to build the telescope. He kept up his rounds of calls, but no one wanted to pour money into a project that seemed to reach too far. The pressures of the search for funds, pulling at Hale from every direction, took their toll in renewed excruciating headaches.

  Hale began confiding in Harold Babcock, a gentle and understanding fellow astronomer who had recently joined the Mount Wilson staff. He told Babcock about his “terribly hard dreams,” in which he would sometimes get up in the middle of the night and try to climb the picture frames on the wall. His letters to his wife hinted at an inchoate anxiety. Others became aware of Hale’s increasing nervousness and urged him to rest. He refused. With one telescope barely finished and another seemingly stillborn, there was too much to do.

  The Saint-Gobain glassworks agreed to bear the loss for the first one-hundred-inch disk and pour another. Ritchey was sent to Paris to discuss the arrangements, and before long Saint-Gobain built a new furnace and annealing oven. They shipped smaller disks to Pasadena for testing. These blanks would be used for the secondary mirrors of the telescope, and from the preliminary tests they seemed excellent.

  During the summer of 1909 the reports of the canals Percival Lowell thought he saw on Mars filled the newspapers with speculation about the possibility of life on the Red Planet. The Mount Wilson astronomers had little patience for the debate about Martians, but during the close approach of Mars that summer, Hale turned the sixty-inch telescope on Mount Wilson—still the largest in the world by a substantial margin—toward Mars, took photographs with red-sensitive emulsions, and concluded that the widespread public belief in canals (fueled by publicity from Lowell and Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian planetary observer who had coined the label canali) was nothing more than wishful imagination. To Hale and the other astronomers, there were more important tasks for this and the next big telescope.

  Within months news arrived that a new one-hundred-inch disk had been cast at Saint-Gobain and consigned to a manure pile, which would generate and hold a steady temperature, for annealing. Now all they could do was wait. The news of the new casting was the perfect background for a visit to Mount Wilson by Andrew Carnegie. Everyone knew that Carnegie’s personal blessing would go a long way toward assuring the completion of the telescope.

  There had been working facilities at the top of the mountain for a decade when Carnegie visited, but Mount Wilson was still a rugged site, at least when compared to the refined eastern observatories. A tin-roofed machine shop and library on one side of the mountain were joined to the other facilities by a narrow balcony and walkway over a one-thousand-foot sheer drop. The site planned for the one-hundred-inch telescope was across a gorge that would have to be spanned with a bridge.

  The famed philanthropist arrived at the peak wearing a long fur coat, which on his ample girth gave him the appearance of a great bear. Carnegie, veteran of thousands of VIP tours, was ever the curious observer, asking questions, taking mental notes on everything he saw. He seemed bored by the huge fixed solar telescopes that studied the sun during the day, and the great sixty-inch reflector that studied the heavens at night. Between peeking through the eyepieces and listening to the descriptions of instruments and research projects, Carnegie’s gaze kept drifting to the stands of ancient pine trees on the mountaintop, some of them 120 feet tall and 17 feet in diameter. Hale had to call his attention back to the telescopes.

  Hale was careful not to make a direct appeal to Carnegie. He had met the great philanthropist in New York and Washington and knew that Carnegie liked to distance himself from the nitty-gritty of his eleemosynary projects. Presenting a proposal required a delicate diplomacy—enough hard sell to be sure Carnegie understood the importance of the work at Mount Wilson and the need for a larger telescope, interlaced with a subtle appeal to Carnegie’s oft-stated preferences for what he considered productive science with a chance of changing the world. Hale did a good job that day. Although Carnegie made no commitment, he seemed impressed with Hale and the work at the observatory and apparently enjoyed himself at dinner in the Monastery. Calling the astronomers’ residence the Monastery was only half facetious. There were no women observers, and observatory policy did not allow women to spend the night on the mountain.

  Reading the tea leaves of Carnegie’s remarks and gestures was an arcane and demanding science. Hale was optimistic, but optimism couldn’t build a telescope. And while he waited nervously for signs, the strain of overwork and compulsive worry about progress in France and Pasadena took their toll. Hale tried to work, juggling his own research, the administration of the observatory, and his efforts to get the new telescope under way, but the headaches and exhaustion wouldn’t go away. His sunken, gray-rimmed eyes and pained expression made his suffering obvious to all who met him. In the language of the day, he had “a bad case of brain congestion and exhaustion.”

  Nervous exhaustion was a commonly diagnosed affliction in the first decade of the twentieth century. Some attributed it to the technological millenialism that the humorist Robert Benchley summed up in a book title: After 1903—What? For Benchley the big question of the day was: “Are we living too fast for our nerves?” Whatever the cause, Theodore Dreiser, Theodore Roosevelt, Frank Norris, William and Henry James, Edith Wharton, and others less celebrated or chronicled suffered symptoms of exhaustion, depression, nervous prostration, dyspepsia, lack of appetite, insomnia, and apathy, sometimes complicated by hyster
ia, invalidism, or hypochondriasis. It was a peculiarly American affliction, according to New York neurologist George Beard, who coined the fancy label neurasthenia. The symptoms were real and often incapacitating, but some sufferers found consolation in identifying neurasthenia as a mark of intelligence, sensitivity, and spirituality, a disease of intellectuals and leaders in a world that was changing too fast.

  The cures ranged from patent medicines for the poor, like Dr. Hammond’s Nerve and Brain Pills, to expensive rest cures. Teddy Roosevelt and Frederic Remington went west to seek a cure in the wide open spaces. Elihu Root and Theodore Dreiser went to Muldoon’s spa, run by a former wrestler and boxer who imposed a regimen of militaristic discipline and vigorous exercise. The stodgy Mrs. Peniston in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth followed George Hale’s mother’s prescription: Lying down was her “panacea for all physical and moral disorders.”

  Alas, none of the cures would work for George Hale. He was too much the scientist to trust patent medicines, already as far west as he could travel, and too busy to take time off for a rest cure. His physician, Dr. McBride, urged him to leave Pasadena for a sustained period of complete rest. Hale refused. He was at a crucial point in his own solar research, the sixty-inch telescope was just coming into full service, and the one-hundred-inch project was at a critical juncture. The most he would agree to was to cut back a little. In 1910 the Solar Union scheduled an international meeting at Mount Wilson, the first time a large academic congress was held at the observatory. Hale was too exhausted to attend more than a garden party, a single dinner, and one brief meeting on the mountain. When the astronomers prepared to look through the sixty-inch telescope, Hale’s pride and joy, he had to retire to bed with a painful headache.

  He finally agreed to leave Pasadena and Mount Wilson for a much-needed rest. He chose Europe, far from the day-to-day pressures of the observatory.*

  Hale was at the peak of his career as a solar astronomer and the director of the leading observatory of the world. In Europe he was feted wherever he went, elected a member of the Royal Society of London, and toasted at receptions at the Paris Observatory, at a stag dinner at Prince Rothschild’s, and at the International Association of Academies. He spent a day with the distinguished Dutch physicist H. A. Lorentz and received an honorary doctor of science degree at Oxford in the company of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Earl Grey, governor-general of Canada. He visited Saint-Gobain and was cheered by the progress on a new mirror. When he came home he felt rested, ready for work again.

  Then the news arrived that the second one-hundred-inch disk had broken during annealing. The Saint-Gobain glassworks admitted it was unlikely that they could produce a disk better than the one they had shipped. There were no other options for the telescope, so Hale suggested another look at the first disk. He recalled that when he had studied the rejected blank in Pasadena, the bubbles were not close to the surface. He questioned whether it was possible that despite their threatening appearance, the bubbles might not interfere with the formation of an optical surface. He fired off telegrams ordering more tests. Arthur L. Day of the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution declared after examining the blank that the layer of bubbles strengthened rather than weakened the disk.

  Hooker and Ritchey protested. Hooker thought he was investing in immortality when he offered the funds for the telescope. He had been promised that the instrument with his name on it would be the largest and most perfect instrument in the world. Now, he demanded a release from all further obligations if he paid the $45,000 in full.

  Hale called on him, urging patience, but Hooker was adamant. He wanted no part of a telescope built from a flawed disk. Without his funds the project threatened to unravel, and with it the hope for a new era of astrophysics and cosmology.

  The new round of squabbles with Hooker was too much for Hale’s frail health. Ever since the interview with his father before he graduated MIT, he had grown accustomed, in times of stress, to a painful ringing sensation in his ears and the ghastly headaches. Now, suddenly, the symptoms were accompanied by an uncontrollable and frightening vision: A little man appeared, as if in a dream, advising and berating Hale about the decisions of his life. The medical vocabulary of the time said his neurasthenia had progressed to nervous prostration. We would call it a nervous breakdown.

  The doctors told Hale that that he had to get away again. Hale chose Egypt, via Menton on the Riviera. He had long been a close friend of James Breasted, the Orientalist on the University of Chicago faculty who was trying to record the history of the Nile Valley through hieroglyphs, and Breasted had suggested an itinerary. Once they were abroad Evelina censored his letters, trying to keep the worries from California at bay. But in each city Hale sneaked away to the telegraph office to send off queries on the progress of the telescope.

  No matter how far he traveled, Hale wasn’t alone. From Egypt to Rome, wherever he went, the little man appeared in visions, telling Hale that what he was doing wasn’t important, that the books he was reading didn’t matter, that his plans were nothing. Though George Hale did not confide in his wife, Evelina could see that her husband’s situation had worsened. She wrote to Walter Adams, the acting head of the Mount Wilson Observatory: “I wish that glass was in the bottom of the ocean.”

  It was when the symptoms were at their worst, the frightening visits of the little man coming almost daily, that Hale—on a train from Menton to Genoa—spotted a tiny notice in a copy of Le Petit Niçois, a French Riviera newspaper, that Carnegie had given another ten million dollars to the Carnegie Institution of Washington. When they arrived he hurried to buy Corrière della Sera, which confirmed the report and mentioned Carnegie’s special interest in Mount Wilson and the one-hundred-inch telescope. Hale knew what it meant: Finally the one-hundred-inch telescope was funded.

  Ritchey still voiced doubts about the disk, but Hale wired him to start grinding the preliminary shape into the mirror. Ritchey took even more extreme precautions for the grinding shop than those that had been taken with the sixty-inch disk. Because even slight variations in the temperature of the shop would affect the results of any testing of the surface, Ritchey and Hale decided that the final figuring and testing would be done only in the summer months. The winter months would be devoted to rough-grinding and work on the auxiliary mirrors. Ritchey ordered electric fans to circulate the air in the optical laboratory, to prevent temperature stratification of the air. With this regime figuring the surface of the mirror from spherical to paraboloid took one year of steady work. Then they stopped to prepare a sixty-inch-plane-silvered mirror that could be used for optical tests at the focus of the big mirror, before they would polish the surface to the final figure. Ritchey insisted on working alone.

  Hale sailed home in 1911. The doctors were cautious, sending him off to a sanatorium in Maine for rest and a regimen of wood sawing, copious good food, rests on the floor with a billet under his spine, daily massage, medicine nine times a day, lectures on the subconscious, and self-hypnosis exercises. When he finally returned to Pasadena, Dr. McBride limited his schedule to working from nine to twelve-thirty in the mornings, and warned him that he would never again be able to return to his previous routine.

  Doctor’s orders or not, Hale couldn’t relax. Even Andrew Carnegie urged: “Pray show your good sense by keeping in check your passion for work, so that you maybe spared to put the capstone upon your career, which should be one of the most remarkable ever livd [sic].” Hale watched nervously as Ritchey ground and polished the one-hundred-inch blank. Ritchey had never been an easy man. Now, with the world watching his progress on the priceless blank, he became even more intractable, raging at anyone who approached his inner sanctum to inquire about progress on the disk.

  Ritchey had his own ideas about telescope design. At his home laboratory he had been experimenting with using a deep, fast primary mirror and a complex hyperboloid curve in the secondary mirror. The resulting design would produce a telescope with a large field of sh
arp focus and a shorter tube design that could be mounted in a fork like the sixty-inch telescope. For the careful photographs Ritchey liked to take of deep-space objects, his design would be a boon. But a wide field of sharp focus was not necessary for the spectrographic studies that would form a substantial portion of the work of the Mount Wilson telescopes. Given the difficulties of fund-raising, Hale and Adams would not support experiments on Ritchey’s new designs.

  Ritchey, chafing that his ideas were ignored, approached Hooker privately for money to set up his own shop. Hale, outraged that a colleague would try to divert Hooker’s funds from “the benefit of the Observatory as a whole” and the “advancement of science” began distancing himself from Ritchey, drawing up a new contract that limited Ritchey’s privileges at the observatory. When Ritchey later advertised his telescope-making business and ordered special stationery imprinted “Professor G. W. Ritchey” with the Mount Wilson Observatory address, the relationship turned bitter. Ritchey and Hale both claimed credit for an edge-support mechanism used for testing of the disk. Rumors began to circulate that Ritchey sometimes had strange attacks when he was alone with the disk, and that he was an epileptic, subject to unpredictable seizures. He was relieved from any further work on the mirror.

  Ritchey was furious. When another optician was given the task of the final figuring and polishing of the mirror, Ritchey announced that the disk was fundamentally flawed, that it had a “strong” and a “weak” diameter at right angles to each other and would never work no matter who figured it. Despite Ritchey’s predictions the opticians kept polishing, gradually bringing the entire surface of the one-hundred-inch-diameter disk to the required optical figure. A deviation of one-millionth of an inch would show up on the optical tests, and ultimately in the quality of the images the telescope produced. The only prescription was more polishing and more testing.