The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  Rose’s education had been in the humanities, and he had been a professor of philosophy at Peabody College before coming to the Rockefeller funds. In his years as a headquarters commander in the wars against tropical diseases, his perspective changed, and he came to believe in the primacy of science over other forms of human activity, and of mathematics and the physical sciences over other sciences. “This is an age of science,” he wrote. “All important fields of activity, from the breeding of bees to the administration of an empire, call for an understanding of the spirit and technique of modern science.”

  Rose’s first official activity was a five-month trip through Europe, visiting nineteen countries and fifty universities, research organizations, and institutions to hunt out leaders in the sciences. Europe, he said, was “ground harrowed by the war, ready for new seed.” In fields like physics, European laboratories and theoreticians were unraveling the secrets of the atom. These were the heady days when Niels Bohr “quantized” the electron in the classic orbits we see on symbols of the atom, Werner Heisenberg added matrix mechanics and the “uncertainty principle,” Erwin Schrodinger developed an alternate theory treating the electron as a packet of waves, and Max Born demonstrated that Schrödinger’s waves were packets of probability. As these sophisticated theories evolved, experimentalists in Berlin and at Cambridge University were probing the nucleus of the atom, discovering new sub-atomic particles and the incredible energy inherent in the atom.

  The funds for this remarkably productive research were minuscule. When Rose visited, in the 1920s, the annual research budget of the famed Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge totaled under one thousand pounds sterling. The possibility of Rockefeller money made Rose a very popular visitor. Wherever he traveled, to Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Gottingen, Stockholm, and Paris, he was received like a visiting monarch. On his trip Rose met Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Isidor Rabi, Samuel Goudsmit, T. Hogness, and Edward Condon—the leaders in theoretical and experimental physics—and made his first grant to Niels Bohr.

  Rose unabashedly held views that later generations would label elitist. His favorite aphorism was: “Make the peaks higher.” When someone on his staff pointed to the long tradition of grants the GEB had made to unknown agencies and institutions, Rose answered, “The high standards of a strong institution will spread throughout a nation and will even cross oceans.”

  His program was a radical departure for the GEB, which for a long time had directed its programs to rural schools in the south and improved education for blacks. To circumvent the inertia of the foundation staff, which was inclined to continue programs they had funded in the past, Rose reached beyond the foundation offices for advice and counsel, calling on an informal “club cabinet” drawn from the distinguished scientists he met in his travels, and from the men he saw regularly at the University Club, the Cosmos Club in Washington, and other familiar haunts. Foundation presidents make useful friends. Scientists who had known Rose before he became president of the GEB, and those who met him later, were eager to cultivate his friendship.

  On questions of astronomy Rose turned most often for advice and counsel to George Hale, whose reputation, experience, and prestige were exactly what Rose sought in his advisers. On his visits to New York, Hale would often have lunch or dinner with Rose. Between visits Hale sent books and articles to Rose, and Rose wrote to get Hale’s views on proposed GEB grants in support of observatories and astronomy programs. It was one of those mutually beneficial relationships that characterized the world of the University Club.

  In the early spring of 1928, rumors circulated that Rose would soon retire from the presidencies of the GEB and IEB, and that a portion of the funds John D. Rockefeller had allocated for the IEB had not been committed. The unspent funds were not an endowment but a self-liquidating trust. When it was gone, if Rockefeller did not choose to renew the fund, the board would dissolve. The rumors among those who followed foundations were that the next president of the GEB would return the direction of the board’s activities to fields like southern and black education in the United States, and that the IEB, which had been created at Rose’s insistence, would be allowed to expire.

  If the rumors were true, Rose’s IEB was an orphan with money to burn. George Hale had been waiting for a long time to hear news like that.

  Hale prepared his campaign carefully. In early 1928 he drafted an article for Harper’s Magazine on “The Possibilities of Large Telescopes.” Harper’s was good seed ground. Foundation officials who see themselves as pacesetters, opening new frontiers of research, are profoundly influenced by the intellectual landscape around them. A serious but readable magazine was more likely to attract their attention than a scientific journal.

  Hale had a knack for describing complex science in simple layperson’s language. “Like buried treasures,” he began, “the outposts of the universe have beckoned to the adventurous from immemorial times.” Hale chronicled the continuing efforts to build larger telescopes, from the medieval Arab astronomers in twelfth-century Cairo to his own work on the Yerkes and Mount Wilson telescopes. “The latest explorers have worked beyond the boundaries of the Milky Way in the realm of spiral ‘island universes,’ the first of which lies a million light-years from the earth while the farthest is immeasurably remote…. While much progress has been made, the greatest possibilities still lie in the future.”

  Hale described the experiments Francis Pease had conducted on the one-hundred-inch telescope with an interferometer. The interferometer united the images from two smaller mirrors at the ends of a long beam into a single image. By comparing the images made with mirrors as much as twenty feet apart, Pease concluded that “an increase in aperture to 20 feet or more would be perfectly safe. For the first time, therefore, we can make such an increase without the uncertainties that have been unavoidable in the past.” Hale’s eloquent prose made the construction of a new telescope sound simple: “As there is every reason to believe that a suitable Pyrex or quartz disc could be successfully cast and annealed, and as the optical and engineering problems of figuring, mounting, and housing it present no serious difficulties, I believe that a two-hundred inch or even a three-hundred inch telescope could be built and used to the great advantage of astronomy.”

  It was a masterfully crafted article, clear enough for the untrained reader but with enough documentation and current information not to be dismissed as mere popularization by those who had followed recent developments. Hale elided over a few details that might have troubled a less optimistic reporter: No telescope disk had ever been successfully cast or annealed from Pyrex or quartz; no disk that large had ever been successfully figured; and there were no workable plans for a mounting that could precisely point an instrument that large or even support one in a stable configuration. Nor had anyone ever done the engineering for a structure that could house the instrument.

  Hale’s article also didn’t admit that the challenge of casting, figuring, mounting, and housing the sixty-and one-hundred-inch instruments on Mount Wilson had far exceeded even the most pessimistic estimates. Hale did not mention the reservations of many astronomers, including Harlow Shapley, who questioned whether the seeing at any site was good enough to take advantage of the potential light-gathering ability of a huge telescope. Shapley’s own interest was in seeing many midsize telescopes built, rather than a single large instrument. His views may have been motivated, at least in part, by jealousy of the growing fame of Mount Wilson, but his pessimism was widely shared.

  Finally Hale did not venture a guess of the estimated cost for a telescope that large. It didn’t take much extrapolation from the final cost of the one-hundred-inch telescope, which exceeded six hundred thousand dollars, to realize that it would require a larger grant than had ever been made by an individual or agency for any scientific instrument ever built.

  Before the article appeared in print, Hale asked his editor at Harper’s to forward a copy of the manuscript to Wickliffe Rose.

&nb
sp; There is no record of when George Hale and Wickliffe Rose first discussed a large telescope. Their earliest talk was probably at the University Club. Neither seems to have kept a diary of these meetings, but Rose wouldn’t have had to push hard to get Hale to talk about his favorite subject. They later met at the offices of the GEB at 61 Broadway. Rose, Hale reported to Walter Adams, was “so keen about a huge telescope that he [would] talk about nothing but the largest possible, and remark[ed] that there [was] no reason why fifteen millions should not be spent on such an instrument.”

  When Hale and Rose finally exchanged letters on the subject, their correspondence was in the stilted language of men laying paper trails to cover negotiations in progress. The salutations were formal—“Dear Dr. Rose:” and “Dear Doctor Hale:”—unusual for fellow club members, and in Hale’s case correct only if you counted honorary doctorates. The language was formal enough to dispel accusations that these old boys had worked out too much in advance. Hale’s letter came right to the point:

  We now have definite observational evidence that at such a favorable site as Mount Wilson a large increase in aperature could be made with confidence…. May I ask whether the General Education Board would consider the possibility of making a grant to determine how large a telescope mirror it would be feasible and advisable to cast, with the view of providing later for the construction of a telescope considerably outranking the one-hundred-inch Hooker telescope?

  Rose answered Hale within the week, in the imperial first person plural reserved for royalty and foundation presidents: “It is a matter that interests us. We shall be very glad to discuss it with you.”

  Rose had already scheduled a trip to Pasadena, to visit the California Institute of Technology, when he received Hale’s letter. The distinguished faculty of the new institution comprised just the sort of men Rose favored with his fellowships. A visit to Mount Wilson and the Pasadena offices of the Mount Wilson Observatory was easily added to the trip.

  H. J. Thorkelson, Rose’s colleague at the GEB, had previously visited the observatory on a foundation scouting trip, in October 1926. He was given the standard VIP reception, met Hubble and van Maanen, ate dinner with the astronomers at the Monastery, saw Jupiter through the sixty-inch telescope, and was escorted into the dome of the one-hundred-inch telescope while it was busy on a multi-night exposure. After the tour Francis Pease showed Thorkelson his tentative drawings of a twenty-five-foot (three-hundred-inch) reflecting telescope, with a probable cost of some $8 million. Pease admitted that there were no real plans for construction or for securing the necessary funds. Thorkelson was impressed that much of the manufacturing work on the big instruments at Mount Wilson had been done by the staff at a saving of about “one-half the estimates submitted by manufacturing concerns.”

  Hale had another meeting with Rose in mid-March, before Rose’s trip to California. The whole process seemed to be moving quickly, so Hale tried to get in touch with John C. Merriam, the president of the Carnegie Institution. Although the observatory functioned independently, with its own director, the Mount Wilson Observatory was a branch of the Carnegie Institution. Merriam was in Mexico and could not be reached before Rose and Thorkelson left for Pasadena and Mount Wilson.

  The seeing was poor the night Rose and Thorkelson were on the mountain, but they were able to view the moon, Neptune, a double star, a nebula in Orion, and a star cluster through the one-hundred-inch telescope. The rest of the evening they talked with Walter Adams, Henry Norris Russell, and other astronomers who were at the observatory.

  Pease again described his plans for a three-hundred-inch telescope. Rose asked what it would cost. Pease estimated the cost at $12 million, $4 million more than two years before. Pease explained that while a plate-glass disk could be impossible, “this disc could easily be made of Pyrex with very distinct advantages over glass,” or of fused quartz, which would be better still.

  Later that evening the group settled into a long discussion of what institution should run a very large telescope, if one were to be built. The astronomers favored an independent director and trustees who would administer an endowment and secure additional funds from time to time, with an advisory committee of astronomers—an administrative structure not very different from the organization of the Mount Wilson Observatory. They also argued strongly that one very large telescope would do more for science than additional telescopes the size of the one-hundred-inch telescope.

  Rose disagreed with their suggestions for administration, arguing that a university was the right institution to run a big telescope. Walter Adams, who reported the discussions to Hale in New York, had the feeling Rose was talking about the California Institute of Technology. Adams was astonished: At the time the fledgling institution had no astronomy facilities and no astronomers or astrophysicists on its faculty.

  On his return to New York, Rose met again with Hale, who had stayed at the University Club in New York during Rose’s trip to California. Rose told Hale that he had been impressed by the facilities and research program at Mount Wilson, but that he had strong reservations about the administration of the institution. The observatory, he suggested, should be a separately endowed institution and not dependent on the Carnegie Institution of Washington for funds. Hale assumed that Rose had the Rockefeller Medical Institute, which he had administered for many years, in mind as an example.

  As they talked that afternoon, Rose made no comments about the mechanical or optical plans for the telescope. From his trips to Europe and his hobnobbing with famous scientists, he had developed a style of his own, leaving the actual science to the scientists. His experience was as an administrator, and he considered himself an expert on issues of scientific administration. Hale was wise enough not to argue with Rose’s institutional preferences, although he did point out that it would be difficult to build a large telescope without the advice and assistance of the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory and their laboratories in Pasadena.

  There is a peculiar, tentative choreography to the early discussions between a foundation and an applicant. Though both parties know they are discussing a potential grant, they dance around the notion of a formal application, wary lest they force a premature decision. Hale, from his experience with Yerkes, Hooker, Carnegie, and others, knew the quagmires in the way of any grant of funds. Donors, whether they speak for their own money or as officers of a foundation, have strong personal preferences that cannot be ignored. A slip of the tongue, a single reference to an un favored concept, could kill the chances of the proposal. Yet Hale couldn’t afford to be too cautious. The early rumors of Rose’s retirement were now public, and the word among foundation watchers had it that when he was replaced, the boards would return to their previous funding priorities, which did not favor science. If a grant was to be secured, it had to be soon.

  For hours that afternoon, as they sat in comfortable wing chairs at the University Club, Hale enthusiastically described the fused-quartz research that had been going on in the General Electric laboratory of the famed scientist and inventor Elihu Thomson, in West Lynn, Massachusetts, and the new Pyrex borosilicate glass that had been developed at the Corning Glass Works in upstate New York. Neither material had been tried in an astronomical mirror, but Hale assured Rose that both materials would be suitable for a very large telescope and that there were no technical problems in the use of either material for a mirror. The work would proceed in stages, Hale explained, working gradually up to a two-hundred-inch mirror, and perhaps to a mirror large enough for the three-hundred-inch telescope that Pease had designed. Hale was persuasive when he spoke about a pet project, and Rose was willing to be persuaded by a distinguished scientist with a reputation as expansive as Hale’s.

  Rose asked about a budget. They had only been discussing the possibility of a grant to explore the building of a large telescope mirror, but Hale had prepared for a budget question by getting figures from Gano Dunn, his friend and the president of the J. G. White Engineering Company, contractors f
or major projects worldwide. Building a series of mirrors up to two hundred inches in diameter, Hale said, would cost approximately half a million dollars. Building a two-hundred-inch telescope would cost in the neighborhood of $6 million. Endowing it with operating funds would require another $2 million.

  “What about a three-hundred-inch telescope?” Rose asked.

  Hale said that his estimates for a telescope that large were still vague, but the figure would be somewhere around $15 million.

  “Well,” Rose suddenly asked. “Do you want a two-hundred-inch or a three-hundred-inch?”

  Hale was astonished. Until then they had only discussed the possibility of a grant to explore whether a large mirror could be built for a telescope. Rose’s calm, unsurprised reaction to the budget figures was the first indication that his foundation might be ready to commit the funds to actually build a telescope. Neither of them had to say that a grant on the scale of Hale’s proposed budget would be, by a substantial margin, the largest award ever made in support of a scientific project. Fellow club members could leave much unsaid.

  Rose’s question wasn’t easy to answer. Hale knew the next telescope would be the last one he would shepherd into existence. The nervous breakdowns and the visits of tormenting demons were now coming so frequently that he had begun to husband the moments of clarity and peace, carefully dividing his energies between his own scientific research and the projects he held dear, like this one. He didn’t have time to make mistakes.