The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  The size of what the astronomers called the big telescope wasn’t a virgin question. At Mount Wilson and in the library on Santa Barbara Street the astronomers had talked incessantly about the big telescope. Hale and his colleagues had spent countless hours going over Pease’s sketch and model for a three-hundred-inch telescope. Still Hale was wary. It was one thing to write optimistically in Harper’s for a general audience, or even in a preliminary feeler to a foundation. Now that the bait had been nibbled, how big a fish could they actually land?

  Hale had spent years struggling with partially completed telescopes, fending off anxious donors who wanted to know why progress on the telescope that was to bear their name was stalled. Each leap in size, from the Yerkes forty-inch refractor to the sixty-and then the one-hundred-inch reflectors at Mount Wilson, had involved far more problems than anyone ever anticipated, and the new proposal entailed a leap in magnitude greater than any of the previous jumps. Much of the technology that had been extended and modified for each of the earlier telescopes couldn’t be stretched any farther.

  Hale didn’t give Rose a direct answer that day. After the meeting he telephoned Walter Adams, the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory since Hale’s retirement, and two other trusted advisers: J. J. Carty, the director of research at American Telephone & Telegraph, and Gano Dunn, the president of J. G. White. Neither Carty nor Dunn was an astronomer or had any special experience with large telescopes, but as the heads of the predecessor of the Bell Labs and of one of the largest engineering firms in the world, they did have experience with large-scale design and construction projects. All three men supported Hale’s instinct to go for a two-hundred-inch telescope.

  That night Hale had dinner with John Merriam. Hale repeated Rose’s arguments favoring the California Institute as the body to administer a large telescope. Merriam made no objections. Hale stayed on at the University Club, waiting to hear back from Rose. He knew that Rose, too, was carrying on delicate negotiations with his colleagues and with selected members of the IEB.

  On the morning of April 12, Rose and Hale met again at the club. Arthur Noyes, Hale’s old professor from MIT and the chairman of the chemistry department at Caltech, joined them. Hale reported to Rose on his discussions with Adams, Carty, Dunn, and Millikan of Caltech. They had all supported the decision to go for a two-hundred-inch telescope and agreed that the proposed new observatory should be vested in the California Institute. In his diary Rose noted that even Carty, who was a member of the board of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, supported the decision that the telescope should go to Caltech, rather than to the Carnegie Institution, which ran the Mount Wilson telescopes. The process was suddenly moving quickly.

  A few days later Rose sent a note to Hale: “I should appreciate it if you would write me an informal letter about the proposed telescope, in which you make all the essential points concerning the proposal in separate paragraphs as 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.”

  It was exactly the invitation Hale had awaited. Working in pencil, at the University Club, he drafted a proposal with the numbered paragraphs Rose requested. Most of his proposal was an expansion and rehash of the earlier letter and the Harper’s article, but years of fund-raising with men like Yerkes and Hooker, who liked to air their views, had made a good listener out of Hale and versed him in the art of praise. “As you have remarked,” he wrote in the second-to-last paragraph, “the most important requirement in the construction and operation of the telescope is the close cooperation of the Mount Wilson Observatory and the California Institute.”

  The proposal included no details of the design of the telescope, because there was no design. Hale was selling an idea and a group of men. The budget in the last paragraph of his proposal was as vague as their talk at the University Club: “The best estimate of total cost I am now in a position to offer is six million dollars, to be expended over a considerable period (probably four to six or more years)…. This estimate, which does not include endowment, is believed to cover the various contingencies necessarily to be reckoned with in a large undertaking of this kind.”

  When he finished the draft, Hale penciled in a few minor changes, then had it typed up and delivered downtown to Rose’s office.

  Hale had dealt with foundations often enough to know that the written proposal was a formality. The presidents of large foundations are quick to say, “I cannot commit the funds of the foundation to your proposal; only the board of trustees makes that decision.” But foundation presidents do not solicit proposals for extensive and costly projects unless they plan to submit the proposal with their endorsement to the board. Unless the staff is out-of-step with its overseeing board, boards of trustees generally go along with the recommendations of the staff. The bigger the foundation, the more likely that the distinguished trustees are too busy to second guess the professional staff. And in this instance the grant was a terminal request to the IEB, which had been more or less Rose’s private fund. With Rose’s assurance that they could count on the support of the Rockefeller group, Hale left for Pasadena feeling confident about the proposal.

  At the GEB offices, Thorkelson put together the supporting material for the proposal, requesting Mount Wilson photographs of spectra, spiral nebulae, star clusters, and exteriors and interiors of the Santa Barbara Street laboratories and the observatory, to accompany the formal presentation of the telescope proposal to the board. To wrap up the last loose ends, Rose scheduled a meeting at the Cosmos Club in Washington to discuss the project with Arthur Day, a member of the board of the Carnegie Institution and one of the inventors of Pyrex. At Hale’s urging Millikan, Dunn, Adams, and others wrote letters to Rose endorsing the proposal.

  For Wickliffe Rose there was only one step left before he presented the proposal to his board: a discussion with John Merriam, the president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, to confirm its support for the telescope project. The call on Merriam was a formality. Rose assumed that the assurances of men he trusted (especially a University Club man like George Hale, whose name was almost synonymous with the Mount Wilson Observatory) were sufficient to guarantee the needed cooperation of the observatory and its labs on Santa Barbara Street.

  Back in Pasadena Hale and his colleagues from Mount Wilson began discussing an appropriate site for the new telescope. The astronomers were deliriously happy in expectation.

  8

  The Politics of Money

  Although they had not been direct competitors in business, there was little love lost between John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. After reading Carnegie’s essay “The Gospel of Wealth” with its pithy aphorism: “The man who dies rich dies disgraced,” Rockefeller wrote to Carnegie: “I would that more men of wealth were doing as you are doing with your money.” Before long the two men were competing to top one another’s eleemosynary efforts. Carnegie announcements of new libraries and institutes fought for headlines with the grants various Rockefeller funds made for education, medicine, or science. In an era before baseball players and entertainers were famed for their salaries as well as their talent, Rockefeller and Carnegie were steady news.

  Before income taxes the wealthy did as they pleased with their fortunes. Rockefeller’s dining table used to be stacked with appeals he had gotten from Baptist missionaries, to whom he would personally send checks. Even after the introduction of income and estate taxes, the creation of foundations allowed the wealthy to maintain their incredible wealth intact, although with muckrakers exposing the sources of that wealth, controversy dogged some of the new foundations. Congress debated granting a charter of incorporation to the Rockefeller Foundation for three years, amid charges of “tainted money,” “the kiss of Judas Iscariot,” and “the Trojan horse,” before turning it down. The foundation was incorporated in New York State.

  By law, foundations had to maintain in their charters and in their public literature that they were independent decision-making bodies, and most observed the letter of the regulations scrupulously. When John
D. Rockefeller established the IEB at Wickliffe Rose’s request, he declined to serve as a trustee, on the grounds, as he put it, that “it is a technical field and I have no qualifications as an advisor.” Yet even when he chose not to serve on the board, the presence of the founder was ubiquitous at the big foundations—not only in the paternal gaze from the oil portrait on the boardroom wall or the name chiseled in stone over the building’s entrance and engraved on letterheads and business cards, but in the membership of the board and the officers of the foundation, who, as often as not, had been picked by the founder. When he set up his foundation, Rockefeller reserved the right to personally designate the recipients of up to $2 million from the annual bequests. He revoked that privilege in 1917 because it proved cumbersome, but even when he wasn’t making grants himself, the staffs of his foundation knew where the money came from.

  Men who owe status, respect, and an excellent job to the beneficence of a wealthy patron rarely forget the reciprocal responsibilities of patronage. His frail health had restricted him to a bland milk diet, but John D. Rockefeller was very much alive in 1928, issuing a constant stream of opinions, each with the force of a decree, on the many ventures and institutions that bore his name. Wickliffe Rose, the president of two Rockefeller-funded foundations, might be willing to trust George Hale on such questions as the technical possibilities of a very large telescope, and the exciting new technology that could be explored to build such a machine, but before a grant could be awarded, there were subtle questions of protocol, procedure, and politics that Rose had to consider. On those matters Rose was first and foremost a Rockefeller employee.

  Hale’s earliest conversations with Rose, and his first letter proposing the telescope, had suggested either the Carnegie Institution of Washington or the National Academy of Sciences as the logical organization to administer the proposed telescope. The Mount Wilson Observatory of the Carnegie Institution had more experience building and operating large telescopes than any other group in the world. The National Academy had no special facilities or experience with astronomy, but as Hale pointed out, they could offer a wide range of technical knowledge, and give the project a status “more nearly resembling that of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood’s Hole.” The National Academy as project sponsor also offered the promise of independence from existing facilities and institutions. But for Wickliffe Rose, both of Hale’s suggestions were fraught with problems.

  The Mount Wilson Observatory identified itself, on its stationery and on the entrance to its buildings, as part of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Wickliffe Rose did not need special instructions to be wary of committing Rockefeller funds to a Carnegie institution.

  Hale’s other suggestion, the National Academy of Science, was also far from independent in the eyes of the president of a foundation funded by John D. Rockefeller. George Hale was an officer of the National Academy, and starting in 1914, he had repeatedly appealed to Andrew Carnegie for funds to build a suitable headquarters for the academy. Carnegie turned him down, but Hale was persistent, so much so that at one point he and Carnegie got into a heated argument about whether Hale had taken advantage of Carnegie’s hospitality. The argument was patched over, and Hale’s relentless pitches and a letter from Elihu Root finally persuaded Carnegie to donate the money to fund the new building in Washington in 1922. Carnegie’s grant, and the beginning of work on the new building, were much publicized. To Rockefeller people, the National Academy of Sciences was another Carnegie institution.

  John Merriam knew about Hale’s proposal for the telescope long before Wickliffe Rose came to Washington to call on him. Hale had sent him a copy of the manuscript of the Harper’s article at the same time he sent it to Rose. Merriam had written back that it was “extremely interesting,” something they ought to talk about. Hale had also met with Merriam in New York to tell him about the proposed telescope. By then Hale and Rose had already agreed that the proposal would be submitted on behalf of Caltech. Since the Carnegie Institution was not the applicant, Hale had not made a formal request for the approval of the project by Merriam. That omission didn’t sit well with John Merriam.

  John Merriam had been second choice for his job as president of the Carnegie Institution, which included, at least on paper, oversight of the Mount Wilson Observatory. Hale had in fact been offered the presidency of the Carnegie Institution in 1919. He declined—the demons were already troubling him, and he wanted to stay close to Pasadena and the telescopes—and it was he who nominated Merriam, a University of California paleontologist, for the job. Although Merriam became Hale’s titular boss, Hale’s fame as a solar astronomer and his long association with the large telescopes—even long after he retired as director of the Mount Wilson Observatory—made George Hale’s the name people associated with the great observatory.

  Merriam seemed to many to have a permanent chip on his shoulder. He was stuffy, heavy-set, with long thinning hair swept carefully over the bald spots on his head. A goatee and tiny wire-rimmed glasses accentuated his stern expression. It was widely known that he had been second choice to George Hale for his job, and that he owed his job to Hale’s recommendation. Like many men in positions of power, Merriam resented anyone to whom he was indebted.

  When Rose came to Merriam’s office and explained his reasons for directing the grant to Caltech, Merriam announced that he knew nothing about the proposal for a large telescope, that the trustees of the Carnegie Institution had not debated the matter, and that on his own he could not promise the cooperation that Rose was assuming from the Mount Wilson Observatory.

  Rose was dumbfounded. He went back to his office and promptly wrote Hale:

  After hearing from him [Merriam] a statement of the policy and program of the Carnegie Institution, it seemed clear to me that the program of the Institution should not be interfered with, and that if the Board should appropriate funds for the proposed telescope it would interfere with the normal development of that program and might be a disservice. We are agreed that it would be inadvisable for us to develop the idea any further.

  The telescope proposal was dead.

  As soon as he got the letter, Hale knew what had happened. The “program of the Institution” that “should not be interfered with” was John Merriam’s ego and petty jealousy.

  “As I understand Dr. Rose,” Merriam wrote after Rose left his office,

  he believes that Mt. Wilson Observatory is eminently fitted to do the work of planning, constructing and operating a two hundred inch telescope, but he believes the organization and policy of the Institution inadequate to give proper guarantees for the utilization of such an instrument or the organization of its work in the future…. Much explaining would be necessary if a great telescope were given to the California Institute, without recognizing the fact that the Mt. Wilson Observatory is the leading observatory of the world today, that its program is well organized and effective, and its research is universally recognized as one of the most effective programs in the world.

  Men worried about appearances can be tough adversaries.

  Fortunately George Hale’s demons were temporarily at bay. He called Walter Adams and Henry Robinson, the chairman of the trustees of the California Institute. Together they telegraphed Merriam: “Have received report conversation between you and Rose which Robinson, Adams and I feel must be distorted. Nevertheless am informed it is likely effectively to prevent carrying out greatest project in history of astronomy previously practically assured.”

  Hale then fired off a telegram to Rose, asking him to hold the opinion of his associates “unprejudiced” until the “true attitude” of the Carnegie Institution could be determined. Rose wrote in his diary that he considered his letter of the same day—a confirmation that the proposal was dead—a sufficient answer to Hale’s telegram.

  Ignoring Rose’s unambiguous letter, Hale mobilized his troops. He got Robinson, Millikan, Adams, Dunn, and Carty to write Rose. He telephoned Carty, who agreed to do everything in his
power to change Merriam’s attitude and to convince Rose of the Carnegie Institution’s willingness to cooperate.

  Once he had covered every base he could reach from Pasadena, Hale took the next train east. Transcontinental trains weren’t quite the novelty they had been in 1921—the funeral journey of President Harding from California to Washington in 1923 had introduced America to the miracle of the trains—but the East Coast was still a four-day journey from Pasadena in 1928.

  On the train Hale tried to figure out Merriam’s actions, jotting notes to himself on a yellow pad. If Merriam intended not to cooperate from the beginning, Hale asked himself, why hadn’t he told Hale when Hale reported his initial talks with Rose and his desire to work out a plan of cooperation? The only answer was that Merriam was petty and insecure, more interested in his own status or how the world saw him and his institution than in the future of science.

  As the train approached Chicago, Hale had to decide whether he should go to Washington to confront Merriam or to New York to try to limit the damage at the IEB. He spoke to Carty by phone from the station in Chicago and learned that Rose had called off a planned lunch meeting that had the proposal on the agenda, that the Rockefeller board had met without considering the project, and that as far as Rose was concerned, the entire project was dead. Hale opted for New York and damage control, caught the Twentieth Century in the nick of time, and when he arrived in New York, called Rose to request a meeting. Rose was cordial as he confirmed that the problem was Merriam’s lack of cooperation and his refusal to commit the Carnegie Institution to the project.

  On Hale’s way out of the Rockefeller Foundation offices, Simon Flexner, a member of the Rockefeller board, told him that if he could bring Merriam around and guarantee the cooperation of the Mount Wilson Observatory, it might be possible to revive the proposal. The new associate for science at the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Mason, agreed to lobby the members of the executive committee to keep the proposal open. The problem, Hale knew, was that Merriam, who had a reputation for stubbornness, was adept at using the mechanisms of power, like his authority to call meetings or to control agendas, to get his way. Arguing with Merriam would do no good and would only stiffen his resolve.