The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  Fortunately there was one man who could force Merriam’s hand. The next day, May 5, Hale and Carty called on Elihu Root, the chairman of the board of the Carnegie Institution, at his apartment in New York. The old diplomat was eighty-three years old. He had served presidents and his country for more than half a century, untangled the most complex of diplomatic thickets, persuaded potentates and presidents, prevented and started wars, and counseled the mighty in government, academe, and industry. His bushy mustache and quick mind were recognized on every continent. His triumphs in diplomacy and statesmanship had earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, vast respect and fame, and the prestige of chairmanships and memberships on distinguished boards. Now, his days in a cutaway long behind him, he had retired from all but a few boards to care for his wife of fifty years, who was dying a slow and painful death from arthritis.

  Hale found Root vigorous, cordial, and eager to help. He stood as erect as a “young West Point graduate,” dressed, as always, in a salt-and-pepper suit, with an old-fashioned, flat-lapeled waistcoat, a soft blue shirt, a polka-dot tie, and the high-topped black shoes of his generation. Hale and Root had been friends for a long time, and Root, the son of a mathematics professor, was sympathetic to science. Root also had personal acquaintances or friendships with everyone involved in the dispute. He listened in his usual style, disconcerting to those who didn’t know him. Without saying a word, all the while scribbling notes on little scraps of paper, Root seemed as though he wasn’t paying attention at all.

  When Root finally spoke, it was obvious that he understood the situation, that the strong personal rivalries of Carnegie and Rockefeller made it absurd to imagine that a Rockefeller foundation would make a gift on the scale of the proposed telescope grant to the Carnegie Institution. Root knew them both well, and characterized the old adversaries succinctly: “Carnegie … always on the warpath, armed with a tomahawk, and Rockefeller … smooth and compromising in most of his dealings.” As chairman of the Carnegie Institution, a position he had held since 1915, there was no question where his own sympathies lay. With a sly grin Root said that it might just be an ideal partnership: The Carnegie Institution could supply the brains while the Rockefellers provided the funds.

  Hale reminded him that the question of the hour was politics, specifically how to smooth Merriam’s ruffled feathers and somehow get the grant application back on track. Root was reluctant to interfere in day-to-day operations of an institution he chaired, or to seem to overrule the professional staff. But if Merriam was stubborn when his authority was on the line, George Hale was persuasive when one of his projects was threatened. Hale brought out the draft of a letter to Wickliffe Rose, written for signature by Root and Merriam.

  Root read Hale’s draft silently. The language was direct, graciously enumerating the “appreciation” of the Carnegie Institution for the proposed gift to Caltech and the opportunities that would be offered to the members of the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory to carry their research “beyond present possibilities” to the region “beyond the Milky Way” and promising the “most cordial cooperation” of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the proposed project. When he finished reading, Root signed his name, and had the letter sent to Merriam in Washington for his signature. Root also gave Carty and Hale permission to contact the members of the board of the Carnegie Institution directly, bypassing Merriam, to lobby for support of the project.

  In Washington, Merriam refused to sign the letter. He wouldn’t say whether he was still hoping that somehow the big telescope would come to his own institution or simply insulted that the conception of the project had bypassed him. It didn’t matter. John Merriam’s pride had met its match in Elihu Root. When the report of Merriam’s stonewalling came back to New York, the old diplomat summoned him to New York to discuss the matter. Merriam could not ignore a summons from Elihu Root. He took the next train to New York.

  Hale watched the drama unfold from his command post at the University Club. He had recruited a delegation of Frederick Keppel, Carty, and Dunn—all board members of the Carnegie Institution—to meet Merriam at Penn Station and prepare him for the expected confrontation. There were no seats in the grand concourse of the station—Charles McKim thought that benches would detract from the Baths of Caracalla grandeur of his design—so the delegation lined up on the platform under the sunlit vaults of the concourse to await Merriam’s train. With their hats in hand, the three men were exactly the sort of high-level delegation, befitting his position, that Merriam enjoyed.

  When he got off the train, Merriam brushed the three men aside. He was going to meet with Wickliffe Rose, he announced. Carty urged him to consider the position and objectives of the Carnegie Institution over his personal feelings, warning that he could bear the sole responsibility for the failure of the two-hundred-inch project and the consequences to science that depended on a new telescope. Merriam refused to discuss the matter. “No one will have anything to regret,” he said.

  Carty telephoned Hale with the news. Even after years of dealing with Merriam, no one knew what to expect from the man.

  At the GEB offices, Thorkelson, who had overseen the telescope proposal, was invited to join Rose and Merriam as Rose explained that the board was firm in its conviction: the only institution they would consider for a grant to own the telescope was the California Institute. To Rose’s surprise Merriam didn’t argue. At the time of their previous interview in Washington, he said, he had had only a brief conference with Hale, he had not received a formal request for cooperation from the California Institute of Technology, and he had no knowledge in detail of the plans for the telescope and its operation. Now that he had “further information,” he and the executive committee of the Carnegie Institution had had an opportunity to consider the matter, he felt confident that the Carnegie Institution would offer its support, and he looked forward to the time when “one or more great telescopes and great coordinated programs for astronomical research may come into being.”

  Merriam was dissembling. He had no new information. The executive committee of the Carnegie Institution hadn’t met, and the hurried discussions by telephone and telegram had been about his actions, not about the telescope. John Merriam was too proud to admit that he had backed down to avoid being taken to the woodshed by his boss.

  Hale called Rose after he heard about Merriam’s meeting. Rose assured Hale that with the formal cooperation of the Carnegie Institution, the grant application could now be reactivated.

  Late that afternoon Merriam phoned Hale to suggest they have dinner together. The evening at the University Club was “as pleasant … as though nothing had happened,” Hale wrote afterward. Merriam “explained” that his earlier position was based on the project as it stood when the subject was first broached to him. To mollify Merriam’s bruised ego Hale prepared a formal request for cooperation, which he telegraphed to Millikan at Caltech. Millikan promptly got the approval of the board of trustees of the California Institute and wired the request to Merriam the next day. Everyone waited while Merriam went through the ritual of polling the board members of the Carnegie Institute, so he could announce their support for the proposal.

  Even with all the formalities complete, Wickliffe Rose worried about the proposal he was about to bring before his board. Six million dollars was the largest request ever submitted to any Rockefeller foundation for a single project. The proposal for a very large telescope was at odds with the charter and the previous programs of the IEB. There was nothing international about the telescope project—except that a few consultants, none of them from Mount Wilson or Caltech, had suggested a site in the Southern Hemisphere for any large telescope—and the telescope grant, if approved, would deplete the funds of the IEB, leaving Rose’s successor with nothing. Despite his confidence in the telescope proposal and in George Hale, Rose was afraid Mr. Rockefeller would consider the project inappropriate. When Rose told a colleague, Raymond Fosdick, of his concern, Fosdick said there was only one way to f
ind out and brought the question directly to Rockefeller.

  The old tycoon, modest in this as in few other subjects, said, “I have no competence in the field of astronomy. Six million dollars is a large sum of money, but I have complete confidence in Mr. Rose and the trustees, and if after careful investigation they decide that it is the wise thing to do, there certainly will never be any criticism from me.” With John D. Rockefeller’s blessing, the grant was assured. The proper procedure of a board meeting was now only a formality.

  It would take months of negotiations between the lawyers at the Rockefeller Foundation and at the California Institute before a formal letter confirming the grant was ready. The letter was even less detailed than George Hale’s proposal, though it did borrow from the language of the long tradition of bequests for telescopes. The two-hundred-inch telescope, according to the terms of the grant, was to be “as complete and perfect as possible.”

  Little did anyone realize what efforts those words would require.

  9

  Elation

  George Hale celebrated his sixtieth birthday in June 1928. In a quiet moment at his beloved solar laboratory, he reflected on the task ahead: “I wish I were thirty years younger and able to jump into the task as I did at Mt. Wilson.” He worried that he and others “may not outlast” the work ahead. “Building a large telescope, as I have found before, is not a rapid job.”

  Where would they begin? In presentations to Rose and other staff members at the IEB, and in authoritative-sounding letters to support the proposal, Hale, the scientists and engineers at Mount Wilson and Caltech, and friends of the project on the East Coast had all taken the position that the telescope was only one more step in the progression of telescopes. Gano Dunn wrote to Wickliffe Rose: “The proposed new five meter objective is not a Great Eastern but jumps ahead of existing construction in a lineal ratio that does not materially depart from the ratio of previous jumps which have been taken with complete success.” It was a good argument to persuade a foundation that they were betting on a winner. But the new telescope wasn’t just one more step in the progression of technology and science. Even at the start there were some who worried that the proposal reached too far, crossing the line from optimism to hubris.

  America was still the land of optimism and superlatives. Thousands of Americans greeted themselves every morning with the ritual phrases of the French pharmacist Emile Coué—“Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” American technology seemed unstoppable. A new piece of furniture had appeared in American living rooms, a tall, handsome, wooden console—people called it “radio” instead of wireless by 1928—with brand names like Zenith, Philco, and Atwater Kent. Radio brought the immediacy of news, live entertainment, sports events, and reports of new technology to remote hamlets. Airplanes regularly flew mail and even passengers. Ambitious young men were hustling funds and machines for the challenge of flying the Atlantic nonstop. It was only a question of time before someone did it. The whole country seemed to follow Coue. Every day in every way ships and bridges were longer, airships were bigger, buildings and the stock markets were reaching higher. Only the most cynical of pessimists predicted it couldn’t go on forever.

  Yet amid the optimism and progress, science in America remained a cottage industry. If there seemed to be no limits to what technology could do, science worked on hand-to-mouth budgets. The previous big telescopes at Mount Wilson, the largest scientific projects in the country, had been built piecemeal, dribbling along as Hale raised the necessary funds. The designs were necessarily compromises, balancing budgets against technology. The size of the sixty-inch reflector was determined by the crucibles at the French glass foundries; the disk was the largest blank they could cast in a single pour. William Hale’s gift for the disk would not cover the research or development of larger crucibles. The one-hundred-inch telescope had been a balancing act between the limits of plate-glass and riveted-structure technology and the constant struggle for funds from Hooker and the Carnegie Institution. The trials of casting and figuring the mirror—plate glass was the only material they could possibly afford in the budget—had been enough to precipitate the worst sieges of George Hale’s demons. The mounting for the telescope was also a compromise; the closed-end English mount was the only way to guarantee a rigid support structure at least within the existing technology. The budget for the one-hundred-inch telescope did not leave room to explore new technology.

  It was different this time. The funding for the two-hundred-inch telescope was committed, $6 million promised, under an arrangement that allowed the California Institute to draw down the funds as needed. But even with the money “in the bank,” Hale and his colleagues faced a daunting task. No part of the new telescope could be ordered off the shelf. No company or institution had the experience to serve as the equivalent of a general contractor, because no one had ever built a machine to the scale and tolerances this one required. The closest parallels were enormous construction projects like the Panama Canal, but they were challenges of scale more than technology. The public loved stories about the plans for an Empire State Building, ships like the Normandie, the Boulder and Grand Coulee Dams, and the Golden Gate Bridge, with their superlatives about the tallest buildings and bridge towers, the deepest cofferdams, the longest ship, or the most tons of concrete poured, but each proposed project was only an increase of scale on an existing technology. For the new telescope there were few working technologies to extend.

  Even the administration for the project put Hale and his colleagues on virgin ground. The earlier big telescopes had been funded through institutions—first the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, then the Mount Wilson Observatory—but in each case the institutions had been so closely associated with the name and fame of George Hale that the benefactors who had provided for the telescopes dealt directly with Hale and held him accountable when progress on the instrument that was to bear their name fell behind schedule. As complex as the projects were, they could be managed through the sheer energy of one man, and there was a convenience and efficiency in the simple administration.

  Not even George Hale at the peak of his abilities had the energy to manage this project alone. The two-hundred-inch telescope was one of the first ventures into big science. No one had ever tried to research so many aspects of technology simultaneously, except perhaps the weapons labs the army and navy had established during World War I. The military, especially in wartime, enjoys a freedom that no civilian project can match: virtually unlimited budgets, the right of eminent domain to build what they want where they want, and the privilege of calling on every university, laboratory, corporation, and individual with the expectation that patriotism, if not payment, would elicit instant cooperation. The resources available to the military were a far cry from the hopes, dreams, and self-confidence of a handful of scientists gathered around the library table at Hale’s solar laboratory on a side street in San Marino, California.

  When Wickliffe Rose wrote, in late May 1928, to report that the IEB had given the observatory proposal “sympathetic consideration,” his letter was vague. He did not say whether the IEB had approved the full amount of $6 million, or whether there were any conditions attached to the grant. It wasn’t until Rose came out to Pasadena that he explained that the grant was only for construction of the telescope and the accessories needed for a complete observatory. The California Institute was to bear the expense of operation. When Rose asked Hale how much endowment the telescope would require, Hale said that Adams’s latest annual budget for Mount Wilson was $250,000 and that he estimated the annual budget for the new observatory, with only a single telescope, at between $100,000 and $150,000. At 1928 interest rates, an endowment-grade investment to capitalize that annual return required between $2 and $3 million, which Hale would have to secure before they could be assured of the grant.

  The next day, a meeting was scheduled at the solar laboratory to discuss the terms of grant with officials from Caltech.
Before the meeting, Hale gave his estimate of the annual expenses of running the telescope to Henry Robinson, a wealthy Los Angeles businessman and the member of the board of trustees of the California Institute who had been most supportive of the telescope project. Robinson told him not to worry. At the meeting, Robinson said he would undertake to secure the necessary endowment. Robinson later told Hale confidentially that he would personally fund an annual endowment of $150,000, and ultimately capitalize the sum.

  Rose, pleased by the prompt action of the trustees, assured Hale that they could begin work on the project immediately. Formal approval of the grant would not take place until autumn, but among fellow University Club members, a round of handshakes was enough to inaugurate the largest scientific project ever undertaken.

  The first decision on the new project was to designate the solar laboratory as project headquarters. The lab was convenient for Hale. Even more important, it was at least symbolically distanced from both the Mount Wilson offices on Santa Barbara Street and the Caltech facilities on California Street. From the earliest discussions with Wickliffe Rose, there had been sore points in the arranged marriage of Caltech and the Mount Wilson Observatory. A neutral home for the project would minimize the complaints of too much influence from one set of in-laws or the other. Before long, as the pace of meetings and decisions picked up, the library of the solar laboratory became a command post, close enough to stay in touch but still removed from the inevitable pressures of expanding Caltech and the ongoing programs of the Mount Wilson Observatory.