The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  George Hale, who kept his ear to the ground for new technologies that might be applied to astronomy, heard of Thomson’s experiments and sent George Ritchey out to visit Thomson in 1904, offering a modest grant of three thousand dollars from the Carnegie Institution for additional experiments with fused quartz. At the time Hale was building the Snow solar telescope, one of the first instruments on Mount Wilson. For a solar telescope, in which the mirrors are exposed to the heat of the sun, the low coefficient of expansion of quartz promised a revolution in optical performance. Thomson experimented until the funds were exhausted and Ritchey had to return to the pressing work of grinding and polishing the mirror disk for the sixty-inch telescope. Thomson did not succeed in producing a usable mirror, and with a dozen other projects under way at the same time, some of them big moneymakers for General Electric, he was soon distracted.

  Despite his failure to produce a working mirror, Thomson’s experiments were too tempting to ignore. Fused quartz had such a low coefficient of expansion that Thomson calculated that a bar one meter long, raised from room temperature to 1000°C, or near the melting point of gold, would expand by approximately one-half of one millimeter. In the range of temperatures ordinarily encountered at an observatory, the expansion and contraction would be close to negligible. A fused-quartz mirror would be all but immune to the problems that plagued the one-hundred-inch telescope.

  A fused-quartz mirror would also be far more efficient to grind and polish than plate glass. Figuring an optical mirror to its final shape is an exquisitely slow process, because the heat generated in polishing affects the optical shape of the surface. In the final stages of the figuring of a mirror, a brief stroke or two with jeweler’s rouge on a tool or a fingertip can heat the mirror enough to produce distortions. The optician then has to wait hours, or even overnight, for the surface to cool enough to test the results of last effort before he can continue. Hours of waiting for minutes of polishing and testing extrapolates into years of work to put the final figure on the mirror of a large telescope. The alternative—grinding or polishing without frequent testing—would risk removing too much material. One slip, a single area polished too deep, could necessitate repolishing or even regrinding the entire disk, a task that could consume months or even years.

  Thomson, who had a shrewd business sense as well as the creativity of a polymath inventor, knew the commercial market was too small, even with potential military and industrial applications, to warrant an enormous investment in quartz technology by General Electric. His early experiments seemed promising, but the research was expensive and time consuming. By the mid-1920s all work had stopped while they waited for a customer. At the annual meetings of the American Astronomical Society and the National Academy of Science, Thomson brought pieces of the fused quartz, which he would show to astronomers. Hale would corner Thomson at these meetings to find out the latest progress on fused quartz.

  Hale and the Observatory Council made a show of considering a range of materials for the mirror, but fused silica promised to be so superior to any other material that for Hale the decision of what material to use for the new telescope was already made. This would certainly be George Hale’s last telescope. For a long time it would be the primary research telescope of the world. There was no room for compromise. Fused silica was theoretically the best material for a mirror, and the obvious choice. The only problem was that no one had yet fabricated a functional telescope mirror for an instrument of any size from the material.

  In March 1928, before he submitted the formal proposal for the telescope to Wickliffe Rose, George Hale met A. L. Ellis, Elihu Thomson’s lab assistant, at the Commodore Hotel in New York. Ellis was carrying a beautiful piece of fused clear quartz. Hale asked him how much it would cost to fabricate a mirror for the two-hundred-inch telescope from the material. On the spot, on a scrap of brown paper, Ellis wrote up an estimate of the cost to fabricate a series of mirrors from the eleven-inch blank the laboratory had already produced, up to a two-hundred-inch quartz mirror. Ellis’s rough figure for equipment, labor, and material—without profit or overhead—for a series of mirrors, from a twenty-two-to sixty-, one-hundred-, and a two-hundred-inch mirror that would be fabricated on Mount Wilson, came to $252,000. It seemed a modest sum in a budget of $6 million.

  As soon as Rose gave the Observatory Council the go-ahead to begin work on the telescope, Hale had Henry Robinson, of the board of trustees at the California Institute, formally ask Gerard Swope, the president of General Electric, to undertake the fabrication of the mirror blanks. Swope wired back:

  GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY WILL BE DELIGHTED TO DO THE WORK ON THE FUSED QUARTZ LENS UNDER THE PERSONAL DIRECTION OF PROFESSOR THOMSON WHO IS MUCH INTERESTED IN IT AT MANUFACTURING COST WITHOUT ANY OVERHEAD FOR COMMERCIAL OR ADMINISTRATIVE EXPENSES WHICH I ASSUME IS WHAT YOU HAD IN MIND.

  Like almost everyone who had never looked carefully at a large reflecting telescope, Swope called it a lens instead of a mirror. No matter. If General Electric and the famed Professor Thomson could produce a two-hundred-inch-diameter disk of fused quartz, Hale and the astronomers would not only have the biggest telescope in the world, but the best.

  Hale delayed a public announcement of the telescope as long as he could. He had always been wary of publicity, afraid that tentative, exploratory ideas and the meandering process of scientific research would be pummeled by a press too eager to “expose” science and scientists and to demand “results.” Astronomers, he feared, could be tempted by the same pressures that had corrupted Sinclair Lewis’s Martin Arrow smith.

  From his experiences with the Yerkes and Mount Wilson telescopes, Hale knew that once the grant for the new telescope was announced, the sheer scale and audacity of the project—more than the celebrated discoveries at Mount Wilson, or the famed debate in Washington—would open the process of building the telescope, and the observational astronomy program, to public and media scrutiny. The Observatory Council would be flooded with questions and offers. Developers with a mountain on their land would offer it as the site for the new telescope. States and counties would campaign to get the big telescope in their jurisdictions. Crackpots would come forward with their ideas of how to build a “giant eye.” Shipping companies, foundries, machine shops, construction companies, and self-promoting entrepreneurs would offer their services as they sought some tenuous connection with the prestigious project.

  California also had more than its share of fundamentalist and revivalist movements, led by evangelists who were quick to brand science and technology as the work of Satan. A few had already spoken out against the telescopes on Mount Wilson. A larger telescope, designed to reach even deeper into the mysteries of the universe, would be a prime target for their sermons. A campaign by fundamentalists would be an even greater threat than the union strikes and picket lines that increasingly disrupted businesses in Southern California, because the police couldn’t be expected to show the same eagerness for scuffles with men and women of the cloth that they demonstrated against the unions.

  Hale also feared that men like Harlow Shapley, at institutions fearful that their own plans would be slighted because of the funds committed to a big telescope, would be quick to join the public doubters. The debate in Washington, and the publicity that surrounded Hubble’s work at Mount Wilson, had turned the attention of many universities to the possibilities of big telescopes. The academic world in 1928 was not exempt from jealousies, rivalries and backstabbing, and many an astronomy department chairman was willing to bad-mouth the new telescope if it would help channel funds or facilities to a local project. Whatever the motives of the critics, the vagueness of the plans for a big telescope would make it difficult to answer questions and challenges in the newspapers or on the radio. There were no working drawings, few calculations, no engineering studies. Hale and his colleagues needed time to experiment, to make mistakes, to explore possibilities that a strict budget analyst would no doubt rate as cost-ineffective.

  In Septemb
er a reporter for the Los Angeles Times got access to some financial records of the Mount Wilson Observatory and began asking Adams about the rumors of a new telescope. Adams and Hale debated using connections to squelch the news and concluded that the effort might backfire. Soon reporters were calling everyone they could find with rumors of the largest grant ever made in support of a scientific project, millions of dollars awarded to build the biggest scientific instrument in the world, a device that would require the largest single piece of glass ever cast and the largest bearings ever machined and gather more light and see farther into space and require more man-hours and demand finer tolerances and … It was impossible to put them off much longer.

  Hale waited until the end of October. The big news in the papers were the presidential campaigns of A1 Smith and Herbert Hoover, another victory by Babe Ruth and the Yankees in the World Series, and the Graf Zeppelin’s maiden flight across the Atlantic. The great airship drew record-breaking crowds to the airfield in New Jersey, eager to see the newest triumph of German technology. Congress awarded a special gold medal to Thomas Edison, in recognition of his scientific achievements. With a bevy of photographers as witnesses, Andrew Mellon presented the medal on behalf of a grateful nation. Science and technology seemed to dominate the news.

  On October 28, 1928, a Sunday, Hale issued a carefully worded announcement, hoping to head off the hyperbole he feared would follow in the papers: “It is our strong desire to avoid all sensational or exaggerated statements,” his release read. “With this type of telescope we do not expect to see very minute details on the moon or planets or to deal with the inhabitants or other hypothetical creatures…. Its object is not to detect skyscrapers on the airless moon or to search for indications of human beings on Mars.”

  Few paid much attention to his caution when the newspapers picked up the release for their Monday editions. The front pages outdid one another in point sizes and hyperbole, with headlines like BIG BERTHA OF SKY WILL AID SCIENCE. The New York Times was only slightly more restrained: GIANT TELESCOPE OF IMMENSE RANGE TO DWARF ALL OTHERS. With gracefully concealed pride, the Los Angeles Times touted the newest achievement of Southern California: “Standing on the threshold of a vast uncharted space to be penetrated by the 200” telescope, the scientific world is frankly a-tiptoe with excitement. Men who ordinarily deal exclusively with uninspiring mathematical problems and cold, concrete facts find themselves engaging in imaginative flights. What, they are asking themselves, will the gigantic new telescope reveal?”

  In response to the demand for more facts about the great machine, Walter Adams cautiously issued figures on the potential light-gathering power of the huge mirror. The newspapers, not sure what it meant, and insisting as often as not on calling it a lens, seized on his numbers. The telescope, they reported, would see stars “700,000 times as faint” as could be seen with the naked eye. It would be able to photograph “a candle flame at 40,000 miles.” At least, Hale could console himself, they didn’t report that the telescope would see Martians or moon men holding the candles. A few papers, like the London Daily Telegraph, resisted the more extreme examples and explained quite simply that the new telescope would “penetrate to the limits of our universe.”

  The New York Times reported that although the size of the grant in support of the telescope had not been announced, it would surely be far in excess of the $600,000 that the one-hundred-inch Hooker telescope had cost. Whatever the cost, the editorials agreed, the telescope was a great leap ahead for mankind.

  Public reaction everywhere was quick, the interest in the great instrument boundless. From all over the world, letters poured into Pasadena from well-wishers sending their salutes and blessings. Thomas J. Johnston, a patent lawyer in New York, praised “the most astounding feature of the proposition. That is, the harmonious concentration of the best trained minds in the world upon a project of pure science, with the certainty of fully adequate financing and technical manufacturing facilities. The history of science shows no such thing, or anything near it.” Using an ethnic slur not uncommon in private correspondence in the late 1920s, Johnston reminded Hale of the struggle to get Congress to fund the old twenty-six-inch telescope at the Naval Observatory in Washington, and “the pitiable attempt in the Committee to jew down Alvan Clark the elder by $1000—What a contrast!”

  A little girl sent a dollar to help the project. Hucksters, businessmen, amateur scientists, backyard engineers, promoters, quick-buck artists, dreamers, and schemers offered their ideas and themselves. Men of the cloth, seeing yet another threat in the hubris of science, sent curses and threats of eternal damnation to those who would unveil the secrets of the universe. Astronomers, hoping that they would someday get a chance to use the great instrument, sent their congratulations, sometimes barely concealing their envy.

  Overnight, it seemed, the unbuilt instrument that would see to the limits of the universe became the symbol of an era of confidence, a metal-and-glass paean to science, knowledge, and progress. For the next twenty years the public and press would be relentless in their fascination with what the newspapers and radio reporters insisted on calling the giant “eye.” Never before, and probably never again, would there be such widespread attention devoted to a scientific instrument with such a benign aim.

  10

  Beginnings

  Rumors of the big telescope had circulated among astronomers for years. Visiting VIPs at Mount Wilson who had seen the sketches and models were suspicious of the repeated denials from the Mount Wilson staff. Scientists and administrators who had dealings with the various Rockefeller Foundations could tell from the hush-hush of the program officers that something big was in the works. Harlow Shapley, accustomed to being consulted by the foundation staff on astronomy proposals, hadn’t been asked for his opinion on this one.

  Shapley sent formal congratulations to Hale and Walter Adams, but they both knew he had been far from subtle in his opposition to the project. For years, he had been resentful of the money that the California Institute and the Mount Wilson Observatory had gathered under their control, and especially resentful of the publicity that the Pasadena institutions had gathered for the discoveries made at Mount Wilson. As the head of the astronomy department and the observatory at the oldest and most famous university in America, Shapley had the prestige to make his opinions heard.

  H. L. Mencken, ever on the lookout for a chance to debunk the latest fascination of the “rubes of the booboisie,” met Shapley for a lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. At first Mencken thought Shapley, with his slicked-back hair and boisterous horselaugh, looked “inconspicuous and somewhat rustic.” After they talked for a while the rusticity vanished. Mencken knew little about astronomy. His interest was news, and he welcomed Shapley’s apparent candor about the much publicized two-hundred-inch telescope project.

  “Practically everything it may be expected to accomplish could be accomplished by existing telescopes,” Shapley told Mencken. Studying the millions of stars astronomers had already reached would occupy them for the better part of the century. The real reason for the new telescope, Shapley said, was publicity. In particular he singled out Robert Millikan, the head of the California Institute, quoting the famed physicist Ernest Rutherford, who had remarked that publicity seeking had finally become a learned science, with its own unit of measurement, the kan, a unit so large that publicity is normally measured in a workable fraction, the Millikan.

  It was exactly the kind of cynical barb Mencken liked.

  Shapley also found a way to make his reservations about the project heard in astronomy circles. The design and ownership of the new telescope were entrusted to the California Institute. There was little Shapley or anyone else could do to change that. But the question of where the telescope would be sited was not mentioned in the grant. It was an issue on which Shapley had strong views.

  One of the grants Harvard had received from Wickliffe Rose’s IEB had funded the move of the Harvard Southern Station from Peru, where they
had a single year of good seeing during the initial testing of the telescope, and wretched conditions for thirty-nine years afterward, to Bloemfontein, South Africa. With the volumes of data they had accumulated over a long period at the Southern Station, Harvard dominated Southern Hemisphere astronomy. Henrietta Leavitt’s original study of Cepheid variable stars was only one of the projects based on these plates. It was not surprising that Shapley began a campaign urging that the new telescope be sited at the Southern Station, or failing that, “Tibet, Kashmir, Peru, Chile, the Argentine, or Australia”—in other words, anyplace but Southern California.

  Shapley directed his campaign at Trevor Arnett, the officer in charge of science programs at the Rockefeller Foundation. Writing with the authority of his position at the Harvard College Observatory, Shapley reported that “the opinion of astronomers in general” was that the big telescope project had been initiated by Hale and the California Institute without consulting other astronomers, and that “naturally they would only consider sites in relation to their own institution,” despite the fact that there were superior sites in New Mexico or Western Texas that would make the telescope more accessible to astronomers from the East.

  Shapley was joined in his efforts by other astronomers who feared that the new telescope, along with the sixty-inch and one-hundred-inch telescopes, would give a monopoly of deep-space research to Mount Wilson and what other astronomers saw as the Pasadena astronomy clique.

  By the end of the summer the lobbying was so intense that Arnett went to Pasadena to show Anderson the voluminous correspondence he had received and his notes of meetings with visiting astronomers. Arnett assured Anderson that there was nothing personal against Hale in the questioning. Rather, he explained, there was widespread concern that Hale was skewing the search to make sure a site was selected close to the California Institute, instead of picking the best possible site for the telescope.