The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  All summer and fall McCauley, usually an easygoing man, had seemed tense to his colleagues and family. He took his wife and children down to see the disk but didn’t seem enthused. He had never been a man to discuss what troubled him, and his wife and children assumed he was anxious about the disk, or bruised by the barbs of Benchley and others who took the disk to task.

  In fact McCauley enjoyed Benchley’s barbs. He would buy each issue of The American and read the tidbits out loud to his family and friends. Though he did not relish the thought of Benchley, or of the other journalists who circled Corning like vultures, seizing on the news of the flaws in the surface of the disk, what really worried him was closer to home.

  McCauley had never been greedy for fame. He was a quiet, churchgoing man with a strong sense of justice. Ever since the world had descended on Corning to witness the pouring of the first disk, J. C. Hostetter, the director of development and research at Corning, had been taking personal credit for the successful disk. Hostetter was not a scientist. His own role was more that of a product manager; his style and background, as a New York-club sort of fellow, suited him well to the job. Hostetter invited reporters to interview him, directed the Corning publicity office to route queries to him, and held court during the two castings as if they were his operations. In public statements, and in stories passed along by his assistant George Maltby, Hostetter did all he could to leave the impression that he, more than anyone else, was responsible for the achievement of casting the disk.

  By late summer the bitterness between them was strong enough that McCauley began avoiding Hostetter. The friendship between their families evaporated. In a small city like Corning, where people share the same church and social activities, the situation became uncomfortable.

  In October, when McCauley reported the scars on the disk at a secret meeting with Amory Houghton, Houghton asked McCauley to show Hostetter the disk before a final decision was made. Hostetter had been sending periodic reports on the disk to George Hale, and Houghton was planning a round of discussions, like the initial talks at the University Club that had begun the Corning work on the telescope. The important element, all three men agreed, was that the Observatory Council and the Rockefeller Foundation should be informed quietly, before newspaper reporters sensationalized the story.

  The University Club meetings were not to be. Early Friday morning, November 1, an earthquake rumbled through the Finger Lakes area of New York State. It was close enough to be felt in Corning, and by midmorning reporters were telephoning and telegraphing the press office at the Corning Glass Works for news on whether the disk had been harmed. Leon Quigley assured them that the disk was fine and had not been affected by the tremor. When persistent reporters began asking, “How do you know the disc is all right?” it was clear that the world, beginning with the Observatory Council and the Rockefeller Foundation, had to be told the state of the disk.

  Although Hostetter had been eager to have all earlier reports about the disk come from him, this time he deferred. On Monday morning Amory Houghton, the president of Corning, told George McCauley he was going on a business trip. He was to buy a ticket only as far as Chicago. No one in Corning, not even his family, was to know the final destination.

  21

  The Journey

  Marcus Brown grew up on his father’s chicken farm in the California foothills. Like most farmers he was a good mechanic, and he eventually got a job driving and repairing a delivery truck for the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he made a good salary for the 1920s—one hundred dollars a month. Much of his job was picking up instruments and optical devices at the Optical Labs on Santa Barbara Street and driving them up the tricky mountain roads to the observatory, so he spent a lot of time in the lab, watching the opticians and workmen as they patiently labored over the glass-grinding machines. Brown—friends called him Brownie—had little formal education, but he was patient and careful with tools. As he watched the men work on the glass machines, he decided that polishing glass was exactly the right work for him.

  John Anderson interviewed him. A job in the optical shop would mean a big cut in pay, Anderson explained, and Brown would have to start as an apprentice, taking orders and doing the lowest work in the shop. Undeterred, Brown took the job. His first tasks were routine and boring. He would clean up around the machines, or stand over a disk for a full shift, slowly pouring a slurry of carborundum and water onto the edge of a glass disk while the grinding machine turned under the direction of a more senior worker.

  Whatever the task, Brown was enthusiastic. Many men, lured by the appeal of steady indoor work, took jobs at the Optical Lab only to discover that they couldn’t stand the routine, the confinement in a windowless room, the painfully slow process of grinding glass. Brownie seemed to thrive on it. He had unlimited reserves of the essential temperament for an optician—patience. Hour after hour he seemed not to notice the droning noise of the machines, the occasional screech of abrasives against glass, the progress that often couldn’t be measured after even days of work. Where most men were too eager to move from one step to the next, rushing the switch to finer grits of carborundum or beginning the final polishing stages before the last residual scratches had been ground off the surface, Brownie was the consummate craftsman, never rushing the glass.

  Anderson was a good judge of men. Before long he assigned Brown responsibilities of his own, including the grinding and polishing of a twelve-inch mirror. Brown did a good job. He couldn’t get enough of the optics lab. At night he studied optics on his own. On his days off he built a grinding machine from water pipe and the insides of an old thresher from his father’s farm. He was one of those men who had found his calling. Brown made no secret of his ambition: He wanted to grind the mirror for the two-hundred-inch telescope.

  In the optics lab as at the observatory, there was a distinct gap between the men who worked on the machines, and the trained opticians—often astronomers—who designed and tested the mirrors and lenses. But Anderson took notice of the curly-haired man with glasses. After Brown had worked in the optics lab on Santa Barbara Street for three years, Anderson asked him if he would move over to the new optical laboratory on California Street.

  The new lab was a huge building, designed in Russell Porter’s characteristic Art Deco style, with stone latticework on the ends to conceal the lack of windows. McCauley described the vast interior space as “large enough to enclose five six-room bungalows, with space enough above their gabled tops for a roof garden containing 5 badminton courts with side lines for spectators.” The machine shop next door assembled an impressive array of grinding and polishing machines for the optics lab. The smaller machines were familiar, modeled after machines at the Mount Wilson shop, but there were also big machines, of welded steel, large enough to hold the two-hundred-inch mirror and tilt it to a vertical position for testing. Brown started on the smaller machines, grinding test mirrors that had arrived from Corning. The mirrors would never be used in a telescope. They were figured solely to test the Pyrex disks and the grinding machines, to determine grades of carborundum and tentative grinding schedules, facing block materials, and procedures for holding the ribbed-back disks in the new grinding machines.

  While Marcus Brown tested mirrors in a temporary laboratory in the basement of the astrophysics machine shop, the machinists upstairs worked on the big grinding machine. The machine was a challenge. It would cradle the largest and most valuable piece of glass in the world. SKF Industries proudly proclaimed in advertisements that the two 51-inch-diameter bearings they had provided for the 17½-foot-diameter grinding table were “the most accurate giant anti-friction bearings ever produced.”

  The machine shop was also turning out models for the engineers who were close to a final design for the telescope and the observatory. Russell Porter had finished a design for the observatory building itself, including the preliminary engineering for the dome. Up on Palomar workmen were leveling the site and excavating the foundations. While the flurr
y of work went on, Brown and a few men ground and polished test disks that would ultimately be discarded. From time to time he would look up at the majestic door, two stories high, at the far corner of the lab. Brown was waiting for the day when that door opened.

  George McCauley arrived in Pasadena on the Santa Fe Chief. He had traveled in secret, picking up the ticket to Pasadena in Chicago so no one in Corning would know his ultimate destination. He had a private Pullman compartment, and tried to concentrate on sketches and data for his presentation to the Observatory Council. The Santa Fe seemed to conspire against him. Just outside the city limits south of Chicago, as his train passed a northbound freight, a wrecking crane on the freight train broke free, hitting the leading diesel of the Chief. McCauley arrived in Pasadena two hours late and exhausted with anxiety.

  His meeting was at the Astrophysical Laboratory on Thursday afternoon. He was ready with his sketches of the disk, measurements of the location and magnitude of the scars he had found, calculations, and tables of data to convince the council that the scars would not affect the finished mirror if the surface thickness were ground to 3? instead of the previously planned 4 inches. George Hale wasn’t there—he was too ill to attend—but McCauley anticipated a tough meeting with Anderson, Porter, Pease, and the others.

  Anderson studied McCauley’s data and passed it around before giving his opinion that there would be no problem with a final thickness of 3? inches for the surface of the disk over the ribs. Anderson had already tested smaller ribbed disks that Brown had figured. They were more rigid than the preliminary engineering had predicted. With the project moving into its eighth year, everyone was eager to start the most important part of the project—grinding and polishing the mirror. Arthur Day, who had been notified of the condition of the disk, had met in New York with Max Mason and Sandy McDowell. They too had given their go-ahead.

  Later that afternoon McCauley was taken to see Hale. Hale, confined to his darkened room, brightened at the news that the disk had survived the annealing intact. He said he was eager to see the grinding begin.

  On the way back to Corning, in Chicago, McCauley received a telegram from Corning warning him that a “well-known science editor” was going to try to intercept him for a scoop on the mirror. He managed to evade the reporter, but it was obvious that news on the disk couldn’t be delayed much longer. The reporters were now joined in their queries by a book author, David Woodbury, a friend of Russell Porter’s from Maine, who had begun interviewing anyone who would talk to him about the telescope project.

  On December 8, 1935, with George Hale’s approval, the press was invited to see the disk lowered from the annealing oven. Hale urged that they be shown the bottom of the disk, instead of the face, both because it would be more interesting and because he wanted to quell possible rumors about the scarred face. But the newspapers wanted the whole show. Photographers were allowed to erect lights around the oven and along the tracks that led from below the oven out to the temporary building on the riverbank. The room was bitterly cold, heated by portable “salamanders.” When McCauley gave the order, the four screw hoists took twenty-four minutes to majestically lower the disk into view. When the surface of the disk was almost in view, a quick measurement showed that one edge might strike a radiator along one wall, so the operation halted while workmen with torches removed the radiator and its supporting hooks. The delay increased the suspense for the crowd of reporters and photographers, none quite sure what he would see.

  When it was finally lowered into place, the surface of the disk was dusty, but observers could still see the ridges and pits, some several inches deep. When the disk was within an arm’s distance of a special balcony that had been built for the reporters, McCauley and Hostetter fielded questions and posed for photographs on the disk. “No effort had been made to get a perfectly smooth surface,” they explained, since the face of the disk would be completely reshaped in the grinding and polishing stages. The pits, they reported, were handmade, deliberate efforts with the sandblaster to explore the consistency of the glass. The headlines in the newspapers the next day, Monday, December 9, set off a wave of demands for a public unveiling.

  There was plenty of news in the United States at the end of December 1935, most of it depressing. The weather had been terrible: Floods and storms had followed the summer drought. The Midwest had begun to turn into a dust bowl. Father Coughlin and his “Golden Hour of the Little Flower” were at their height; his anti-Semitic radio broadcasts generated so much response that he received more mail than anyone else in the United States, including the president. In Pennsylvania employers were deducting thirty-three cents per week from the pay of children to indemnify themselves for the $100 fines imposed for working the children ninety hours per week. The average steelworker’s clothes caught fire once a week. The average family income, excluding those on relief, was $1,348 per year, which typically supported a mother, father, and one or two children.

  In the fifth year of the worst depression anyone could remember, the successful casting of the great mirror, the triumph of American technology, was the kind of good news many Americans were eager to celebrate. Corning yielded to the demands. The first public unveiling was scheduled for Sunday, January 26. By then Corning millwrights, using the first two-hundred-inch disk as a model, had finished the steel crate for shipping the disk. The first disk was rolled out of the steel building on the riverbank, to be stored on a platform of heavy timbers, and the second disk took its place. The disk was nestled into the steel crate, swung upright with the four corner chain lifts, and the masons began the tedious work of chipping the mold cores out of the ribbed back. McCauley wanted to display the disk with the scarred surface hidden, and its best face—the ribbed back—showing.

  The cores were only half out by January 26. A blizzard made roads in the Corning area nearly impassable. Still, two thousand people showed up to see the great symbol of American progress.

  Two days later the rest of the cores had been removed. The disk was again open for public viewing on February 2. This time more than five thousand visitors came to view the disk. An observer described the audience as “filled with awe and puzzlement”—awe no doubt at the sheer size of the immense disk and puzzlement at just what this great waffle iron of glass would do. No matter how many press releases Leon Quigley put out, all but a few newspaper reporters called it an “eye” or “lens.” That the huge mass of glass was not to see through was a concept counterintuitive to all but the amateur astronomers and others familiar with telescopes. Most reporters chose to ignore the careful wording of the press releases.

  On February 6 the press photographers were invited to take photographs of the disk before it was crated. One photographer, Robert Richie, stayed on long after the others left. Richie tried every possible angle to get the photographs he wanted, including lying on the floor and standing on ladders. Late in the day he finally had the angle he wanted, but announced that the photo needed human interest. Would McCauley be willing to pose?

  McCauley agreed, and Richie asked him to climb up to the central hole in the disk, some nine feet off the floor, and pretend he was measuring the stress in the disk with a small polariscope. After much tinkering with the lights and camera angles, Richie finally snapped his photograph. The resulting photo, with McCauley looking very tiny in the middle of the great disk, was widely distributed, winning national recognition for Richie, even wider fame for the telescope disk, and a temporarily sore back for McCauley.

  The cascades of publicity for the as-yet-unveiled disk, and the much reproduced photographs, brought a barrage of queries from all over the country. What had been an object of curiosity for those in central and southern New York was suddenly a focus of national attention. Schoolchildren, mayors of small towns, hucksters looking for a promotion, and reporters who had rarely covered anything more distant than their local county fair wrote to find out when and where they could see the great disk. Told there would be no more public viewing, they asked
when the disk would be shipped to California. Where would the route take it? What cities would it visit?

  The mid-1930s had seen a wave of building projects, many with the kinds of superlatives that had been the triggers for national pride a decade before. Radio and the wire services had also tied the sprawling nation together. The nightly news and the familiar entertainment programs were shared from coast to coast. Still, hearing about the new Golden Gate Bridge on a Lowell Thomas news broadcast, or seeing UPI photographs of Hoover Dam in the newspaper, didn’t evoke the same pride as the possibility of actually seeing, up close, a great and unique achievement of American technology. In the eight years that the telescope project had been underway, none of the superlatives had been diminished. It was still the biggest and most expensive scientific device ever planned. The mirror disk—the largest and heaviest piece of glass ever cast—was the first tangible evidence of the telescope. Americans, in small towns and big cities, in rural hamlets that had never seen any telescope except in a Sears Catalogue, wanted to see the triumph of American achievement.

  The railroads, aware of the popular interest, besieged the Corning Glass Works and the Observatory Council with requests to carry the disk. The Argonaut Steamship Line offered to ship the disk by sea, guaranteeing delivery in twenty days. Teamsters offered their services. Glen M. Wiley, the “designer and builder of Wiley Whirleys,” offered to truck the disk across the country, assuring Hale and Anderson that he could provide the maximum publicity for the disk. Hale scribbled on the letter, “This man must think we have the point of view of a three ring circus!” Wiley, not easily discouraged, wrote highway departments in every state on his proposed route for permission to carry the oversize cargo.