The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  With the six months up and the design problems solved, Rein Kroon packed up and moved back to Philadelphia. Like the hero of a Western, he had come to town, cleaned up the troubles, saddled up, and ridden on, to other towns and other problems. He never saw the telescope.

  23

  The Endless Task

  John Anderson had trouble sleeping the night the disk arrived at Caltech.

  The glass disk had been unloaded from the Belyea Brothers truck onto a heavy timber easel strong enough to support three times the weight of the disk. On Easter Sunday, Marcus Brown and his workmen removed the front and back of the steel packing crate, revealing the marred face of the disk and the beautiful honeycomb structure of the back. Like the Corning officials when they had exhibited the disk to the public, “Brownie” put the disk on the easel with the back showing, although in his case it was only because the initial work was scheduled for the back of the disk. Brownie fretted for a long time to make sure the disk was secure. The circular sections of the crate were still in place around the edge of the disk, and the overhead crane that ran the length of the optics shop was left attached to the slings that fastened to two points on the crate. Anderson came over to check the easel and supports for the disk when it was finally secured in the optics lab.

  In the middle of the night Anderson began to wonder what would happen if an earthquake hit Pasadena. From his work on seismographs, he knew how frequent earthquakes were in Southern California. What if an earthquake jostled the easel while the disk was still hooked up to the overhead crane? The thought was enough to get him to bolt from bed and drive to the optics lab. There was no earthquake that night. The disk was where they had put it. It was only the first of many nights that John Anderson lay awake worrying about the great mirror.

  In 1935 and 1936 there were plenty of applicants for work in the optics lab. The pay wasn’t great: starters got forty cents an hour; the most experienced men ninety-five cents an hour. But when word got out about a steady job, working indoors, men lined up. Some had no work; others wanted better work. Mel Johnson, a young mechanic, was willing to give up a one-hundred-dollar-a-month salary for the promise of steady work. Brownie warned each applicant with the same speech: “Glass won’t ever do what you expect. It’s human. It has as many moods as a movie star, and no two of ’em are alike. You’ve got to know them all. And remember this: If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do anything till you find out.”

  The men listened, nodded, and went to work on a trial project. Most left after a few days or a week. It took special talents to work on optics, to stand up to the routine. Previous career was no indication of who had the temperament. The men Brownie hired included a failed insurance salesman, a man who had worked on a garbage truck, and a pump jockey from a filling station.

  Work began every day at 8:00 A.M. Everyone who worked in the optics lab changed into a white shirt and trousers, cotton hospital uniforms, and canvas sneakers. Sometimes, depending on the work, the men needed a clean uniform each day. At lunch they changed out of the uniforms, ate from brown bags, and played handball outside and then changed back into the uniforms for four more hours of the routine. There were no breaks. Brownie rolled Bull Durham cigarettes and sometimes chewed Bull Durham while he worked, and others picked up the habit. A few men were interested in optics, and Anderson agreed to give evening classes to explain the mysteries of the mirrors and lenses. Otherwise the only times the lab was quiet enough for conversation was during lunch or while the men showered and dressed. The favorite topic was guns and hunting. Anderson was a hunter and had once shot a polar bear. But the gap between Caltech professors and Mount Wilson astronomers—the men who wore suits and ties—and the workers who actually ground the glass, was too great for small talk. Russell Porter, at heart still an amateur telescope maker, sometimes worked on his own projects in the optics lab. He was too deaf for much conversation.

  The obsession with cleanliness in the optics shop was more than many men could stand. The floors were swept and washed daily. A worker rolled a magnet over the floor daily, sometimes several times a day, to pick up even tiny specks of metal. If a speck was found it was put into an envelope, and the search began for the culprit machine. Was it a chip off a gear? Abrasion of some metal part that no one heard because of the noise of the grinding machines? A foreign speck off the shoes or uniform of a careless worker? Whatever the cause, it had to be found. A speck of metal under a polishing tool on the surface of a disk could make a scratch that might destroy months of work.

  Mostly the deadly routine got to men. The machines were huge, driven by electric motors big enough to power a large lathe or milling machine. Despite the size of the machines, glass can only be worked slowly. Removing millimeters of glass can take months of slow grinding. In the later stages of work, polishing a disk to optical tolerances of fractions of a millimeter can take years. Men used to seeing progress in their work, accustomed to a finished product at the end of the day, would leave in frustration. Week after week each day was exactly like the one before—tending a machine, performing a routine task, like feeding carborundum into a funnel-hopper on a grinding tool, sloshing the carborundum-water slurry over the face of the disk, or even sitting perched, for hours at a stretch, on a scaffold platform under the big disk-grinding machine, greasing a drive gear by hand to make certain the drive mechanisms did not gall. The unchanging routine, coupled with the fear that a single lapse could destroy a priceless disk, was more than many could stand. Marcus Brown said, “Time is worth less than glass around here.”

  Before the disk arrived Anderson and Brownie tested the big grinding machine with smaller pieces of glass. Brownie had also tried the lift with loads heavier than the mirror blank. But no amount of testing could assure everyone that the procedures and machines could safely move and work the heavy disk. From the easel where it had been stored on arrival, the disk first had to be lowered, face down, onto the surface of the big grinding machine. As the grinding and polishing proceeded, moving the disk on and off the machine, and from the horizontal grinding position to a vertical testing position, would become a regular weekly procedure. Brownie took the controls of the crane himself for the first moves. Every step was tentative, like a father holding his newborn child for the first time.

  Before Brownie and his crew could begin the actual work of shaping the disk into a parabolic mirror, the two faces of the disk had to be true: absolutely flat and parallel to one another. He started with the backside. The ribs and pockets in the back would gall on a grinding tool, so the pockets and spaces between the ribs were filled with wooden tables, built so their surfaces were two inches below the level of the glass. The gaps were then filled with plaster of paris. The initial grinding was done with a seven-ton cast-iron disk, half the size of the mirror disk. The surface of the grinding tool was covered with glass blocks, held in place with wax. The actual abrasive was a slurry of carborundum and water, poured between the grinding tool and the surface of the disk as the tool rotated in a slow epicyclic motion that covered the entire disk.

  Grinding glass, even a relatively simple task like truing the faces of the disk, is a job for the patient. What takes but a minute to describe took months on the grinding machine. Hundreds of pounds of carborundum and thousands of gallons of water went into the slurry. The glass blocks on the face of the grinding tool wore out rapidly and had to be replaced. The surface of the disk had to be washed completely each afternoon, lest water left on the disk etch the glass. When the back was ground flat, the plaster of paris and the tables were cleaned out and the disk was turned over.

  The face of the disk was a sorry sight. The scars that George McCauley had discovered in the annealing oven looked like jagged wounds. One, near the center, had been excavated with a laboratory sandblaster to a depth of almost five inches, at a point where the disk would reach its maximum “dish.”

  Anderson had already decided that the top two inches of glass, including much of the “scar tissue” o
f the annealing oven wounds, would be ground off the disk before the actual shaping of the mirror began. The face of the disk would end up four inches thick instead of the originally planned five and one-half. The loss of rigidity wouldn’t be a problem if the edge-and back-support system worked, and the thinner disk would have substantially less temperature inertia.

  The grinding was tedious. The coarse carborundum grated as the iron grinding tool turned. The iron, in turn, reverberated the noise into a screech. Conversation was impossible. From the first days of work, Brownie calculated that they would need five tons of carborundum to remove the two and a half tons of glass on the surface of the disk. Five tons was a lot of screeching. Anderson came in daily to examine the disk. He was spared the screeching of the machine, but he had bigger worries.

  Once the train carrying the disk left Corning, life settled into a kind of normalcy at the Corning Glass Works. There were still some smaller disks to cast for other observatories, which kept George McCauley busy. He was also much in demand for lectures on the casting of the disk.

  For months tension had been brewing between McCauley and Hostetter. Hostetter had taken the limelight when the press returned to Corning for the unveiling and the shipment of the disk. He was good with reporters. He wasn’t a scientist and had done no research; his job was an administrative position that brokered between the client and the research and production people. But when he spoke about the disk, the most famous product Corning had ever produced, he gradually shifted his voice from we, meaning himself and McCauley, to the first person singular. What reporters heard was that Hostetter, with the help of McCauley and others, had produced the great disk. Hostetter’s assistant, George Maltby, officially a reports collector (which corresponded roughly to a timekeeper for different projects), spent much of his time promoting his boss.

  McCauley, normally an easygoing man, resented Hostetter’s open grab of credit. The disk had been McCauley’s obsession. He had stayed awake nights worrying, had gone every day for a year to personally check the annealing. He had worked side by side with the workmen when the flood threatened the disk. And he had taken on the task of explaining the wounds in the surface to the Observatory Council.

  By Christmas 1935 the two men weren’t speaking. When a Christmas card arrived at the McCauley household from Hostetter, George McCauley sent back a note saying that under the circumstances he could not reciprocate. They went on that way for months. The breaking point came early in the summer of 1936, when an invitation arrived asking McCauley to speak in England on the casting of the disk. Hostetter had intercepted the invitation and accepted, for himself McCauley went directly to Amory Houghton. Under the circumstances, he explained, he couldn’t continue to work at Corning. Houghton knew George McCauley and his family from the Episcopal church they all went to each Sunday. He assured McCauley that his work was much appreciated. Everyone, Houghton said, was exhausted with this project. He suggested that McCauley take his family on a long vacation as soon as school was out. In the fall, when you get back, Houghton said, “We’ll talk about it.”

  McCauley was packing the car for that vacation when he got an emergency call from California on Friday, July 3.

  The caller was John Anderson. He asked McCauley to please be in California on Monday morning. Anderson didn’t say why he wanted McCauley there, but it wasn’t hard to guess. It also didn’t surprise McCauley that Anderson said so little on the phone. From the first meetings in New York City, they had agreed that communication about the project, to the extent possible, would be oral and in person, to avoid headlines and publicity.

  Only Houghton knew McCauley’s destination when his chief scientist caught the late-afternoon Erie train for Chicago. There McCauley boarded a twelve-passenger United Airlines Boeing for the flight to Burbank, California.

  The boyish enthusiasm of a physicist on his first plane ride competed with apprehension about what he might find in Pasadena. From the airport at Cicero, on the west side of Chicago, the plane bumped its way up to a flying altitude of 12,000 feet. McCauley watched the view from the window until they crossed the Mississippi, then settled back to read a new bestseller, Gone With the Wind, thinking the title particularly appropriate for his first plane ride.

  The plane stopped in Omaha, Cheyenne, Laramie, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas. The repeated ascents and descents, the sensation of flying through the Rockies instead of over them, and a rough passage through a thunderstorm outside Las Vegas left McCauley with an earache that swallowing and the ministrations of a stewardess with a swab of ointment couldn’t cure. The earache persisted for six months, an unpleasant souvenir of his first plane trip, but the flight to Burbank had taken only twelve hours, twenty-seven hours faster than even the extra fare trains. He was able to spend Sunday afternoon with his brother in Los Angeles and show up rested for the Monday-morning meeting with Anderson.

  They met at the optical shop and put on white coveralls and the required white cotton shoes in the anteroom. While the workmen stood back, Anderson and Marcus Brown showed McCauley a series of fractures that had appeared as the grinding tool cut down into the glass.

  McCauley examined the fine fractures with a magnifying glass. He knew the disk had been thoroughly annealed, and while he couldn’t explain what caused the fractures, he assured Anderson that the checks would disappear by the time they ground down to the final shape of the mirror. No one, including McCauley, had any experience with Pyrex castings that large, but McCauley’s confidence was enough to assuage Anderson’s worries about the disk.

  As Anderson and Brown proudly showed off the optical shop equipment to McCauley, Brownie explained that the biggest problem they had encountered in the work so far, aside from the unexpected fractures, was that the glass blocks they were using on the face of the grinding tool were breaking. The face of the tool was a deep lattice, made by welding sheet stock in a crisscross pattern. Glass blocks four inches square and two inches thick were fastened into the openings in the lattice with molten wax. The spaces between the blocks allowed the carborundum-and-water slurry to flow freely. The disk worked well, but when they heated the wax to fasten in a new block, many of the blocks broke from the thermal shock.

  McCauley offered a solution: Pyrex blocks. When Anderson protested that new blocks would take too long to make and cost too much, McCauley assured him that the Corning Glass Works would turn them out in no time and that the saving from having no more breakage would make up for any additional cost. McCauley flew back to Chicago and got back to Corning on Wednesday at noon. The entire trip and consultation had taken only five days.

  The A Factory made good on his commitment to produce Pyrex blocks, which were on their way to Pasadena within a week. That done, he took up Houghton’s suggestion of a long vacation. He packed his family into the Hudson and set off cross-country. They visited family in Missouri, stopped at Mount Rushmore, listened to George’s story of his flight through the Rockies, and put up with his hobby of photography, which required sudden halts of the car, followed by a lengthy ritual of setting up his tripod and camera, then burying himself under a black cloth until he got everything just right to snap his plates. In California they visited the University of California and Caltech. McCauley sneaked in meetings with Robert Millikan and Ernest Lawrence. To McCauley’s children, who had grown up with the long nights and constant anxiety over the disks, it seemed a real vacation. For the first time in years, they had gone weeks without hearing a word about the disk.

  It was only when they got back to Corning in the fall, and saw Am Houghton greet George McCauley at church like a long-lost friend, his exuberance and enthusiasm out of all proportion to the short time McCauley had been away, that George McCauley’s wife and children realized that the visits to Berkeley and Pasadena, and the private meetings with Lawrence and Millikan, hadn’t been idle sightseeing. He had been exploring new jobs. But at work the next day, McCauley learned that Hostetter had left Corning and the Glass Works.

  George H
ale tried to follow developments on the telescope, but by 1936, his afflictions had become incapacitating. In the fall of 1935 he was suffering attacks of vertigo so severe that he had to cancel trips abroad and to the East Coast. The attacks would “come suddenly, without warning” and lay him up for weeks. Even the darkened room at the solar lab, where he had once sought solace from his demons, wasn’t enough to ward off the vertigo. When the spells hit, Miss Gianetti, who had shifted duties from being Hale’s private secretary to general secretary for the Palomar project, protected him from all visitors and calls. John Anderson had been accustomed to making oral reports to Hale, keeping him up to date on various aspects of the telescope. Francis Pease, Walter Adams, and others who had known Hale from Mount Wilson, would come to visit during the quiet periods between attacks. They would find Hale as alert as ever, a bundle of energy as he fired off questions about one detail or another of the project. When McCauley went to Pasadena in November 1935, to report on the state of the disk as it emerged from the annealing oven, Hale asked him and Anderson exactly what thickness of glass would remain if the wounds on the face of the disk were ground away. “If further defects do not appear below 3%-inch depth,” Hale later reported to Max Mason, “and if no magic mirror defects develop,” he was confident not only that the mirror would be satisfactory, but that the thinner mirror would be “better.”

  But as the year wore on, Hale realized that his lucid periods were fewer and farther apart than ever before. He missed the arrival of the disk, missed the party to inaugurate work on the mountaintop, and wasn’t strong enough to visit the optical shop to see the disk in place. When problems developed or decisions had to be made, George Hale couldn’t be counted on for the wisdom and experience that had guided so much of the telescope building.