The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  But the portion of the Woodbury manuscript that aroused the strongest reactions in Pasadena was the portrayal of McDowell and his role in the project. “The whole account of McDowell is exaggerated and much of it is contrary to fact,” Max Mason wrote. “The tale of confusion in Pasadena and how he set it right is nonsense…. The picture of a man like Henry Robinson of the Observatory Council being stunned by McDowell’s energy is ridiculous.”

  From the beginning the scientists and many of the engineers had resented McDowell’s condescension and his insistence that his procedures, his friends, and his contacts in industry were the only course for the telescope. The version of events McDowell fed to David Woodbury was grossly unfair to men like George Hale, John Anderson, Francis Pease, and others who had borne the bulk of the responsibility for the design and construction of the telescope. Even if he hadn’t exaggerated his own role and made many in Pasadena look like bumblers, McDowell’s stories were, in the minds of scientists, “conduct unbecoming.” They had struggled to avoid sensationalism, to keep public information about the telescope accurate. After the manuscript circulated, and it was clear that McDowell had been the chief source of what many thought a badly distorted book, Max Mason quietly asked McDowell to leave the project at the end of 1938. After the firing Mason reported that “the somewhat complicated personnel situation now seems to be entirely straightened out.”

  McDowell put a good face on it, explaining to anyone who would listen that while the telescope wasn’t finished, “so far as I can see, all the work that has come under my jurisdiction will be completed within the estimates set up.” In his final report he commented favorably on several of the engineers on the project. The only scientist about whom he had a kind word was Sinclair Smith, who was dead.

  Forty years later a picture of Sandy McDowell, posing with the one-tenth-scale model of the telescope, was still hanging in the basement offices of the astrophysics building. No one on the Palomar staff was quite sure who it was.

  29

  Almost

  The world was too busy to pay much attention to Palomar in the fall of 1938. Shooting wars of surprising passion were being waged in almost every corner of the globe. The Spanish Republic had been fighting the Franco rebels for more than a year, with German, Italian, and Russian “volunteers” and the International Brigades using Spain as a warmup for the expected death struggle of fascism and communism. The Japanese were campaigning in China, forcing the Chinese government to abandon its capital; Jewish and Arab groups were in open rebellion against the British government in Palestine; fascist movements were bidding for power in South America; Italy had invaded and annexed Ethiopia; Germany had annexed Austria and was in the process of dismembering Czechoslovakia. No one needed a telescope to see the coming world war.

  Most Americans, urged on by Charles Lindbergh, the America First movement, and the isolationists in the Senate, did their best to ignore the stirrings of war that threatened every continent except their own. The United States had already turned down membership in the League of Nations; in 1935 the Senate rejected adherence to the World Court; and in the following years neutrality laws canonized the oft-quoted injunctions of George Washington’s Farewell Address. A few critics pointed out that the American army and navy were not prepared for war, but their warnings went largely unheeded. After sending armies to fight the “war to end all wars,” much of America had no enthusiasm for seeing more of its young men fall on foreign soil.

  Still, it was impossible to ignore the whirlwind that seemed to have gripped much of the world. News from Europe was on the front pages every day. Commentators read the tea leaves of Hitler’s speeches. Occasional frightening articles outlined the extent of Japanese military and naval might and territorial ambitions. By 1939 even the two great oceans didn’t seem enough to keep America isolated. The only consolation was that a few far-seeing entrepreneurs suggested that war business might end the lingering depression.

  Many Americans hoped that progress—the technology that had built the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Boulder Dam—would be enough to bring the United States out of the doldrums. That same technology, the newspapers occasionally reported, was finishing the greatest scientific instrument ever built. By 1938 the articles about the telescope included photographs of the disk, the mount, or the observatory—concrete proof of America’s unique mission: Let other nations fight their wars. America would build a better world.

  For visitors to Caltech and Pasadena, a stop in the observers’ gallery of the optics shop and a walk through the halls of the astrophysics building, where Russell Porter’s drawings of the telescope hung, were the height of the tour. Visiting astronomers and observers at Mount Wilson were often treated to a visit to Palomar to see the telescope. Even men who had spent many hours on large telescopes had trouble believing the scale and precision of the machine they saw going up. When John Anderson took Vannevar Bush, Walter Adams, and their wives up in April 1940, the telescope was still 15,000 foot-pounds out of balance, but the oil bearings were working well enough to demonstrate that a milk bottle on one side of the great horseshoe would actually move 1 million pounds of telescope. To answer the most common question, Anderson said that the summer of 1942 was a likely completion date. The last step would be the installation of the mirror. Once that was ready and installed, he said, the telescope would be in operation within two days.

  Even the most cynical of eastern skeptics had put a moratorium on voicing doubts about the telescope. Hubble, Baade, and others were already planning how they would use the new telescope. Baade had concluded that only the light-gathering power and resolution of the two-hundred-inch telescope would give him evidence to support his new and important theory of stellar populations. Hubble and Humason had used the special Ross lenses developed for the two-hundred-inch to stretch the range of the one-hundred-inch telescope beyond the limits anyone had anticipated. Hubble had plans for an extensive program with the two-hundred-inch telescope, beginning with a extensive sky survey by the forty-eight-inch Schmidt telescope. Pleased by the popular attention his research had attracted, and caught up in his own celebrity inside and outside the world of astronomy, Hubble believed that the first priority for the new telescope should be his work.

  The astronomers at Mount Wilson and in the spacious library on Santa Barbara Street could talk and plan, but Caltech had the keys to the two-hundred-inch telescope. They also had the nucleus of an astrophysics faculty in Fritz Zwicky, spectroscopist Ira Bowen, and cosmologist Richard Tolman. There were some at Caltech who suggested that the institute should run the telescope alone. The lack of experience at building large telescopes certainly hadn’t stopped the ambitious and confident engineers and scientists. Maybe the lack of experience administering a large observatory could also be overcome. The Caltech boosters overlooked the fact that Caltech had no funds to operate the observatory.

  The terms of the original grant called for Caltech to raise an endowment suitable to pay the operating expenses of the observatory. Henry Robinson, the chairman of the Caltech board of trustees and the member most enthusiastic about a telescope, had pledged $3 million when the grant was first received, fulfilling the Rockefeller Foundation requirement and obviating the need to search for endowment funds. Robinson hadn’t lost his enthusiasm, but the stock market crash had decimated his portfolio. Aside from an interest in the Bolsa Chica Club, which he had purchased almost by accident before oil was discovered on the property, he had nothing to offer the observatory. As of 1938 no portion of the endowment was in hand, and with the depression still vitally affecting business and philanthropy, there seemed little prospect of raising it.

  The obvious partnership, which the public assumed already existed, was between Caltech and the Mount Wilson Observatories. Mount Wilson, a department of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, had a long record of experience with large telescopes; offices conveniently in Pasadena; and a substantial staff of opticians, engineers, electricians, an
d trained night assistants. The Mount Wilson staff astronomers, men like Walter Baade and Edwin Hubble, were experienced observers with unparalleled experience on large telescopes. The Mount Wilson optics lab had done work on the early quartz and glass disks, correcting lenses, and other instrumentation for Palomar; portions of the telescope instrumentation and optics had been tested on Mount Wilson telescopes; and Mount Wilson staff members, including Sinclair Smith, Francis Pease, and John Anderson, had for many years worked half-time on the Palomar telescope, with that portion of their salaries paid by Caltech from the telescope budget. Mount Wilson staff had been accustomed to attending colloquiums and symposia at Caltech and had worked with Caltech faculty in physics and geology.

  However sensible the relationship between the two institutions might have seemed to an outsider, the Observatory Council and John Merriam, the president of the Carnegie Institution, had long memories. After the roadblocks Merriam had erected in 1928, when he tried to sabotage the grant, and again in 1934, when he appointed his special committee, the Observatory Council and the staff and trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation thought it best to soft-pedal any talk of cooperation, because of the “personal difficulties which sometimes surround the activities of J. C. Merriam.”

  Merriam occasionally tried to court the project. In 1936 an exhibit on the two-hundred-inch telescope was included in the annual Carnegie Institution Christmas display in Washington. Early the next year Walter Adams asked Max Mason if he would consider appointment as an associate of the Carnegie Institution. Mason said he would be honored, but John Merriam apparently changed his mind. The appointment never came through.

  The mistrust went both ways. Merriam wasn’t popular, even among the Carnegie Institution staff and trustees. But he wasn’t the only one at the Carnegie Institution who felt that Hale, as an officer and an employee of the Carnegie Institution had been openly disloyal when he worked out the original plans for the telescope. It was no secret that Hale had used his personal friendships with some trustees and Elihu Root to sidetrack Merriam’s initial obstruction of the grant.

  Underlying the resentment of the grant and Hale’s actions, there was also a deep-seated Carnegie dislike of Robert Millikan and Caltech. The Carnegie Board was made up of conservative men, mostly easterners with strong ties to the Ivy League and quietly contemptuous of Millikan’s aggressive fund-raising, faculty-stealing, and penchant for publicity. After the stir his comments on religion had made in the 1920s, Millikan followed up in the 1930s with strong public positions against federal support of science, all the while arguing that increased scientific research—meaning the kind of research he had raised funds to support at Caltech, rather than economic tinkering—would create jobs and end the depression. Even Carnegie trustees who agreed with Millikan’s opposition to the New Deal resented the publicity he drew to Caltech, often at the expense of Carnegie departments like the Mount Wilson Observatory.

  Still, to many a marriage between the two institutions seemed inevitable. Frederick Keppel, a trustee of the Carnegie Institution, was at Max Mason’s retirement party, given by John D. Rockefeller. He drew Mason aside to say that the Carnegie Institution was “vitally interested” in the two-hundred-inch telescope and wanted to discuss the possibilities “as soon as Merriam was out.”

  Merriam retired on schedule in 1938. His replacement was a surprise—Vannevar Bush from MIT. Although Bush had advised Sandy McDowell on a number of questions, found Edward Poitras to replace Sinclair Smith on the control-system work, and suggested people and firms to work on the project, no one at Caltech really knew him.

  Bush took over the Carnegie Institution by storm, appointing special committees to review every area of operations and personally investigating large projects. He recruited the most famous of California engineers, former president Herbert Hoover, a trustee of the Carnegie Institution since 1921, to head a special subcommittee on astronomy. After leaving the White House, Hoover had become an active California booster. He visited Palomar before construction work on the observatory began, eating dinner with Colonel Brett in his cabin. Over the years Hoover followed the progress of the telescope, and even before Bush came to the Carnegie Institution, Hoover tried to raise money in Southern California to bring the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories together under a single organization, independent of both the Carnegie Institution and Caltech.

  Hoover’s plan was that the Carnegie Institution turn over the Mount Wilson Observatory and $6 million of endowment to the new organization. Caltech would turn over the Palomar telescope. Bush liked the plan, with one exception: He thought that the Mount Wilson Observatory and the Carnegie Institution expertise was a sufficient contribution without an additional $6 million for operating endowment. What Bush liked about Hoover’s plan was the centralization of authority. Millikan and others at Caltech had suggested that a group of scientists from Caltech and a group of astronomers from Mount Wilson could work together at Palomar under a joint committee. Bush thought running an observatory by committee an unworkable idea.

  Bush went to Warren Weaver, the head of science programs at the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation, he told Weaver, had made a serious mistake in letting Caltech go so far with the two-hundred-inch telescope. Caltech didn’t have the funds to endow the operation of the telescope, and they didn’t have the technical or astronomical staff to operate the facility. Lacking the resources to embark on their own astronomical program, they should stick to physics and leave astronomy to the Carnegie Institution. Two departments would not only be wasteful, but would inevitably lead to competition. Even if Caltech didn’t try to start a separate astronomy department, if the Rockefeller Foundation was not effectively to lose the funds they had put into the project, Bush warned, they would have to be prepared to face the necessity of committing between $1 and $2 million in additional grants to support the maintenance and operation of the telescope, and be prepared “actively to enter the situation and manipulate the plans for the operation of the telescope.”

  Bush’s warning struck sensitive chords. Any foundation officer dreads two possibilities: the need to commit more funds to “rescue” a project, and the need actively to enter the management or control of a funded project. Warren Weaver urged Raymond Fosdick, the new president of the Rockefeller Foundation, to stay out of the fray and not to make any move that could be construed as an offer of additional funds, even though “back of all this theorizing there remains one hard and disagreeable fact. It is true, and of inescapable significance, that the Rockefeller boards will have a very heavy investment in this Observatory. It is true that it would be intolerable and unthinkable that the Observatory not be properly utilized.” For the present, at least, he was reluctant to consider the possibility that the Rockefeller Foundation might have to add $1 or $2 million to their commitment “rather than see the former investment invalidated.”

  Bush told Weaver that the only reasonable administration for the new telescope was for a member of the Mount Wilson staff to be appointed director of the Palomar Observatory, and for the astronomical staff to be Carnegie Institution employees. When Weaver asked whether the Carnegie staff didn’t already have their hands full at Mount Wilson, Bush assured him that the present staff of Mount Wilson was fully capable of utilizing the facilities of both observatories. Under Bush’s plan Caltech would own Palomar and furnish a minimal thirty thousand dollars per year for basic maintenance. Caltech scientists would be allowed to work at Palomar, with the understanding that their interests would be in physics rather than astronomy. All publications from the observatory would give full credit to Caltech, and an advisory board from both institutions would recommend research programs and allocation of observation time. Bush, convinced that publicity was the real objective of Caltech, even offered to structure any agreement to save face and provide maximum publicity for Caltech. The crucial point for Bush was that final authority would rest with the director of the observatory, who would be a Carnegie man.

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bsp; As he explained his idea to a somewhat incredulous Warren Weaver, Bush argued that Caltech was overextended, that Millikan had lost his ability to raise funds and no longer commanded respect from other scientists, that Caltech was not capable of utilizing the Palomar Observatory without the Carnegie Institution, and that the Rockefeller Foundation had no choice but to intervene to protect its investment. At the same time he said he would not present his plan directly to Max Mason or the Observatory Council, because they would instinctively oppose placing the ultimate authority for the observatory in the hands of a Carnegie Institution officer and would only accept the idea if it were forced on them by the Rockefeller Foundation.

  Bush was in a powerful position. The Carnegie Institution of Washington not only enjoyed the wealth of its own considerable endowment, but Bush could appeal to the Carnegie Corporation, a separate body, for additional funds. Caltech, which had promised to raise an endowment for the telescope, did not have the funds at hand, and Millikan, who usually had the knack of making Southern Californians think it was a privilege to give money to Caltech, had had no success in raising an endowment for the telescope. The long years of depression didn’t help. Even if the economy had been better, endowment funds are less-glamorous causes than capital construction, and the observatory was so closely associated with George Hale and the Rockefeller Foundation that any potential donors knew they would have little chance of the immortality that Lick, Yerkes, or Hooker had achieved with the telescopes bearing their names.