The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  Night after night he tried. Each noon, when he showed up for breakfast at the Monastery, everyone on the mountain would know from his mood whether the previous night had produced a good plate. Through the best seeing months of late summer and early fall 1942, Baade got closer and closer to his elusive goal. He estimated that some plates showed “incipient resolution,” that he could almost discern individual stars. All he needed, he estimated, was a tiny increment in limiting magnitude, not more than 0.3–0.5 magnitude, to resolve the stars of the distant nucleus. He had pressed the equipment to the limit. With the largest working telescope in the world, nearly ideal observing conditions, and every extraordinary precaution he could conjure, the stars still eluded him. The task, like so many other unresolved problems of observational astronomy and cosmology, would have to wait for the completion of the two-hundred-inch telescope.

  It wasn’t the only problem that cried out for a bigger telescope. Rudolph Minkowski, another Mount Wilson astronomer, had been studying the Crab Nebula, a supernova that Chinese astronomers had first observed in 1054. Minkowski was eager to get spectra of the two faint stars at the center of the nebula, which he suspected were remnants of the supernova. But even with Baade’s careful observations, in the very best seeing, using a special three-inch Schmidt camera at the Cassegrain focus of the one-hundred-inch telescope, it was impossible to achieve sufficient contrast between the central star and the surrounding nebulosity for satisfactory spectra of the stars. By 1942, after dozens of tries, Baade and Minkowski had succeeded in getting only one satisfactory spectrogram. The Crab Nebula was left as another problem for the rapidly filling agenda of the two-hundred-inch telescope.

  In the summer of 1943 Baade tried again to resolve the central region of Andromeda. He had previously used emulsions that were sensitive in the blue end of the spectrum, because the evidence from spectrograms of the stars in the arms of the Andromeda Nebula showed a predominance of high temperature blue-white stars there. After his failed efforts of the previous summer, and on the basis of studies he and Hubble had made of the Sculptor and Fornax stellar systems, Baade suspected that the stars in the central region of Andromeda belonged to an entirely different stellar population, that they were cooler and less luminous red stars. He also reasoned that red-sensitive photographic plates might cut down on the sky fog from the background of light scattered by interplanetary dust and scattered starlight.

  He set his campaign for late summer, when Andromeda would be highest in the sky at midexposure, and when Mount Wilson has the best seeing. He waited for perfect nights, with optimal seeing and optimal figure in the sensitive mirror of the one-hundred-inch telescope, and exposed his plates from 11:00 P.M. to 3:00 A.M., the four-hour window around the time when Andromeda was on the meridian (at the highest point in the sky). Before he exposed the plates, he bathed them in a dilute ammonia bath to increase their sensitivity. Then he would patiently guide the telescope for the full four hours.

  Finally he got his perfect night. The plate was labeled

  M32—the brighter, round companion of Andromeda, 103E plate (ammoniated) behind a Schott RG 2 filter, λλ 6300–6700—exp. 3h 30m, Aug. 25, 1943.*

  The next day the shy, normally reticent Baade was all smiles at breakfast in the Monastery. “After shooting was over,” he recalled, “it was quite clear that all the precautions had actually been necessary; I had just managed to get under the wire, with nothing to spare.” To the naked eye, his plates show only the dark (the plate is a negative) disk of M32, the unresolved blob he had captured on hundreds of plates before. Then Baade, with his wonderfully trained eyes, showed that under a magnifying eyepiece the surface of the disk was powdered with thousands of pinpoint stars.

  The margin of visibility was so slim that when the Astrophysical Journal received Baade’s article announcing the achievement, they would not trust reproductions of the plates. Instead individual enlargements were printed directly from the negative and bound into each issue.

  Baade’s achievement has been called the greatest “scoop” in the history of big-telescope astronomy. The consequences went beyond the extraordinary observational feat, as Baade used the evidence he gathered to distinguish two different populations of stars, a major step that would have broad consequences in the determination of cosmic distances. That those observations required years of effort by the finest observer on large telescopes, and the peculiar circumstances of a wartime blackout, proved how much astronomy needed the two-hundred-inch telescope that languished, half finished, in the laboratories in Pasadena and on a remote mountain.

  31

  Endless, Damnable War

  War transformed America. For a generation that had grown up knowing only the depression, the nation suddenly seemed whole again, united and mobilized in a cause that few opposed.

  The boom hit everywhere. Corning production lines shifted overnight from baby bottles and Pyrex baking dishes to lenses for gun sights. The Westinghouse plant that a few years before had been eager to build a telescope mount to keep its workers and machines busy was working full shifts on ship turbines. As men went to war, women left home for the factories. Rosie the Riveter showed up in cartoons, radio editorials, and patriotic speeches. Prudish critics were shocked when some women liked work outside the home, and when others, freed from the protection of the home, found entertainments and amusements outside work. Servicemen got “Dear John” letters or came home to surprises. The moral crisis the naysayers had predicted as far back as the 1920s, with the rise of hemlines and the sight of women smoking in public, had arrived with a vengeance.

  The war also transformed the scientific and technological underpinnings of America’s industrial might. Before the war an undertaking as complex as the two-hundred-inch telescope, a national engineering and design effort that drew on the resources, facilities, skills, and wisdom of dozens of companies, large and small, and hundreds of scientists and engineers from universities, private industry, government, foundations, and the military—had been a unique enterprise. There had been no formal institutional structure to bring together that vast spectrum of individuals and institutions except the regular if informal connections of the white, well-to-do, educated, Protestant, urban men George Hale drew into the enterprise. In the early days of the war effort, many of the same old boys whose companies, institutions, and agencies had designed and built the two-hundred-inch telescope showed up in positions of prestige and power in the war effort. But modern war on two fronts brought a demand for coordinated research and production that soon far outstripped the manpower, organization, and resources the old boys could command from their clubs.

  Projects like the two-hundred-inch telescope were dwarfed by the magnitude of the war effort. Vannevar Bush and James Conant, under the authority of the NDRC, swallowed up laboratories, faculties, scientists, and programs, channeling the efforts of thousands of researchers and vast manufacturing facilities into war research and development. When the resources of existing laboratories and production facilities weren’t sufficient, they could call for the construction of vast new plants and secret labs. The NDRC/OSRD took over the administration of atomic energy projects from a committee headed by Lyman Briggs at the Bureau of Standards, and in 1942 handed it over to the U.S. Army and General Leslie Groves, who formed the Manhattan Engineering District to administer a far-flung empire of facilities in New York, Chicago, Berkeley, Hanford, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos. The facilities in Hanford and Oak Ridge, and the secret laboratories in Los Alamos, dwarfed every previous scientific venture. The full cost of the two-hundred-inch telescope, the most expensive scientific instrument ever started before the war, would have been a footnote to the budget of the Manhattan Project.

  The complexity of managing and operating such diverse facilities, coordinating the productive efforts of entire divisions of companies like Du Pont, laboratories with hundreds of engineers and scientists, and physical plants with thousands of employees, created a new scale for big science. The world of Geor
ge Hale had rejected navy captain Sandy McDowell’s flowcharts as too bureaucratic and authoritarian, preferring the easy collegiality of informal meetings in their basement offices. The new science and technology would need men like Gen. Leslie Groves, veteran of building the Pentagon, who had the managerial and bureaucratic skills, and the authority, to clear every obstacle. Some Manhattan Project scientists resented Groves as much as the Palomar and Caltech scientists had resented McDowell. They couldn’t fire him. The needs of wartime research had created a science too big for the scientists to run alone.

  Compared to the decade of war that some countries had endured, America’s war was mercifully short. Yet for scientists eager to do astronomy, it seemed an endless hiatus. Young men—there were still almost no women in astronomy and astrophysics—took leaves from graduate school or postdoctoral fellowships to work on rockets at Morris Dam, ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, or fission in Los Alamos, postponing or even derailing their careers. Senior scientists lost the momentum of research projects that were suspended for the duration. Those who had counted on using the big telescope at Mount Wilson or who planned research projects that could only be completed on the unfinished two-hundred-inch telescope waited and dreamed.

  There had been no question of continuing the work on the telescope during the war. But even as the unfinished telescope languished, the politics of the telescope wouldn’t sleep.

  In 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, Vannevar Bush pushed aside the proposals for joint operation of Palomar and Mount Wilson by saying that under the “present emergency” the details would be difficult to work out. He was wary of Robert Millikan’s insistence that the institution be headed by a committee instead of an individual. Mount Wilson had always been run by a single director—first George Hale, then Walter Adams. And, like other Millikan watchers, Bush knew that for all his insistence on committee and joint decisions, Millikan was not a man ever to allow himself to be overruled. The negotiations to pair Carnegie money with Caltech’s telescope trickled on through 1941 as the two proud institutions worked out the details of what constituted “joint operation.” What names would be on the letterhead? How would the citations on scientific articles based on work at the facilities read? Behind these seemingly frivolous issues lay Mount Wilson and Carnegie Institution fears of Millikan’s “acquisitiveness” and his publicity machine, and Caltech fears that Mount Wilson and the Carnegie Institution were somehow usurping their telescope.

  War ended the bickering. It also changed the rules of the game. Bush, more than anyone, understood how the war would change the future of science. Government-funded war research had demonstrated the potential of science on a scale no one had dared imagine in the years before the war. Even without a peacetime equivalent to the Manhattan Project, it was clear to Vannevar Bush that government funding for future big science was inevitable, and that institutions like Caltech would be prime recipients. Before the war his bargaining point had been that tiny Caltech was overextended and couldn’t afford to run the telescope. He knew Caltech would be a different sort of place after the war.

  By the spring of 1945, as the Allied forces marched across Western Europe and the Marines hop-skipped up the chain of islands toward the Japanese heartland, even pessimists began to think of the end of the war. Bush, who was aware of the secret weapons the United States was developing in Los Alamos, knew that the war would not last out the year. Within a year or two of the conclusion of the war, the two-hundred-inch telescope would be finished. Walter Adams was ready to retire as director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. The joint facilities would soon need a director.

  Bush put great store in the role of a director. The Manhattan Project, with the unlikely choice of J. Robert Oppenheimer as director, was flourishing. Oppenheimer was far from a household name outside the world of physics, but at the Manhattan Project the legendary quickness and breadth of his mind attracted first-rate men to the project, and his grasp of the project kept the wildest of the scientists from going too far afield. The joint directorship of the joint Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, Bush concluded, needed a personality of comparable fame and prestige in astronomy.

  He first quietly floated the name of Harlow Shapley. As director of the Harvard College Observatory since 1921, Shapley was something of a dean of American astronomy, at least in the minds of easterners. He worked at a famed circular desk, keeping his many interests distinct on different sections of the desk. Shapley had enjoyed good relations with journalists, from the irascible H. L. Mencken to reporters from the influential New York Times, and as a regular participant in programs on the radio, in the newspapers, and at the Harvard College Observatory, he had built a public following, unusual for an astronomer. In the world of big science that Bush knew would follow the war, a widely known director who enjoyed easy rapport with the press and the public would be a strong asset.

  Still, Bush wasn’t sure of Shapley. When he solicited views, he found that many thought Shapley lacked “generosity … his own reputation and advancement have often been too keenly in his mind rather than the welfare of his organization or of his colleagues.” Walter Adams shared Bush’s qualms. Shapley’s position in astronomy, Adams pointed out, was due to his early work at Mount Wilson, rather than to anything he had done since. “Hubble and Baade do not rate most of the Harvard work at all highly, and they should be excellent judges.” The strongest argument against Shapley was that he had never been enthusiastic about the two-hundred-inch telescope; indeed, he had done his best behind the scenes to derail the project.

  The only other astronomer as well known, among the public and scientists, was Edwin Hubble. In 1936, when it seemed that the engineers were taking over the project, Walter Adams had confidentially urged that Hubble be appointed astronomical director of the Caltech two-hundred-inch-telescope project. From a public relations perspective Hubble was a natural choice. In the news weeklies and science supplements, he was the discoverer of galaxies, the measurer of the universe. His name was mentioned in conjunction with Einstein—science journalists liked to write that Hubble had proved what Einstein predicted—and Hubble had done little to discourage the idea that the real purpose of the big telescope was to support his own work. Hubble enjoyed fame; he liked to hobnob and be photographed with celebrities, rarely turned down a chance to be interviewed by a reporter or to appear in a newsreel, and made a point of appearing at Mount Wilson, in his tweeds and with his acquired English accent and pipe prominent, whenever a distinguished visitor scheduled a tour of the observatory. Robert Millikan, who had never been known to turn down publicity for Caltech, made no secret of his own preference for Hubble as the director of the joint observatories, where Hubble’s adeptness with the press might help Caltech as well as Mount Wilson.

  In the agreement for joint operation of the observatories, Millikan had ceded the right to appoint the director of the joint observatories to Bush, probably because he assumed that Hubble was such an obvious choice that Bush had no options. But Millikan hadn’t checked first with the astronomers and physicists. Hubble was not popular among his colleagues. They found him pompous, arrogant, self-centered, and narrow in his perspectives toward astronomy. His wartime assignment to the Aberdeen Ballistics Lab, far away from the other astronomers who stayed in Southern California, was welcomed by many.

  The harsh opinions of Hubble weren’t strictly personal. Many astronomers did not share Hubble’s enthusiasm for his proposed survey of galactic expansion, which he considered the primary mission for the two-hundred-inch telescope. In the years before the war, astrophysicists had begun exploring stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis, the processes and stages by which stars transform themselves. Hubble’s interest had been purely cosmological; he had sought evidence for a geometry of space. A new generation of astronomers and astrophysicists wanted to go beyond his goals, to explore the sequences of stars within globular clusters and galaxies and thence to understand the entire evolution of the universe. The key to
unlocking those secrets would be the superior light-grasp of the two-hundred-inch telescope. If time on the new telescope were monopolized for Hubble’s measurements of red shifts, other avenues of research would be closed or at least hobbled.

  Bush had spent enough time around academics to ignore much of the backbiting between astronomers and physicists. The one man whose opinion he trusted was Walter Adams. Adams was a quintessential New Englander: tall, slender, reserved, with a strong Protestant ethic of work and propriety. He worked hard as both an administrator and astronomer and admired those who worked hard and observed the proprieties and manners of the observatory and science. He thought Hubble a bad choice as his successor. Hubble, he explained to Bush, was not interested in administration and did not have a “friendly interest” in other members of the observatory, from the scientific staff to unskilled workmen. Adams’s delicate language did not hide his feelings, and Bush had administered enough science and visited enough observatories to realize that while the position could tolerate a prima donna, the close life of a mountaintop observatory didn’t leave room for a snob.

  By midsummer Bush had decided against Hubble. He was confident that Hubble would not leave if not appointed, but to make sure he recommended that a new position of chairman of the Committee on Scientific Programs be established for Hubble, with a salary comparable to that paid the director of the institute.

  Bush’s final choice of director was a surprise to many. Turning down other well-known astronomers, he picked Ira Bowen, a spectroscopist and longtime member of the physics faculty at Caltech. Some astronomers quietly protested. Bowen was a physicist, a student of Robert Millikan. He had done some superb work identifying unknown lines in the spectra of gaseous nebulae—an achievement Walter Adams identified as one of the most brilliant astronomical discoveries of the early twentieth century—but Bowen had done his work on a laboratory spectrograph, not at an observatory.