The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  Still, Bowen was a superb physicist, well respected by colleagues, and free from the posturing and politics of Hubble or Shapley. Though he had spent limited time in observatories and on telescopes, he was an excellent optician, well equipped to supervise the completion of the two-hundred-inch mirror and the other optics for Palomar. The easterners and the Californians at Caltech thought of Bowen as an unmistakable midwesterner. He was serious and often could not understand a joke. He had little sense of fashion, in his dress or manner. For years he wore a hideous necktie made of some synthetic material he claimed was stain-proof, until it literally fell apart; he was apparently unaware of the quiet grins of others when he bragged that the marvelous tie, no matter how many times he wore it, was as good as new. He was penurious with faculty salaries and supplies. When one astronomer needed to use a paper recorder for an experiment, Bowen asked how much paper the experiment would use. The astronomer said, “One thousand feet per week.” Bowen finally approved the experiment, “but only if you use every inch of the paper.” Waggish astronomers would ask, “Do you know the difference between Ike Bowen and a brick wall? If you push long enough on a brick wall you can move it.”

  Walter Adams had been an admirer of Bowen’s research, and he eagerly supported the appointment. Adams, at the compulsory retirement age of sixty-five, was no longer officially on the Mount Wilson staff after Bowen’s appointment. Eager not to cramp Bowen’s style, he moved his own office to Hale’s old solar laboratory when Bowen took over.

  Not every astronomer welcomed Bowen’s appointment. Hubble tried to put a good face on his disappointment, writing that he welcomed the prospect of research without the responsibilities of administration. “On the other hand,” he reminded Bowen, “the appointment of a physicist as director of the astronomical center of the world will not be welcomed by astronomers if it involves actual control and direction of research…. I will expect to have a free hand … in the field you call cosmology. Some of us have given much thought to the big problems in that field, and have rather definite notions on the methods of attack.”

  Hubble was used to a prewar world of astronomy, where the director of an observatory could function as a benevolent dictator on his mountain. The war, the growth of big science, and the complex institutional relationships that were needed for facilities like the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories changed all that. Astronomy, a profession of gentlemen, had yielded to astrophysics, in which thirty was old. As Paul Dirac had once written in an end-of-term sketch:

  Age is of course a fever chill

  that every physicist must fear.

  He’s better dead than living still,

  When once he’s past his thirtieth year.

  Jesse Greenstein, who would later come to Caltech as the first chairman of the astrophysics department, witnessed the transformation: “The world changed. The characters in the play changed. Instead of the gentlemen, we have as the ideal the brilliant, aggressive young genius interested in everything, careless of whose feet he steps on and very anxious to make the discovery of the week or the year or whatever. It’s a loss, and it’s a gain.”

  Twenty years before, Edwin Hubble had been the brilliant aggressive young genius. Now, a younger generation was waiting in the wings. One afternoon late in 1945, a group of astronomers and physicists, including Bowen, Tolman, Baade, and Adams, met at Hale’s solar laboratory to make preliminary plans for the allocation of research time on the two-hundred-inch telescope. They reviewed the work in progress among astronomers at Mount Wilson and at other institutions and concluded that the world’s biggest telescope, and especially the priceless “dark time” when the moon was absent and the telescope could be used for research on faint objects at the limits of the observable universe, was too valuable to be monopolized by Hubble’s “rather definite notions” and methods. Hubble would get some observing time on the telescope, but nothing like the free hand he expected.

  32

  Starting Anew

  The end of the war left a malaise at Caltech. Wartime research and production had been exciting. Now, at parties, men asked one another, “Well, now what are we going to do?” A few couldn’t wait to purge the years of war work. Bruce Rule brought his wartime research papers home and burned them in the fireplace, asking his daughter formally to witness the deed.

  One group on the Caltech campus knew exactly what they would do. Soon after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the formal peace was signed, workmen started clearing the war work out of the optics lab and the astrophysics machine shop. Max Mason’s plan of holding the essential work crew together on war projects had been successful. A few men had moved on to other projects, but a core stayed on. Men who had started as apprentices when the project began were now heads of much of the work staff. The chief electrician from Palomar and his assistant took new jobs after the war; Ben Traxler, who had started as a utility man and radio operator at Palomar and stayed with the scientists and engineers at Morris Dam during the war came back to Palomar as chief electrician. Mel Johnson, who had stuck it out in the optical shop, was Marcus Brown’s chief assistant when the work on the mirror resumed.

  Before they could clear away the timbers that had protected the disk and restart the gear polishing machines, there was an administrative nightmare to clean up, as Caltech and Pentagon accountants tried to figure out who owned what. By the time the war work was cleaned out of the shops, the Palomar blueprints, tools, jigs, and dies were retrieved from storage, and new men were trained for the highly specialized telescope work, six months had elapsed. Officially the OSRD, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, had purchased much of the specialized machinery in the shops from Caltech for the war effort, then sold them back to Caltech for their salvage values. The result of the transactions was that Caltech was able to apply $144,000 of the funds from military contracts to restoring facilities for the telescope project. The funds helped, but the war years had been expensive for the telescope; a skeleton staff had to be maintained at Palomar to guard and maintain the facilities, and the war had inflated salaries and the cost of equipment. By July 1945 only $4,000 of the original grant of $6 million remained to finish the telescope.

  Max Mason wasted no time in applying to Warren Weaver, his former colleague at the Rockefeller Foundation, for an additional $250,000 grant to finish the telescope. It was such a reasonable request, eighteen years after the original grant, that the Rockefeller Foundation promptly approved the additional funds. By summer of 1946 sixty-five men were on the astrophysics payroll.

  In the machine shop the trickiest single operation was finishing the machining of the drive gears. It had never been easy to find and train men with the patience to cut and polish gears to the needed tolerance. The war years, with their emphasis on producing machined goods to quick timetables, made for a rough transition to work with specifications so exacting it couldn’t be rushed. Instead of three shifts, competing with one another to set output records, the shop was slowly returned to the old pattern, one shift of master machinists, working painstakingly on one-of-a-kind production. While men on the gear-cutting machine measured their progress with hourly examinations of the surfaces of the fourteen-foot-diameter gear with microscopes, machinists on the boring mill and milling machines put together the mount and tube for the forty-eight-inch Schmidt camera and the remaining mechanical and electrical components of the two-hundred-inch telescope.

  Mark Serrurier, who had supervised much of the assembly work on the telescope, had left the telescope project to work with his father in the movie industry, where he later developed the Moviola and received an Academy Award for his work. Bruce Rule, who had worked on the electrical systems of the telescope before the war, took over the supervision of the mechanical and electrical components of the telescope. Byron Hill returned to Palomar Mountain to supervise the work on the site. Rule and Hill had worked together at Morris Dam during the war. Both were strong willed, and their years together on war work hadn’t
mellowed either man. Their “discussions” were legendary.

  Next door to the machine shop, in the optical shop, Marcus Brown had been counting the days until he could return to his work on the telescope. Brown had done war work polishing prisms and mirrors. For some of the men in the shop, work was work, and the optical shop was a good job: They were exempted from the draft, got steady paychecks, worked indoors, and didn’t complain. For Brownie polishing glass wasn’t enough. The mirror was his mission. He wanted to finish it before his legs gave out.

  In September 1945 Brownie and his crew—only a few men were veterans of the prewar telescope work—lifted off the timbers that had protected the mirror disk for three years. It took them three months to clean the entire optics shop with magnets, hoses, scrub brushes, and magnifying glasses. The polishing machine, unused for almost three years, had to be examined and lubricated. On December 17, 1945, Brownie pushed the button to restart the machine.

  Most of the men were new, but the rhythm of figuring the mirror on the huge polishing machine returned quickly. For five days each week, Monday through Friday, Brownie and his crew would polish zones of the disk, bringing the surface closer to the elusive perfect figure. On Saturday John Anderson and Brownie would test the disk, studying the shadows of the knife-edge to find zones that would need more attention on the polishing machine. Day after day, week after week, the polishing went on. From the gallery it was as if the war had never come along.

  But inside the shop, in the offices of Robinson Hall, even on Palomar Mountain—the mood of the men working on the telescope had changed. However much the machines and men looked the same in 1945 as they had before, the war had changed America too much to ignore. Some changes were obvious: Returning servicemen flooded the workplaces and universities, women returned home from wartime jobs, deflation replaced the raging wartime economy. Other changes were unanticipated: Wartime separations had taken a toll on marriages and families, as women who had enjoyed life outside the home and men who had taken advantage of overseas freedoms confronted one another. Often relationships that had survived long separations fell apart when postwar reality didn’t match wartime dreams.

  The changes weren’t only in the family. Men and women who had been part of a crusade against evil were now working for a paycheck. The work—whether on an assembly line or in the Caltech optics shop—might be the same, but without The Cause, it felt different. Polishing a prism in the optics lab had been a small but essential part of a national effort. The same routine steps, on the same machine, after the war, was just a repetitive, boring job.

  Even the excitement of working on the telescope had paled for some. Before the war the two-hundred-inch telescope had been the most exciting venture of American technology and science. Men had considered work on even a component of the project a privilege. But even the triumph of prewar technology paled alongside the achievement of the war. The United States, the fortress of democracy, had put together the greatest human economic effort ever organized. Military historians might argue that the battles between the German and Russian armies on the Eastern Front were bigger than any engagement the Americans had fought, but for men and women who had worked in factories, railroads, and ships, producing and transporting more airplanes, trucks, ships, guns, ammunition, gasoline, and uniforms than the world had ever imagined, the war had provided a unique experience of working for something that mattered. After that crusade the telescope paled in comparison.

  The war also marked a watershed in the scale of science. Warren Weaver, from his position as science administrator of the Rockefeller Foundation, watched it happen. Before the war the Rockefeller Foundation had made some substantial grants to Ernest Lawrence, at the University of California, for work on his cyclotrons. The grants were relatively small compared to the $6 million commitment they had made for the telescope, but after Lawrence pyramided the funds with grants from the state of California, and especially after Lawrence’s eighty-four-inch cyclotron became one of the fuel sources for the Manhattan Project and the University of California later took over as site manager for Los Alamos, nuclear physics research at Berkeley and Los Alamos dwarfed what had once been big science, including the two-hundred-inch telescope.

  An inverse corollary of Gresham’s law prevails in science: Good money attracts more money and good people. At war’s end the big machines, publicity, and seemingly limitless funding at places like Berkeley and Los Alamos drew bright young scientists and senior researchers to particle physics and nuclear weapons research. Men like J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had explored astrophysics problems before the war, were now absorbed in the seemingly limitless enterprise of nuclear research and its potential consequences. “Doomsday” had become part of the vocabulary. When he heard that work on the telescope had resumed, Warren Weaver wrote Max Mason that “everyone agrees that it should be finished adequately and promptly. Indeed, with the way the nuclear physicists are carrying on, the astronomer had better get a good look at the universe while it (and we) are still here.”

  If they were no longer at the center stage of science, the work on the unfinished telescope went on. The Los Angeles newspapers carried an occasional feature on the telescope project that everyone vaguely remembered, but people in Southern California had been hearing about big telescopes for so long that Robert Benchley’s humorous plaints—“They must just throw the glass away when it finally, after weeks of publicity, gets out there”—seemed accurate.

  In the shops at Caltech, the once pathbreaking machining and polishing work began to seem routine. The first drive gear, machined to a precision never before achieved in a gear that large, had been a compelling task. The second right ascension gear and the declination gear, equally large and no less exacting in the machining requirements, were only routine. The first gear had proved it could be done.

  Even in the optics shop, the polishing became tedious. Opticians are patient men, but the two-hundred-inch disk had been in the optics shop for ten years.

  By early 1947 the surface was within one-millionth of an inch of a true parabola. John Anderson didn’t like to use those measurements—for an optician fractions of a wavelength of light are a more useful scale—but he proudly admitted to visitors that the mirror had reached a trueness over its surface never before achieved on any optical device. As the surface came closer to the final figure, Brownie’s precautions in the optics shop became fanatical. Workmen had to exchange their protective suits for a fresh one at the slightest suspicion. Twice a day a man would go over the floor with a magnetic sweeper. Some men did nothing all day but search the room for metal filings or specks of foreign matter. Brownie worried about the forced-air ventilation system. The system had been designed to work under positive pressure, so no foreign material could be brought into the shop. But what if the forced air picked up a grain of glass? A single speck under the polishing tool for an instant could set them back six months or more.

  The Saturday tests crept up on Anderson’s elusive goal. Anderson and Brownie worked together on the tests each week, taking turns at the eyepiece as they discussed the remaining work to be done. Anderson was pleased with the progress. The remaining high zones were gradually coming down. There was still work to be done on the disk. The outside edge had deliberately been left slightly high. Anderson’s calculations for the mirror supports indicated that the edge of the disk, extending out beyond the outer ring of supports, would sag in the telescope. What seemed a high edge in the laboratory tests could be just right in the telescope. If the mirror didn’t sag that much, they could polish the edge down at the observatory. The opposite error, if the edge were too low, would require repolishing the entire mirror, a formidable task. Anderson’s only worry was the support system, “for which we have at present no really satisfactory test. As far as we can tell it is ok—but the final decision will have to wait until it is installed in the mounting at Palomar, sometime next year.”

  The work in the optics lab was nearing its end. The surface of the mirror
was close to a perfect paraboloid. As the surface progressed, unspoken tensions developed between Anderson and Brown. Brownie wanted to keep polishing, to bring the entire surface closer to a perfect mirror. Some of the tests detected a barely perceptible “orange peel” effect on the surface of the mirror, which would reduce the pinpoint sharpness of images by scattering light. He wanted a few more months, perhaps another year. Anderson pointed out that the theoretical resolution of the disk, the ability to focus the light from a distant star into a fine point, was already greater than the best of atmospheric seeing would allow the astronomer to use.

  Anderson and Bowen had already announced that after the mirror was moved to Palomar, Don Hendrix, chief optician at the Mount Wilson optical shop, would take over the remaining polishing. A superb optician, in 1947 he was just finishing the mirror and corrector plate for the forty-eight-inch Schmidt telescope, which he had started before the war. Hendrix had come back to the seventy-two-inch mirror in late 1945. With the famed two-hundred-inch mirror across town at the Caltech optics shop, with its visitors’ gallery, the reporters paid little attention to Hendrix’s mirror. The figuring went well, and the crises remained private. Once, when they tried to lift the mirror off the grinding machine for a test a vacuum had formed between the mirror and the table of the polishing machine, so that the table lifted with the mirror. Someone spotted it and Hendrix quietly pushed the DOWN button on the electric hoist. Everyone in the lab was shaking when the mirror and disk finally settled back in place. Another time the polishing tool galled while they were grinding one of the sockets at the back of the disk. Hendrix calmly sent one of the assistant opticians off on a motorcycle to get dry ice to pack around the tool to contract the metal enough to release it from the disk.