The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  Hendrix’s assistant on the mountain would be Mel Johnson, who had worked on the mirror longer than anyone except Brownie. Like Hendrix, Johnson was younger and healthier than Brownie. He also had Hendrix’s calm, easygoing temperament, what the opticians called a Mount Wilson style. Neither was interested in astronomy. Hendrix and Johnson belonged to the same gun club. Weekends they went hunting, fishing, or target shooting. It relaxed them from the pressure of figuring glass.

  Brownie had the Caltech temperament. In the shop, he would roll Bull Durham cigarettes and smoke with the men, and he had the patience for hours of polishing and testing. But on two subjects he could be hot tempered: the rival Mount Wilson optics shop, and his disk. He didn’t like Hendrix, and he didn’t want to give up the disk, not to Hendrix and not to the astronomers. Bowen and Anderson said that they had named Hendrix to finish the mirror because Brownie’s legs were acting up, that his health couldn’t take the working conditions for polishing the mirror on the mountaintop. He had put almost twenty years into the mirror, training himself in an apprenticeship at the Mount Wilson labs, working on trial mirrors and auxiliary mirrors in the new optics shop on California Street, and from 1936 on, devoting his life to the big mirror. What had been a job for others was his calling. He didn’t want to let go.

  The “mirror is at the really exciting stage now,” Max Mason wrote in June 1947: “minute polishing, and tests every other day—working now with the millionths of an inch. Nobody knows how long—maybe a month—maybe bad luck and longer—maybe a lucky run, and sooner.” Astronomers at Caltech and Mount Wilson, following the reports from the optics shop, counted the days before the mirror would be finished. The joke around Caltech was that the mirror had already focused its first image, a reflection of the pinup photographs on the wall of the optics shop. Everyone knew that there was much work to be done afterward, the final figuring on the mountain, final tuning of the support systems, the drive and control systems, and the corrector lenses and spectrographs. But the goal seemed near.

  In the optics shop the men began talking about what they would do after. Some would stay on, finishing auxiliary mirrors for a few months before the optics shop was closed down. Brownie talked of going back to the farm he owned, which had grown up in sage in the twenty years he had been working on the telescope. He talked of other projects, maybe a jewelry-and-clock business. The talk didn’t conceal his sadness.

  It was October 1947 before Anderson was finally satisfied. Max Mason reported, “We are calling the mirror finished, as to figuring, and are happy over it.” The Caltech publicity office issued its announcement on October 3. “The most daring optical job ever attempted by man was completed today—polishing of the giant 200-inch telescope mirror for the Palomar Mountain Observatory.” The release quoted Mason: “Our last tests show that we have reached the goal toward which we have worked from the beginning—a parabolic (concave) surface accurate to within two millionths of an inch.” The grinding and polishing of the disk had taken eleven years, more than 180,000 man-hours. More than five tons of glass had been ground off the original blank. The eleven and one-half years on the grinding and polishing machine had consumed thirty-one tons of grinding compounds and rouge, hundreds of white cotton surgical suits and pairs of canvas shoes. Twenty men at a time worked on the mirror. Over the years, dozens of men had worked in the shop. Only Marcus Brown had been there from the start.

  33

  Delicate Cargoes

  The blueprints for the telescope filled cabinets in the basement of Robinson Hall. To a trained engineer each blueprint was clear; each assembly made sense. But no blueprint could make the entire assembly clear. The engineers, work crews on the mountain, even John Anderson, who had been with the project from the beginning, used Russell Porter’s drawings to visualize how the parts would all go together. Whenever Anderson saw a visitor’s eyes glaze over as he tried to explain some detail of the operation of the telescope, he would take him out into the hallways of Robinson Hall and find the right Russell Porter drawing, which made the complex seem simple.

  Porter’s drawings and the smooth welded construction of the telescope were deceptive. The gears, motors, and electrical components of the drive and control systems were concealed inside the horseshoe yoke, the two massive side tubes, and the base assembly of the mounting. The oil pressure bearings for the horseshoe were exposed, but the neat piping and the inconspicuous pressure pads made it seem simple. The south bearing, where a ball on three oil pads supported the weight of the lower end of the telescope, was concealed under the mounting, the access through manholes and crawl ways.

  As the pieces of the drive and control mechanism arrived, the fourteen-foot drive gears from the astrophysics machine shop at Caltech, the worm gears from a gear company in Connecticut, portions of the drive controller from Hannibal Ford’s plant in Long Island, other portions from the Mount Wilson labs and the Caltech machine shop, Byron Hill and Bruce Rule and the crew on the mountain assembled and tested the telescope. Rule had designed the windscreen, a heavy collapsible canvas curtain, on a heavy lifting mechanism, that could automatically rise to block the bottom portion of open slot in the dome without obscuring the view of the telescope, to protect the instrument from wind. The control mechanisms for the windscreen were phenomenally complex. Rule ran the initial tests in the daytime and realized that no one had calculated the expansion coefficient of the canvas. When the sun shone on one side of the screen, it drooped.

  With the forty-eight-inch telescope nearing completion at the same time as the two-hundred-inch, the engineers saved time and money by using the same technology, scaled up or down, for both. Sometimes the scaling worked. Bearings that had been machined for the two-hundred-inch telescope, then rejected in favor of a different design, were adapted to the forty-eight. Sometimes the men assembling the telescopes found that the promised economies didn’t work out. Bruce Rule designed the windscreen assembly for both telescopes. On the forty-eight-inch telescope, a single fractional-horsepower motor could lift the windscreen. On the two-hundred-inch, the windscreen was so heavy that his plan called for two three-horsepower motors, tied together electrically so they would stay in phase as they lifted the heavy windscreen. The voltage drop when the two big motors engaged would make the relays that controlled the motors “chatter,” which in turn would leave the windscreen jerking up or down by fits and starts. Rule, sure of his design, insisted the installation was wrong. The electricians on the mountain quietly installed capacitors and an auxiliary power supply to cure the chatter. On the mountain the men had learned that it was better to get the telescope working than to win arguments with the engineers.

  When the mounting of the forty-eight-inch telescope was first installed, the telescope wobbled and settled out of alignment from the slightest shake. The foundation was modeled after and scaled down from the four-point mounting of the two-hundred-inch telescope. The weight of the two-hundred-inch telescope, divided between the north horseshoe bearing and the south bearing, was split among four foundation caissons. The smaller forty-eight-inch telescope, with a simpler fork mounting, put almost all of its weight on the front two supports. Byron Hill, a civil engineer and concrete man by training, wanted to take it apart and rebuild the foundation. Bowen, in charge of the observatory, with a budget and timetable to meet, ordered reinforcements for the front bearings of the mount. Sometimes compromises were necessary.

  As the last parts of the control and drive mechanism were installed, Hill took on the tricky job of balancing the telescope. If the bearings had the low friction everyone promised, and if the telescope were perfectly balanced with minimal backlash in the gear assemblies, the tiny motors—the main drive motor is 1/12 horsepower, the size of a sewing-machine motor—would drive the huge telescope smoothly, without the spurts and jerks of a powerful electrical motor. As soon as the mirror was delivered from Pasadena, the opticians would want the telescope to work easily and reliably, so they could point it anywhere they needed for testin
g of the mirror and other optics.

  Byron kept his notes on the balancing of the telescope in a tiny handwritten notebook that even today sits in the drawer of the superintendent of the observatory. An engineer at Caltech had written up the procedure for balancing the telescope, which made it sound simple.* But the engineer wasn’t a mechanic. The counterweights were on four-inch-diameter Acme screws with unlubricated nuts that depended on the smooth motion of copper against graphite to turn freely. They probably turned freely when they were first installed, but the years of inactivity during the war had taken their toll. By 1947 the screws screeched when they were adjusted. Hill cursed and drank dripping oil trying to keep them lubricated. It was October 1947 when the telescope was balanced enough to take the dummy concrete mirror out to await the real mirror.

  By then as many as two thousand tourists a day were coming up to Palomar to watch the progress on the celebrated telescope. Palomar Mountain Stages offered tours from Oceanside, leaving at ten in the morning and returning at four in the afternoon, at a cost of six dollars. Others drove up in their cars, enjoying a Sunday afternoon drive after years of war-rationed gasoline and tires.

  The visitors found plenty of surprises. Gus Weber, one of the workmen on the mountain, had gotten into the habit of parking his pickup truck inside the dome. Hill didn’t like that, so he taught Weber a lesson by waiting until Weber wasn’t around and using the overhead hoist to suspend the truck high over the two-hundred-inch telescope. Weber, suspecting a practical joke, searched the mountain before he came into the dome and saw the visitors staring up above the telescope. His barrage of swearing was another treat for the visitors. A picture of Weber’s truck dangling over the telescope still hangs on the bulletin board in the observers’ room of the telescope.

  Another evening Ben Traxler and Olin Wilson passed the time by crafting a sign that they put on the old concrete mock-mirror disk, which had been relegated to a spot alongside the walk outside the dome:

  THIS FLYING SAUCER, DRAWN HERE BY THE GREAT

  LIGHT-GATHERING POWER OF THE TWO-HUNDRED INCH TELESCOPE

  HAS BROUGHT VISITORS FROM OTHER WORLDS

  WHO ARE CURRENTLY GUESTS OF THE GOVERNMENT

  After a woman visitor fled to the Forest Service office down the mountainside, demanding to be protected from the spacemen, Byron Hill took the sign down.

  Reporters, who love superlatives, might have argued that the San Francisco Mint, moved in the midst of the depression, was a more valuable cargo than the mirror for the Palomar telescope. If value is counted by the digits on the insurance policy, the mint won. But the heavily guarded armored cars moved only money and specie from the mint. The two-hundred-inch mirror was sixteen years of work. Even without a war, it would take a decade or more to replace. No insurance payment could compensate for that.*

  The move was planned for months. Irving Krick, a Caltech meteorologist, studied weather charts, using his own weather data and navy reports to track the behavior of each weather system that approached Southern California. The weather on Palomar Mountain could be volatile. The proximity of the ocean and the lack of nearby mountains allowed weather systems to move over the peak quickly. During the beginning of the rainy season in November, a day can dawn clear and bright, as if it were ushering in a spell of fine weather, only to be followed that evening by heavy cloud cover or a storm. Krick watched for a window long enough to move the mirror.

  Byron Hill and a group of Caltech civil engineers surveyed the route from California Street in Pasadena, out to U.S. Highway 101, down to Escondido, and finally up the new highway San Diego County had built up the mountain. The route they chose added thirty miles to the most direct route but avoided suspicious bridges and underpasses and congested thoroughfares. The engineers tested every bridge, overpass, and culvert with strain gauges to make sure they could safely bear the load. Five bridges needed additional shoring. The Galivan Bridge on Highway 101, near the line between Orange and San Diego Counties, sagged more than the engineers liked. The high bridge couldn’t be reinforced. The engineers decided the trailer would need special dollies attached for the bridge crossing to distribute the load over additional wheels.

  The road up Palomar Mountain was new and in good condition, but it was built to San Diego County road-building specifications, not Byron Hill’s. He didn’t trust the culverts. From earlier disputes Hill had discovered that submitting a request to the San Diego County officials was like trying to clear a patch of brush near a wasps’ nest. He skipped the permits and, using crews from the observatory staff, quietly reinforced the culverts to his own specifications.

  Reporters, sensing an event, began asking about the move. George Hall, in the Caltech publicity office, fended them off. California had changed in the twenty years since the first announcement of the telescope. Drive-in restaurants with waitresses on roller skates had replaced the once innovative cafeterias, and oil rigs had begun to encroach on the miles of orange and lemon groves. But some things, like the fundamentalist preachers on the tent circuits, remained the same. After the announcement that work on the mirror was complete, anonymous callers and letters to Caltech and to the observatory threatened to destroy the mirror on its way to Palomar.

  They might have been crank calls, but there were enough phone calls and letters, and a couple of appearances of men of the cloth at Palomar that Hill thought suspicious, to put everyone on alert. Hall asked the reporters not to write about the move yet. He told them the date wasn’t set, the mirror wasn’t quite ready, the telescope wasn’t ready for the mirror, that they were waiting for the right weather—any excuse that came to mind. The reporters wouldn’t go away. Local reporters had heard the talk in Pasadena, and newspapers like the New York Times had contacts like Harlow Shapley, who kept up with the latest reports on the mirror.

  At the end of October, Hall sent out a press release asking all reporters and press agencies to cooperate by not announcing in advance any details of the move. Those who cooperated would be provided with opportunities for photographs, film coverage, or a place in a vehicle accompanying the move.

  The reporters respected the news embargo, even on November 12, 1947, when the great doors in the optics shop opened for the first time since the disk had arrived eleven and one-half years before, and a huge sixteen-wheel trailer from Belyea & Sons was moved into the optics shop. Jack Belyea was famous for trucking impossible cargoes, from oil rigs in the Middle East to ships that he had moved from seaports to inland lakes.

  Inside the shop Marcus Brown ordered a final wash for the mirror. To the men with the hoses and sponges, it seemed no different from the thousands of times they had washed the disk, often several times a day. This time, when the disk was clean, the rubber skirts that covered the edge to keep water out of the support mechanisms were stripped off for good. The disk was tipped up on edge, in the position normally used for Saturday testing. John Anderson and Ike Bowen showed up with a Caltech photographer, and the entire optical lab crew posed in front of the disk. The crew wore their cotton surgical suits. Anderson and Bowen wore three-piece suits. Brown and Anderson shook hands for the photographer. For some shots one of the workers sat up in the central hole of the disk, giving a better scale. There was an air of festivity, but Brownie didn’t smile in the photographs. When the workmen went home at the end of the day, Brownie stayed late in the optics shop, as he often did.

  The next morning Brownie told Mel Johnson to operate the crane to load the disk onto the trailer. Brownie would stay at the trailer, supervising the lowering of the priceless cargo. They spent much of the morning securing the slings to the disk, measuring and remeasuring the trailer and the heavy timber case, twenty feet square and eight feet high, that had been built for the disk. Lifting the disk in its heavy cell, moving the crane the length of the room, and lowering it horizontally onto two I-beams that had been welded to the trailer took most of a day. Sponge rubber was used to cushion the disk. The mirror cell was fastened to the trailer at three points, two
fixed and one movable, to allow for flexure in the trailer. Brownie paced the floor on his bad legs, signaling each move to Johnson.

  When the disk was finally on the trailer, workmen climbed onto the big crate to put a sheet of paper and a wooden cover, one inch thick, on top of the disk. One worker saw what looked like a scratch on the surface of the glass in the central hole in the disk. A scratch on the inside of the hole wouldn’t have any effect on the mirror, but everyone in the shop knew that the central hole had been ground smooth and true before the temporary plug had been put in. The plug had later come out cleanly, and the hole had been carefully washed. From his perch the workman leaned down to examine the scratch.

  It wasn’t a scratch. He read the letters etched into the glass: Marcus H. Brown 1947 A.D. Brown said nothing about the signature. Craftsmen and artists had always signed their masterpieces.

  With the protective wooden cover in place, a radio-crystal detector was mounted on top to measure vibrations the disk received, and connected to an indicator in the cab of the tractor pulling the trailer, where an assistant driver could monitor the vibration. The disk was then covered with aluminum foil insulation and a heavy square cover of two-inch planks. Belyea and Pacific Rigging had brought a banner they wanted displayed on the outside of the crate.

  The mirror, cell, and wooden case weighed forty tons. The trailer was another twenty, making a total load of sixty tons, just within the limits of what one of the huge Belyea diesel tractors could pull on a level highway. The civil engineers had estimated that speeds of up to 15 miles per hour would be safe on the best stretches of road; for the final stretch up the road on Palomar Mountain, the speed would have to be held to 4 miles per hour. At those speeds they would need one long day for the 125 miles from Pasadena to Escondido, and another day for the 37 from Escondido to the Observatory. Krick, the meteorologist, had been told to aim for a window of two days of clear weather.