On Monday, November 17, the trailer was pulled through the archway outside the optical shop with winches. An engineer had calculated that the trailer and disk could make the sharp right-angle turn, but it took a whole morning with heavy steel slip panels to get the cargo through the arch, with inches to spare on either side. By 3:00 in the afternoon a Belyea diesel tractor was coupled to the trailer in the driveway. The area was roped off under heavy guard.
The California Highway Patrol had been asked to provide ten officers on motorcycles to escort the mirror. Towns along on the route were asked to have police on alert for crowd control. The Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads agreed to station extra signalmen at each railroad crossing on the route, to stop any ongoing trains if the mirror got stuck on a crossing. On the afternoon of November 17, Krick rechecked his weather maps and predicted that the next two days would be clear. The time of departure was set for 3:30 A.M. on November 18.
The reporters and film crews were already gathered outside the optics shop when Bruce Rule placed a final phone call to Byron Hill, who had gone down to Escondido to check the weather at that end. Hill said the sky was clear, and Rule gave the go-ahead signal. At 3:15, the Belyea driver started the engine of the big diesel tractor. Minutes later, amid a blaze of flash bulbs, the trailer eased out of the driveway. Highway patrolmen on motorcycles rode in front and along both sides of the trailer. Bruce Rule sat on the trailer with a portable chart recorder, testing the level of vibrations as the driver moved down California Street at five miles per hour.
It wasn’t until they were outside Pasadena that the speed picked up to eight, then ten miles an hour. By then it was early morning. Farmers working close to the highway and workers held up by local police closing off the roads stopped to watch the strange procession. “What is it?” people asked. Those who kept up with the stories in the newspapers answered with the ubiquitous-if-wrong moniker the reporters had adamantly assigned to the mirror: “the Giant Eye.” Those magic words were enough to silence crowds, who knew what they had seen was something to tell children and grandchildren.
The procession ignored stop signs and red lights. The lead motorcycle officers were far enough ahead of the truck to block intersections and order approaching motorists to pull over to the curb. Two patrol cars behind kept irate motorists from trying to pass. Every time the road or grade surface changed, Bruce Rule monitored the vibration gauges before he authorized an increase to fifteen miles per hour on Rosemead Boulevard, or ordered a cut to eight miles per hour on Los Alamitos Boulevard in Norwalk. As the day went on, the crowds got larger. Local police were called out in small towns, “in case.” But there were no disturbances. Everywhere people watched in awe.
America had changed in the twelve years since the raw glass disk had crossed the country by rail. In 1936 the United States was in the midst of the depression. Americans were hungry for a focus, for reassurance of the capabilities and promise of science, technology, and industry. By 1947 Americans were accustomed to the prosperity of wartime production, jaded by atomic bombs, television, and the possibility of owning their own homes and cars. Yet even people who knew nothing about Palomar or telescopes knew from the escorts and the slow pace of the procession that this was a sight they would never again see.
It took six hours to reach the junction with Highway 101 near Santa Ana. On the smooth four-lane highway, the tractor-trailer could safely speed up to 20 miles per hour. At the Galivan Bridge, five miles north of San Juan Capistrano, where the highway spans the Santa Fe Tracks in a ravine 50 feet below, the procession stopped while the riggers from Pacific Rigging bolted dollies onto each side of the trailer. Everyone was itchy as they waited. The highway patrolmen parked their motorcycles and stood at the perimeters, guarding the disk. The additional sixteen wheels on each dolly spread the load of the disk over fifty-eight wheels. As the lead tractor and then the front wheels of the trailer inched onto the span, the bridge sagged. Caltech engineers monitored deflection gauges they had affixed to the bridge. When the entire load was on the bridge, the gauges showed a maximum deflection of three-eighths of an inch. The reporters wondered why Rule and the other engineers were smiling as the dollies were unbolted on the other side.
At 2:34 in the afternoon, in Carlsbad, a second heavy diesel tractor was hooked to the rear of the trailer in preparation for the grades of the coastal mountains. The speed dropped to only a few miles per hour as they approached the slopes. Toward sunset clouds scudded in from over the ocean. The drivers needed windshield wipers for the misty drizzle. It was dark enough for headlights when they reached Escondido at 5:02 P.M. and parked for the night. They had covered just over 126 miles at an average speed of just under 11 miles per hour. Everything was on schedule but the weather. The mist had turned to rain, and the thermometer was falling.
By morning, the rain was steady and cold. The weatherman said the visibility was 150 feet. Workmen remembered it as 50. There was nothing to do but set off. Despite the conditions, the drivers, now used to the load, covered the 20 miles to Rincon at an average speed of 6.4 miles per hour. There a third huge diesel tractor was hitched behind the trailer for the final climb up Palomar Mountain. The highway patrol motorcycles left at Rincon. The road up the mountain was wide enough only for the tractors and trailer.
Bill Marshall had grown up on the mountain. His father had worked in the office and as the wartime caretaker, and his mother was the schoolteacher. After years of waiting, the arrival of the mirror was too exciting to miss, so Bill took a day off from college in San Diego. Byron Hill assigned him to the crews that braced each bridge from Valley Center to the top of the mountain with twenty-to thirty-foot-long timbers. Moving the timbers was hard work, but there was an excitement in the air as they watched the truck majestically cross each bridge.
On the drive from the coast highway to Escondido, the driver of the tractor at the rear of the trailer had coordinated his speed and gear shifts by watching the puffs of exhaust from the stack of the lead tractor. Now the visibility was so poor the drivers of the two tractors at the back couldn’t see the exhaust of the one in the front. They kept their throttles and gears synchronized with one another and with the lead tractor by listening to the sounds of the engine and transmission of the lead tractor.
They passed the Native American village of Pala. Caltech officials had been sent to explain how astronomers would use the telescope to solve the great questions of the origins of the sun, moon, and stars. The Pala had listened politely and nodded. They had their own explanation. Their myths told of a great bird that had flown into the sky, with a branch of flaming tule reeds in its beak. The Pala stood by the road, watching the strange procession toward the mountain.
The grades were steeper after Rincon. The temperature dropped at the higher elevations, hovering around freezing. The rain turned to freezing rain, then sleet, and the road surface froze in patches over the culverts and overpasses. There were some hurried discussions about waiting for a clearing. The drivers wanted to go on. The schedule had called for a speed of four miles an hour up the road on Palomar Mountain, but with the weather worsening, the drivers picked up their pace to double that. Caltech engineers and the reporters in the cars following the big tractors felt their tires slip and skid on the slick road surface. They wondered how the drivers of the big rig did it.
At the bottom of the mountain Byron Hill met the trailer. After thirteen years on the mountain, he knew the treachery of the weather. The temperature on the mountain could drop suddenly. Sleet and freezing rain could turn to snow, covering the road so fast that the centerline and edges would be invisible. The switchback turns of the road were hard enough to follow on a clear day with a dry surface.
Hill climbed on top of the crate encasing the mirror, so he was high enough to signal to the front and rear. The final climb was a dozen miles, most of it on steep grades, the turns just wide enough that if the drivers took exactly the right line, they would keep the wheels of the trailer on the pavement an
d the mirror would clear the trees. Men walking alongside the lead tractor marked the edges of the pavement as the sleet began to stick in patches. There was no place to turn around. The drivers were reluctant even to risk stopping.
The sky was too gray to reveal the passage of time. When the reporters’ cars stopped for photographs of the tractors and the trailer with the disk, men would have to get out and push to get them going again. While the reporters struggled, the tractors kept up their steady pace, shifting down to low-low, then back up through the range of gears to keep their speed steady on the changing grade. Men walking alongside counted the puffs of diesel exhaust for each shift, watching the three tractors synchronize their moves. After a mile it was hard to keep count.
At eleven o’clock in the morning, four hours ahead of schedule, the lead tractor rolled through the gate of the observatory grounds. Despite a dozen close calls, with much shouting and arm signals, there had been no real mishaps. A crowd was waiting at the dome, huddled in the wind and sleet, as the tractor pulled to a stop outside the big doors. One after another the cars that had followed the mirror up the mountain pulled up to the dome. The anxiety of the climb showed on every face. Someone said there was a pot of coffee on inside the dome, and everyone rushed in for warmth, hot coffee, and small talk. It was ten minutes before anyone inside realized that no one was outside with the mirror.
The trailer was exactly where they had left it. The wind and sleet were still blowing, and everyone was exhausted with the anxiety and fatigue of the trip up the mountain. There was talk of delaying the unloading for a day, but Hill and Rule had been told to watch expenditures, and demurrage for a tractor and trailer sitting on the mountain overnight was expensive. Byron had the big doorway opened and positioned men on either side of the trailer, and back at the doorway, to direct the driver. Lloyd Green, a Belyea driver with twenty-five years’ experience, climbed up into the cab of the huge diesel and waved them all away. He pulled forward, leaned out of the window to look over his shoulder, and backed the huge trailer straight through the doorway. Like the highway patrolmen who later received souvenir photos to thank them for their help, Green would have stories for his children and grandchildren about the day he drove the most valuable cargo on earth up the mountain.
Max Mason, back in Pasadena, waited until he heard that the mirror was safely in the dome to call Warren Weaver at the Rockefeller Foundation. Mason passed on the reports he heard, letting Weaver share the good news. Only then did Mason break the bad news: The telescope project was broke.
34
Finishing Touches
The final journey of the mirror was front-page news. Collier’s, Life, and Time all planned features on the telescope and, discovering that it was far from operation, sent their reporters to George Hall, in charge of publicity at Caltech, for material. Hall had been on the job long enough to know the weeklies loved nothing as much as a colorful personality, so he set up interviews with Fritz Zwicky and Edwin Hubble. Zwicky’s thickly accented explanations that he would use the telescope to search for neutron stars and gravitational lenses sounded wacky, but Edwin Hubble was a reporter’s dream.
Hubble had returned from his wartime service as chief ballistician at the Aberdeen Proving Ground with the Medal of Merit. He enthusiastically posed for pictures at the two-hundred-inch and at the forty-eight-inch Schmidt camera, and explained to the reporters, in his acquired English accent, that when the telescope was ready, he would extend his measurements of red shifts and counts of nebulae out to the “one-billion light years range of the 200-inch,” and test the cosmology of an expanding universe and Einstein’s geometry of space. Tantalizing quotes like, “Mathematical physicists believe (from Einstein’s ubiquitous Relativity) that space is curved back upon itself, in a four-dimensional way,” and photographs of the tweedy, handsome astronomer with his pipe, a bold adventurer preparing to solve the mysteries of the universe, sold magazines.
“It will be a historic night,” Time wrote, “an extra-clear night, with the sky velvety black and the stars, though bright, twinkling hardly at all. Hubble will go into the observatory after dusk, rise to the big round telescope chamber in a push button elevator.” Along with the interviews Hubble also gave speeches on the problems the two-hundred-inch telescope might solve. Mostly the problems he described were his own cosmological program, but he added that the telescope would determine, once and for all, whether there were canals on Mars.
The new wave of publicity raised hackles at Mount Wilson and Caltech. Astronomers and engineers on the project had learned to live with minor inaccuracies. The “big round telescope chamber” was the prime-focus cage, six feet in diameter, cramped inside for a six-footer like Hubble. The telescope would never be used for observation of Mars, and the issue of canals had long been dismissed by most astronomers. What galled most of all was that Hubble had hoodwinked the press. Walter Adams, a quiet, gentlemanly sort who avoided publicity and nastiness, sent a handwritten complaint to Bowen, “because it is not material I should want to give to a stenographer.”
Adams was troubled that the new round of news stories was so one-sided, that there was no mention of men like Max Mason, and instead it seemed to be
a kind of glorification of two men, Hubble and Zwicky, the first of whom has done little work of the first order for twenty years, and the second hardly anything at any time.
It’s clear that Hubble cannot be relied upon to provide a fair or adequate description of the work of a large modern observatory to a journalist seeking information. He knows little about spectroscopy and what it is doing, and at the age of practically sixty is still eager for notoriety and has his press agent continuously at work. I judge he will never be able “to put away childish things.”
The short shrift given to other astronomers was improper and just plain wrong to a fair-minded man like Adams. He was even more troubled by the impression Hubble had publicized that the two-hundred-inch telescope would answer the important questions of cosmology. “It is just possible,” Adams wrote, “that the Hale telescope will not meet all our hopes in its penetration of space, or that even if it does, the gain will not be sufficient to answer many of the important cosmological questions.” If the public was led to believe that “answers” about the size and shape of the universe were the sole purpose for the telescope, it might be considered a failure if it did not answer those questions—while the considerable contributions the telescope might make in dozens of other fields of astronomy were ignored.
Propriety wasn’t the only reason for the confidentiality of Adams’s letter. Harlow Shapley had begun another round of skeptical comments about the telescope, and the first tests of the completed telescope hadn’t produced any good news to quash the rumors he started.
Before they could even test the telescope, the opticians had to turn the disk into a mirror. In 1928, when the telescope project began, mirrors in astronomical telescopes were coated with a thin layer of silver. In a household mirror the silvering is applied to the back of the mirror and is seen through the glass, which protects the delicate silvered layer. Viewing through the glass also adds distortions, intentional in an amusement park or a magnifying mirror, acceptable in a household mirror, and intolerable in a precision instrument. In an astronomical telescope the mirroring is applied to the front surface, so that nothing stands between the finely figured surface of the mirror and the light from distant objects. The reflective coating, perhaps one thousand atoms thick, is the telescope.
When the telescope is in use, that thin coating of the mirror is exposed to the elements, vulnerable to the corrosive effects of the atmosphere, the accumulation of dust, dripping oil from the telescope, an accidental drop of tools or equipment, rain, snow, hail, windblown debris, even a falling meteorite. The potential hazards are so great that it is tempting to never use the telescope.* When the two-hundred-inch telescope is not in use, the mirror and cell are protected by a diaphragm over the mirror. Leaves, like the blades of a camera shutter,
are opened and closed by motors. In case of a power failure, auxiliary power is available to close the diaphragm and protect the mirror.
Silver had long been the material of choice for telescope mirrors. It was easy to apply to the mirror chemically, and immediately after it was applied, it would reflect almost 95 percent of the visible light that struck the mirror. But, as generations of English butlers have learned, silver tarnishes on exposure to air. After a relatively short period of use, the reflectivity of a silvered telescope mirror decreases to approximately 50 percent. In the ultraviolet spectrum—which, though invisible to the naked eye, is important to the astronomer—even a freshly deposited silver film reflects only 4 percent of the light to hit the mirror. John Anderson tried some experiments, coating silvered mirrors with silica and/or fluorite, and concluded it would not protect the silver.
The problems with silver coatings prompted Francis Pease to ponder the ideal mirror material, the imaginary substance mirrorite, which would have the “reflecting power of silver, the zero coefficient of expansion of Invar, the freedom from tarnish of stainless steel, and the lightness of magnalium.” Even for the two-hundred-inch telescope, the Caltech geologists couldn’t find mirrorite.
In 1932 John Strong discovered a mirror coating almost as good. Strong was trying to deposit a protective layer on rock-salt prisms, to prevent the surfaces from deteriorating on exposure to the air. He finally succeeded in depositing a thin aluminum film on the prisms in a high vacuum, then tried the same process on glass. By 1932 he had aluminized a twelve-inch-diameter telescope mirror. The new coating was nothing short of sensational. The aluminum film didn’t need burnishing, and instead of tarnishing on exposure to air like silver, the aluminum formed a hard, transparent oxide coating that protected the reflective surface. Dust could be wiped off the surface with a moist soft cloth or even washed off with soap and water—a treatment that would have removed a silver coating. The reflectivity was only 89 percent of visible light, slightly less than the initial reflectivity of silver, but the aluminum maintained its reflectivity even after continued exposure to the atmosphere and also reflected 85 percent of the ultraviolet light. Tests at the Lick Observatory showed that for stellar photography, the new coating reflected on average 50 percent more light to the photographic emulsion. It was like getting a new telescope.
The Perfect Machine Page 54