The Long Space Age

by Alexander MacDonald

  Hale is without equal in the history of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century space exploration. His three successive “world’s largest telescopes” were at the pinnacle of American astronomy from the 1890s until the 1990s, when his last and most important work, the two-hundred-inch reflecting telescope at the Palomar Observatory, was finally surpassed in resolving power over forty years after its completion. Although a respected scientist and capable instrument builder, Hale’s real strength was as the initiator, principal organizer, and unparalleled fund-raiser for the mammoth projects that he pursued. Over his career as a fund-raiser, Hale tapped a diverse mix of sources, which shifted as his reputation grew and as the landscape of American philanthropy began to change in the early twentieth century. After first convincing his father to bankroll the construction of an impressive solar observatory in the backyard of the family home, Hale moved on to personally raise observatory funds from some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in America and to pioneer the relationship between large observatories and the then newly emerging large philanthropic foundations. Hale’s story is a microcosm of the broader funding narrative of American astronomy. It highlights the important role of signaling and personal interest in observatory funding, but it also underlines that it is the often passionate and dedicated efforts of the virtuoso individual that provide the motivating force. By examining Hale’s correspondence with his patrons in the George Ellery Hale Papers at the California Institute of Technology Archives, and building on previous Hale scholarship, it is possible to analyze the personal strategies and underlying motivations that allowed Hale to become the preeminent astronomical entrepreneur.

  The story of Hale’s early dedication to astronomy has much in common with what we see in the stories of the early rocket pioneers. Like Goddard, Hermann Oberth, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Hale was a sickly child who found solace and purpose at an early age in books, study, and thought. As with the rocket pioneers, his career decision can be attributed to a sort of “conversion” associated with spaceflight fiction. Hale had been a young boy of many interests until he read Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, after which his passion began to bend more and more toward astronomy.89 As he wrote in his unpublished notes for an autobiography, “Books of adventure were read by the score, especially Jules Verne’s ‘Mysterious Island,’ ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea’ and ‘A trip to the Moon.’ The gigantic telescope on a peak of the Rocky Mountains, into which ‘ the unfortunate man disappeared’ while watching the projectile on its way to the moon, especially struck my fancy.”90 The inspiration of Jules Verne’s adventures was deeply ingrained, and Hale portrayed astronomy as an exploration and a grand adventure in his public and private writing. His “Recollections of Childhood,” written near the end of his career in 1935, starts off in a rollicking tone: “ ‘Adventures’? you say, as you scan these pages. Certainly not, if looked at from the standpoint of an early Californian pioneer or a soldier in the front trenches of the war. But if adventures can happen anywhere and consist of all sorts of events, some of them involving heavy risks, of one kind or another, I have had quite enough. After all, an astronomer may see strange worlds and wander far from the orthodox path in half a century’s experience at home and abroad.”91 After his experience with Verne, astronomical adventure promised in “strange worlds” became the young George Hale’s overriding interest, and he became, in his own mind, a self-starting space explorer. Unlike the similarly inspired early rocket pioneers, however, Hale started life as the only son of a family that could directly fund his ambitious projects.

  Hale’s father, William, made his fortune in the Chicago elevator business during the postfire rebuilding boom. He would provide major financial support for his son’s pursuits throughout his life, starting with the purchase of young George’s first telescope. As Hale’s enthusiasm for science grew, his father outfitted the attic of the family’s new mansion in Kenwood as a laboratory and purchased for his son the finest in photographic equipment, heliostats, and spectroscopes, including a $1,000 Brashear spectroscope to help with Hale’s senior thesis at MIT.92 After his graduation, rather than take up one of the faculty positions that he had been offered, Hale returned home, where he convinced his father to pay for the construction and outfitting of a private research observatory for him—a $25,000 endeavor.93 The observatory, built in 1888 next to the family home in Kenwood, had its own dedication ceremony, with noted solar astronomer Professor Charles Augustus Young being invited by Hale’s father to travel to Chicago from Princeton to give the dedicatory address. The Kenwood Physical Observatory was equipped with the most advanced instruments for solar observation, Hale’s principal interest at the time, and it was here that Hale undertook the research on the emission lines in the spectra of nebulae, which led to his first published paper at the age of twenty-three. William Hale would continue to play a significant role in supporting his son’s efforts, including personally paying the salary of George Ritchey, the innovative telescope designer and assistant who worked with Hale, and even buying the mirror blank for what would become the sixty-inch reflecting telescope on Mount Wilson before any other support had been secured—an additional expenditure of some $10,000.94 The use of family resources underlines the self-initiated nature of Hale’s endeavors. He did not rely on any external demand for an astronomical observatory to initiate his plans; instead, he made a decision to pursue projects of his own interest and then went about finding the resources to achieve them.

  Those resources would come, in one form or another, from single individuals, the first of whom, Charles Tyson Yerkes, would provide them based on a blatant and singular interest in the signaling attributes of large observatories. Yerkes was the despised robber baron behind Chicago’s street railway system: he had once frankly stated that “the secret of success in my business is to buy old junk, fix it up a little, and unload it upon other fellows.”95 Needless to say, this approach to business left Yerkes with a public relations problem and a resultant interest in finding some philanthropic polish to apply to his image. When Hale, now a young faculty member at the University of Chicago, sent him a letter outlining the possibility of securing the largest refracting telescope in the world for an observatory that would henceforth bear his name, Yerkes saw an opportunity to improve his reputation and gain entrée to the circles of the Chicago elite that shunned him. Hale had come to his university perch through an arrangement that saw the Kenwood Observatory become part of the University of Chicago in return for a faculty position for Hale and a promise from the president of the university, William Rainey Harper, to secure over $250,000 for a larger observatory within two years. Within months of Hale joining the faculty, the latter part of that arrangement would be spectacularly fulfilled, thanks to Yerkes’s desire for a monument and the emergence on the market of the largest refractor lens in the world.

  The forty-inch lens that would become the centerpiece of the Yerkes Observatory had been born out of the enthusiasm that accompanied the height of the 1880s Los Angeles real estate boom. Edward F. Spence, president of First National Bank and president of the Board of Trustees of the University of Southern California, set out to acquire for his university a telescope that would overshadow the University of California’s thirty-six-inch Lick refractor. In 1887, Spence contributed $50,000 of his own money to pursue this goal, and there were numerous fund-raising rallies and banquets held to generate interest and support.96 A contract for a forty-inch refractor was signed with Alvan Clark & Sons, but the death of Spence and the bursting of the Los Angeles real estate bubble in 1892 precipitated a default on the agreement by the trustees, leaving the Clarks with a mostly complete, largely unpaid for set of enormous lenses. While attending a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Rochester, Hale heard Alvan Clark tell the story of the homeless, now completed refractor and the opportunity for discovery that awaited those who might be willing to buy it from him. The young Hale was entranced with the idea a
nd returned home to Chicago in search of a patron who could put him in possession of the largest telescope in the world. The story of how the twenty-four-year-old Hale managed to achieve this is perhaps best left to Hale himself, who described the events in his note on “The Beginnings of the Yerkes Observatory,” written in 1922:

  After consulting my father, whose interest in my project was very keen, I visited several men who might conceivably be willing to provide for the telescope. But no one had the money to spare. A few days later I made another fruitless round of visits in the city. At noon, somewhat discouraged, I called at the Corn Exchange Bank to see Mr. Charles Hutchinson, then, as now, the enthusiastic friend and supporter of every such effort. After explaining my object, I asked for suggestions. “Why don’t you try Mr. Yerkes?” he replied. “He has talked of the possibility of making some gift to the University, and might be attracted by this scheme.” So I went at once to President Harper. . . . After a few questions he heartily approved of the attempt, asked me to write out a statement of the plan, and sent it to Mr. Yerkes. A reply came back asking us to call on him. We did so, and before the interview was over Mr. Yerkes asked us to telegraph for Clark, with whom he made a contract for the 40-inch objective. I remember with pleasure Dr. Harper’s enthusiasm as we left the office. “I’d like to go on top of a hill and yell!”97

  Although Yerkes was initially enthusiastic about the project, his keenness was short-lived. Yerkes had hoped that the telescope project would signal to Chicago society his beneficence, and he basked in the bonhomie and goodwill that followed the announcement of his planned donation. Encouraged by the public reaction, he let the cost estimate of the endeavor creep upward to $500,000 from the original $300,000 estimate made by Alvan Clark, and he was even quoted in the Chicago Tribune as having promised $1 million. Only one month after the announcement, however, when Hale submitted his detailed analysis of the cost of constructing and outfitting the observatory at $285,375, Yerkes refused to pay this amount.98 His interest—like many observatory patrons before—was not in outfitting an observatory for research but simply in attaching his name to the biggest telescope in the world. He was unwilling to set up an endowment for the observatory and at the same time refused to allow other philanthropists to create endowments or donate instruments that would carry their names to “his” observatory. Although he ultimately expended some $349,000 to complete the observatory, this left it with no endowment for faculty or equipment.99 Yerkes was evidently only prepared to pay the bare minimum for the “world’s largest telescope” and had been wholly driven by its monument value.

  The observatory did, however, boost his reputation, at least initially. On the dedication day in 1897, nearly eight hundred dignitaries attended the dedication ceremony of the observatory, where Yerkes—seated on a dais within its dome—reportedly blushed at the standing ovations. The Chicago Times-Herald suspended its regular attacks on Yerkes, saying, “Whatever opinion we may hold of Mr. Yerkes in his relations with the people of Chicago, there can be only one opinion, and that extremely complimentary, of Mr. Yerkes as the founder of the Observatory at Lake Geneva.”100 Shortly after the dedication, however, the attacks resumed, and Yerkes was ultimately driven out of town in 1900. He stopped giving any funds to the observatory in 1903, and when he died, two years later, his will allotted only $100,000 of his approximately $5-million estate to an endowment for the observatory.101 The story of the Yerkes Observatory is an interesting counterexample to his own statement made at the dedication ceremony: “One reason why the science of astronomy has not more helpers, is on account of its being entirely uncommercial. There is nothing of moneyed value to be gained by the devotee of astronomy; there is nothing he can sell.”102 Despite Yerkes’s claim, it is clear that Hale was able to sell him an observatory for the purpose of burnishing his reputation, a purpose that, temporarily at least, the observatory was able to fulfill.

  Even before the Yerkes Observatory was finished, however, Hale was already thinking of building his next, even larger telescope. Within two months of securing Yerkes’s promise for the forty-inch refractor and attendant observatory, Hale had become determined that what he actually needed for his research was a sixty-inch reflecting telescope.103 For Hale, a student of spectroscopy, reflecting telescopes were particularly valuable, as they eliminated the problem of the chromatic dispersion of light that bedeviled the use of spectrometers with refractors. He often discussed the potential of building large reflecting telescopes with George Ritchey, a thirty-year-old craftsman in Chicago who was a devoted believer in reflectors and in his own ability to build them larger than ever before. Ritchey was already in the process of manufacturing a twenty-four-inch reflector, which would ultimately be housed at the Yerkes Observatory. Like Hale, however, he already had grander ambitions. By 1895, their ambitions conjoined, as Hale convinced his father to personally contract with Ritchey for the purchase and polishing of a sixty-inch mirror that would form the heart of Hale’s next telescope.

  Although Hale had originally intended the sixty-inch reflector to become part of the Yerkes Observatory, the death of his father in 1898, the strained relationship with Yerkes, and the poor weather at Lake Geneva meant that Hale now looked to find a new home and a new funding source for the telescope in the clear air of the mountains of California. However, his initial appeals to potential donors—like grain market mogul Norman Ream and the widow of the founder of the Union Stock Yards, Timothy Blackstone—were unsuccessful. Although the source of financial support for what would become the Mount Wilson Observatory was ultimately a single, wealthy individual, it was accessed through a relatively new type of institution that would shape the way astronomy and observatories were funded throughout the twentieth century—the large American philanthropic foundation.

  In 1902, the two institutions that would finance most of Hale’s astronomical ambitions in California were founded—the Carnegie Institution of Washington and John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board. There had been privately financed philanthropic organizations in America before, but the ambitions and wealth of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller transformed the nature of the philanthropic foundation. Unlike the Smithson bequest, the funds would not be at the disposal of government employees but in the hands of the private citizens who were the foundations’ board members and officers. Unlike earlier private foundations, such as the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, these new organizations were established from the start to be permanent institutions that would use the annual interest from large financial endowments to fund philanthropic causes in perpetuity. The rise of large philanthropic foundations would change the funding dynamics for American astronomy, and no one was a more significant part of that change than Hale.

  The Carnegie Institution of Washington—founded by America’s premier steel tycoon, Andrew Carnegie, for the purpose of supporting scientific research—would be the first foundation that Hale would cultivate in order to fulfill his ambitions. The thirty-four-year-old Hale immediately understood the new organization’s inherent potential to support his sixty-inch reflector project when he read of its establishment and its unprecedented $10-million endowment ($2.1 billion in 2015 PWC-ratio terms; $7.4 billion in 2015 GDP-ratio terms).104 He mailed the recently established Carnegie Institution Executive Committee his five-page summary of his intended project, “A Great Reflecting Telescope,” complete with spectacular images of nebulae that had been taken by Ritchey on the twenty-four-inch reflector. Although there was no immediate direct response to his proposal, Hale was appointed one of the initial members when the Carnegie Institution established its Advisory Committee on Astronomy. From this position, the energetic young Hale used his influence and connections to move the foundation ever closer toward supporting his plan. Hale so deftly embedded his ambition into the culture of the organization that, on the face of it, he did not even officially request the funding for the project—he was simply responding to a request for information from Charles Walcott, secretary of the
advisory committee, as to the capabilities and cost of a hypothetical sixty-inch telescope.105

  In anticipation of the Carnegie Institution’s support for his project, Hale again demonstrated his personal initiative by moving out to Pasadena in 1904 and beginning the establishment of the observatory without any official word of financial support. Although he had received a couple of small grants totaling $13,000 from the institution, this was insufficient to cover the cost of moving his team, including Ritchey, to California and setting up shop. In moving his operations to California, Hale incurred a substantial personal debt of some $27,000.106 Hale had made this move in the expectation that it would all but force the Carnegie Institution to support his full plan to install the sixty-inch reflector—a plan that he estimated would cost $325,000 over five years. In 1905, within a year of his move, his gambit had succeeded and the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory became the first astronomical observatory to be established by a major philanthropic organization.