The Day We Found the Universe (31 page)

With his skill in languages and his expertise in the law, Hubble purportedly took on postwar assignments at the U.S. Army of Occupation headquarters in Germany, the Combat Officers Depot in France, and the American Peace Commission in Paris. Along the way, he learned of a U.S. Army program for officers to study in British universities while awaiting shipment back home. He quickly arranged to be assigned and arrived at Cambridge University in March 1919, along with two hundred other American officers and enlisted men. Like James Keeler, Hubble was a skilled networker and made sure to hobnob with the noted astronomers who were there in Cambridge. Soon he was being proposed for membership in the Royal Astronomical Society. Upon arriving at a posh dinner hosted by the best and the brightest of British astronomy at this time, visitors from Mount Wilson were surprised to see their prospective staff member, junior at that, seated in a place of honor between a noted British physicist and Great Britain's astronomer royal.

By May 1919, worried that his promised job at Mount Wilson might have evaporated given the added delay of his postwar activities, Hubble dashed off a brief note to Hale for reassurance. He reminded Hale, “My interest has for the most part been with nebulae especially photographic study of the fainter ones.” Hale soon replied. “I had been hoping to hear from you,” he wrote, “and am pleased to find that you still wish to come to the Observatory.” Hubble's salary offer rose to $1,500, and Hale promised him rapid advancement, should his work prove worthy. But he urged Hubble to come as soon as possible, “as we expect to get the 100-inch telescope into commission very soon, and there should be abundant opportunity for work by the time you arrive.”

Hubble arrived in New York on August 10. After a one-day stop in Chicago to meet with his mother and sister, who had specially traveled down from their new home in Wisconsin for the brief reunion, he quickly journeyed to California, resplendently attired in uniform and introducing himself around as Major Hubble, a moniker that many people continued to use from that time on. But before showing up at Mount Wilson, just after being discharged in San Francisco, Hubble sent Hale a telegram: “Just demobilized. Will proceed Pasadena at once unless you advise to contrary.” He was either being obsequious or still incredulous that Hale had held the position open for him so long.

The job was assuredly his, and Hubble couldn't have turned up at the Mount Wilson Observatory at a more perfect time. On September 11, 1919, just about a week after his arrival in Pasadena, the great 100-inch telescope came into full use for the staff. It was a moment that observatory director Hale had been anticipating since 1906.

On the Brink of a Big Discovery—
or Maybe a Big Paradox

G
eorge Ellery Hale could never rest on his laurels. He was a man of endless enthusiasms. British theorist James Jeans said he possessed “a driving power which was given no rest until it had brought his plans and schemes to fruition.” After being awarded nearly every major scientific honor before the age of forty—from election to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States to the gold medal of Great Britain's Royal Astronomical Society—Hale craved additional triumphs. “He has reached a place where scientific work and honors are not enough,” George Ritchey suggested darkly after a conflict with Hale. “He must have vast
power
also; power to dictate the welfare, the making or unmaking, the
positions
even, of scientific men both in the observatory and outside of it—as far as his influences can possibly reach.”

Even before Mount Wilson's 60-inch telescope went into operation in 1908, Hale was thinking ahead to a new adventure. In the summer of 1906 he spent a weekend at the home of John Hooker, a wealthy Los Angeles businessman and a founder of the Southern California Academy of Sciences, and excitedly discussed his latest dream. Again, it was to be an even bigger telescope. Like a compulsive climber, Hale was always looking ahead to the next challenging mountain. He captivated Hooker, an amateur astronomer, with his description of a mirror one hundred inches in width that would gather nearly three times more light—the very lifeblood of astronomy—than the 60-inch. Hale and Ritchey followed up with a letter to Hooker, outlining the usefulness of such a large mirror, including the tens of thousands of nebulae that would likely be revealed, unlocking the secret of their mysterious nature.

Hale's charismatic personality, coupled with Ritchey's technical expertise, worked their magic. Within weeks Hooker, who had made his fortune in hardware, pledged the money to construct the mirror, even though no one (neither Hale nor Ritchey) knew at the time whether such a disk—four and a half tons of pristine glass—could even be cast, polished, or mounted. No glass that large had ever been made before. Hale's younger brother, Will, once called George the greatest gambler in the world. Ordering up a 100-inch mirror was his biggest bet ever. And he almost lost.

In December 1908, the giant glass arrived from France, where it had been manufactured, but as soon as the crate was unpacked at the observatory's headquarters on Santa Barbara Street in Pasadena, everyone could see the blank was seriously flawed—bubbles were dispersed throughout the disk and the glass incompletely fused. From the side it looked like a three-layered cake. Such defects jeopardized the mirror's ability to expand and contract uniformly and so maintain stable images as temperatures in the telescope dome changed over the nighttime hours. “We don't pay for this!” declared Hale.

A new disk was ordered, but the best candidate broke as it was cooling. With his funds exhausted, Hale decided to have the first disk ground and polished, despite its imperfections. Both Hooker and Ritchey opposed this decision with intense vehemence. To compound Hale's trials, Hooker grew increasingly jealous and antagonistic over Hale's friendship with Mrs. Hooker. Previously an ally, Hooker was now Hale's demoralizing opponent who balked at any new request. Faced with these multiple struggles, Hale snapped. Having inherited the high-strung and anxious temperament of his reclusive mother, he experienced the first of many nervous breakdowns that plagued him for the rest of his life, attacks that included horrendous nightmares and blinding headaches. His exuberance, once deemed inexhaustible, finally flamed out. In a poignant letter to Walter Adams, Hale's wife wrote that she now wished “that glass was in the bottom of the ocean.”

Hale's recurrent psychiatric episodes gave rise to the popular myth that he sometimes hallucinated during these breakdowns, literally seeing a little “elf” who would advise him on the conduct of his life. Helen Wright first recounted this tale in her noted biography of Hale, referring to the specter as Hale's “little man.” Expanding on Wright's account, other authors began to use the word
elf
. The legend is rooted in a letter that Hale wrote to a friend, in which he refers to a “little demon” plaguing him. Psychiatrist William Sheehan and astronomer Donald Osterbrock have made a good case that Hale only intended the demon to be taken figuratively, not literally, as the personification of his depressions, much the way Winston Churchill referred to his “black dog” when facing a bout of melancholy.

In the end, Ritchey carried out Hale's orders concerning the imperfect glass. Gritting his teeth and complaining all the way, he initiated the grinding and polishing of the flawed disk in 1910, an arduous task that was finally completed in 1916. Over those six years, the disk was figured to exquisite perfection. The curved glass surface was subsequently coated with silver, transforming it, at last, into a true astronomical mirror. All the while, the materials for the mounting and dome—every bolt, rivet, and steel beam—were laboriously transported up the mountain by truck. The nine-thousand-pound mirror went up on July 1, 1917. To Walter Adams “there was more publicity…than was desirable” during the event. The Pasadena police had received word that there might be trouble on the road. As a result, the bridges were guarded, and deputies accompanied the mirror to the top.

Full view of the 100-inch Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson
(
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

The Hooker telescope got its first trial exactly four months later in the midst of wartime, which resulted in the 100-inch's assuming the nickname of a famous German howitzer—the “Big Bertha” of light. Among those present on that first evening of November were Hale, Adams, and the British poet Alfred Noyes, then visiting Pasadena as a university lecturer. Hale, as director, was the first to climb up the black iron steps to the observing platform and look through the eyepiece at the chosen target, Jupiter, then brilliantly shining in the nighttime sky. To his horror, he saw six overlapping images of the planet rather than one. The mirror was somehow distorted. Was it a physical defect—the numerous bubbles indeed wrecking havoc, as Ritchey had warned—or merely a temporary warping, caused by workmen having left the dome open that day and heating the mirror? “To add to the gloom,” recalled Adams many years later, “news of the great disaster to the Italian army at Caporetto had just arrived, and I remember our sitting around on the floor of the dome speculating on whether Italy was completely out of the war.”

After waiting many excruciating hours for the mirror to cool in the nighttime air, trying but finding it impossible to sleep at one point back at the Monastery in their spare rooms, furnished only with bed and desk, first Hale then Adams returned to their cathedral of brass and steel at around 2:30 in the morning. Jupiter was now out of reach, so the night assistant swung the telescope around, its massive weight smoothly rotating with little friction because its bottom supports floated in tanks of mercury. The scope's new target was the bright blue star Vega. Hale once again peered into the eyepiece, and this time let out a joyful yell. The stellar image was exquisite. To everyone's relief, the mirror was not permanently damaged after all. Noyes later paid homage to this historic launch in his poem “Watchers of the Sky,” fairly bursting with metaphors inspired by the ongoing conflict in Europe:

High in heaven it shone,
Alive with all the thoughts, and hopes, and
dreams
Of man's adventurous mind.

Up there, I knew
The explorers of the sky, the pioneers
Of science, now made ready to attack
That darkness once again, and win new
worlds.

… they hoped to crown the toil
Of twenty years, and turn upon the sky
The noblest weapon ever made by man.

War had delayed them. They had been
drawn away
Designing darker weapons. But no gun
Could outrange this…
We creep to power by inches. Europe
trusts
Her “giant forty” still. Even to-night
Our own old sixty has its work to do;
And now our hundred-inch … I hardly
dare
To think what this new muzzle of ours
may find…

But there were delays in the final preparation of the long and imposing telescopic “muzzle,” keeping it from full operation. “The truth is the war work here has completely stopped work on the 100-inch,” said Shapley to a colleague a year later. “Very little has been done with it… because of the war contracts in the shop.” Ritchey, for example, had to turn his attention to making lenses and prisms for such military items as binoculars, range finders, and periscopes. Once the United States officially entered the war on the side of the Allies, the Mount Wilson optical shop was quickly engaged in the effort.