The Perfect Machine (10 page)

It was when the symptoms were at their worst, the frightening visits of the little man coming almost daily, that Hale—on a train from Menton to Genoa—spotted a tiny notice in a copy of
Le Petit Niçois,
a French Riviera newspaper, that Carnegie had given another ten million dollars to the Carnegie Institution of Washington. When they arrived he hurried to buy
Corrière della Sera,
which confirmed the report and mentioned Carnegie’s special interest in Mount Wilson and the one-hundred-inch telescope. Hale knew what it meant: Finally the one-hundred-inch telescope was funded.

Ritchey still voiced doubts about the disk, but Hale wired him to start grinding the preliminary shape into the mirror. Ritchey took even more extreme precautions for the grinding shop than those that had been taken with the sixty-inch disk. Because even slight variations in the temperature of the shop would affect the results of any testing of the surface, Ritchey and Hale decided that the final figuring and testing would be done only in the summer months. The winter months would be devoted to rough-grinding and work on the auxiliary mirrors.
Ritchey ordered electric fans to circulate the air in the optical laboratory, to prevent temperature stratification of the air. With this regime figuring the surface of the mirror from spherical to paraboloid took one year of steady work. Then they stopped to prepare a sixty-inch-plane-silvered mirror that could be used for optical tests at the focus of the big mirror, before they would polish the surface to the final figure. Ritchey insisted on working alone.

Hale sailed home in 1911. The doctors were cautious, sending him off to a sanatorium in Maine for rest and a regimen of wood sawing, copious good food, rests on the floor with a billet under his spine, daily massage, medicine nine times a day, lectures on the subconscious, and self-hypnosis exercises. When he finally returned to Pasadena, Dr. McBride limited his schedule to working from nine to twelve-thirty in the mornings, and warned him that he would never again be able to return to his previous routine.

Doctor’s orders or not, Hale couldn’t relax. Even Andrew Carnegie urged: “Pray show your good sense by keeping in check your passion for work, so that you maybe spared to put the capstone upon your career, which should be one of the most remarkable ever livd [sic].” Hale watched nervously as Ritchey ground and polished the one-hundred-inch blank. Ritchey had never been an easy man. Now, with the world watching his progress on the priceless blank, he became even more intractable, raging at anyone who approached his inner sanctum to inquire about progress on the disk.

Ritchey had his own ideas about telescope design. At his home laboratory he had been experimenting with using a deep, fast primary mirror and a complex hyperboloid curve in the secondary mirror. The resulting design would produce a telescope with a large field of sharp focus and a shorter tube design that could be mounted in a fork like the sixty-inch telescope. For the careful photographs Ritchey liked to take of deep-space objects, his design would be a boon. But a wide field of sharp focus was not necessary for the spectrographic studies that would form a substantial portion of the work of the Mount Wilson telescopes. Given the difficulties of fund-raising, Hale and Adams would not support experiments on Ritchey’s new designs.

Ritchey, chafing that his ideas were ignored, approached Hooker privately for money to set up his own shop. Hale, outraged that a colleague would try to divert Hooker’s funds from “the benefit of the Observatory as a whole” and the “advancement of science” began distancing himself from Ritchey, drawing up a new contract that limited Ritchey’s privileges at the observatory. When Ritchey later advertised his telescope-making business and ordered special stationery imprinted “Professor G. W. Ritchey” with the Mount Wilson Observatory address, the relationship turned bitter. Ritchey and Hale both claimed credit for an edge-support mechanism used for testing of the disk. Rumors began to circulate that Ritchey sometimes had strange attacks when
he was alone with the disk, and that he was an epileptic, subject to unpredictable seizures. He was relieved from any further work on the mirror.

Ritchey was furious. When another optician was given the task of the final figuring and polishing of the mirror, Ritchey announced that the disk was fundamentally flawed, that it had a “strong” and a “weak” diameter at right angles to each other and would never work no matter who figured it. Despite Ritchey’s predictions the opticians kept polishing, gradually bringing the entire surface of the one-hundred-inch-diameter disk to the required optical figure. A deviation of one-millionth of an inch would show up on the optical tests, and ultimately in the quality of the images the telescope produced. The only prescription was more polishing and more testing.

Months of polishing the surface stretched into years. The continued crises over the new telescope brought an end to the temporary remission of Hale’s dreaded symptoms. The familiar pattern returned: first a ringing in his ears and an agonizing headache, then physical exhaustion, a tingling in his feet, frantic excitement, insomnia, indigestion, spastic colitis, and the sensation that his mind was whirling out of control. The little man who had tormented him in Egypt came back, a dreaded, unwelcome companion offering unsolicited advice. There seemed to be no escape.

The early twentieth century was not an age of medical candor. Hale told no one outside a few close confidants the extent of his torments. When he did confide in a friend, like Harold Babcock, he called the collection of symptoms “Americanitis,” his term for the madness and impatience that Charlie Chaplin later portrayed in
Modern Times.
Other times Hale called the symptoms, onomatopoeically, the “whirligus.” Whatever he called it, Hale was powerless in the face of its tortures. He tried everything, even thanking the elf and promising to follow its advice. The whirligus would always come back.

The relapse in 1913 sent Hale back to Dr. Gehring’s sanatorium in Maine. Gehring’s diagnosis was that prolonged use of one part of Hale’s brain had allowed poisons generated in a displaced large intestine to accumulate. He labeled the condition
ptsosis,
and prescribed sawing wood, subconscious exercises, and light massage of the intestinal area. The treatment helped, temporarily relieving the driving headaches and sending away the whirligus. But by summer Hale needed yet another trip abroad to get away from the pressures of the observatory and the unfinished telescope. Hale’s life had become a seesaw, brief moments of relative peace alternating with the tormenting headaches and uncontrollable visions.

During one of the clear moments, in 1914, Hale interviewed an energetic young astronomer in New York. The astronomer came to the meeting primed to discuss the latest astronomical research, especially
the variable stars on which he had done considerable work of his own. To his surprise Hale asked him about music, opera, drama—anything but astronomy. George Hale knew that a candidate who came with formidable recommendations from Henry Norris Russell would be a capable observer and astronomer; what he needed to ascertain was whether the man was the right sort of fellow, whether he could function well in the atmosphere of close collegiality that Mount Wilson required. The young astronomer was Harlow Shapley, who would soon be using the sixty-inch telescope for his research on globular clusters.

Through sheer force of will, Hale fought back the horrible symptoms often enough to carry on, recruiting a steady stream of first-rate astronomers for the observatory and dealing with the institutional and administrative problems of a major research institution. When the components of the huge new telescope proved too heavy to go up the mountain on mules, special trucks were bought for the treks up the mountain. The daily trips of the one- and three-ton trucks tore up the road and required regular labor teams to keep the crude path passable. Crisis after crisis came up, and with World War I beginning to draw on American resources, Hale could not turn down the invitation of the National Academy of Sciences that he assist in the organization of a National Research Council, which took over many of the laboratories and facilities at Mount Wilson for war-related research.

George Ritchey, though relieved as optician in charge of the grinding of the mirrors and other optics for the one-hundred-inch telescope, remained at the observatory, and other astronomers still chafed at his sanctimonious and sometimes sadistic attitude. His perfectionism was more than mildly annoying, not only in the time he would spend on the big telescopes, taking one
perfect
exposure (and, as often as not, forgetting to note the parameters that would make the plate useful for scientific purposes), but in his procrastination of any writing, so that collaborations involving him fell impossibly behind schedule. One night he helped a visiting French astronomer, Henri Chrétien, use the sixty-inch telescope for the first time. Ritchey loaded the telescope’s plate holder and Chrétien spent several hours guiding the telescope, perched precariously at the eyepiece, in freezing temperatures, pushing buttons on a paddle to hold a star image steady in the crosshairs. When the exposure was done, Chrétien knew he had done a good job and was eager to develop this, his first plate on the famed telescope. Then Ritchey told him that it was a blank, that he had not been willing to risk a good photographic plate on a novice.
^*

Other astronomers, especially Walter Adams, who served as acting
director of the observatory during Hale’s absences, were outraged by Ritchey’s sadistic and authoritarian manner. By the middle of the war, Ritchey, who was in charge of war production at the optical shop, began signing his correspondence “Commanding Officer, Mount Wilson Observatory.”

He rarely passed up an opportunity to give the staff of the optical laboratory or visitors to the observatory his views on the one-hundred-inch-telescope project. He had spent long enough with the disk, he said, to know that it changed shape with even slight changes in position, and that the layers of air bubbles from the three separate pours had fatally weakened the glass. Ritchey’s success in figuring the mirror for the sixty-inch telescope weighted his predictions. Doubts about the new telescope were widespread.

5
First Light

Their hundred inch reflector, the clear pool,

The polished flawless pool that it must be

To hold the perfect image of a star.

And, even now, some secret flaw—none knew

Until to-morrow’s test—might waste it all.

Where was the gambler that would stake so much,—

Time, patience, treasure, on a single throw?

The cost of it,—they’d not find that again,

Either in gold or life-stuff! All their youth

Was fuel to the flame of this one work.

One in a lifetime to the man of science,

Despite what fools believe his ice-cooled blood,

There comes this drama.

If he fails, he fails
Utterly.

—ALFRED NOYES, WATCHERS OF THE NIGHT

It was 1917 before the telescope was ready for first light.

The weather was clear and cool when the group left Pasadena for the drive up to Mount Wilson, the kind of November evening in Southern California that condenses enough moisture to require windshield wipers on a clear evening. Pasadena is a flat city, with streets laid out in a rectangular grid. Were it not for the palm trees that line the main streets, the stucco exterior walls, and red tile roofs, it could pass for a midwestern city.

The mountains arise abruptly at the northern edge of the city. As the party drove up the rugged nine-mile path from the base of Mount Wilson, through patches of scrub oak, sagebrush, and black-cone fir, layers of fog closed in, first scattered, and then so dense that driving was difficult. Only at the summit, at 5,700 feet, did they break through the fog that obscured the light of the sprawling Los Angeles basin below.

The city’s pain was the astronomers’ gain: The frequent fogs below the summit, and the inversion layer that trapped pollutants in the Los Angeles Basin, were a blessing on Mount Wilson. The fog scattered and occluded the light of the city below, and the inversion stabilized the atmosphere. From the peak the sky overhead was filled with stars, pinpoints in a celestial dome of black velvet. The stillness of the atmosphere left the star images stable, without the twinkle that inspires poets and frustrates astronomers. Mount Wilson has among the best seeing of any observatory site in the world.

That cold November night in 1917, twenty men walked across the narrow wooden drawbridge to the one-hundred-inch telescope. The dome was immense, dwarfing the dome of the sixty-inch telescope in the distance. A table had been set up so each of them could sign the logbook that W. P. Hoge, night assistant on the sixty-inch telescope, used to record the evening’s events.

The great telescope loomed above them, a seventy-five-foot-high erector set of riveted black steel girders and huge brass gears. An astronomical telescope is an impossible combination of the scale of a battleship and the precision of a microscope. The heart of the telescope was a fraction of an ounce of silver, the coating of the great mirror that had been polished to as perfect an optical shape as the opticians could achieve. Everything else—the whole huge structure of girders, gears, bearings, and drive mechanisms—was there to cradle and aim that ounce of silver.

The mounting had been fabricated by the Fore River Shipbuilding Company in Quincy, Massachusetts—a division of Bethlehem Steel more accustomed to building naval gun turrets than precision optical devices. Sections of the telescope tube were so large they had to be shipped around Cape Horn to Los Angeles Harbor. Assembled, the instrument weighed one hundred tons. The clock mechanism alone required a ton of bronze castings, one and a half tons of iron castings, a two-ton driving weight, a seventeen-foot driving wheel, and a maze of hand-machined gears, each wider than a man’s reach. Altogether the telescope, dome, and shutters needed thirty electric motors to move them.