The Perfect Machine (14 page)

7
Old Boys

In 1926, in an article for the
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,
Francis Pease wrote, “The question has often been asked, ‘How large a telescope can be built today?’… My reply would be that anything up to a hundred feet in aperture can be built provided one wants to pay for it.”

Some newspapers picked up the story, and a friend wrote to Hale, “Glory, Hallelujah, for the 300-inch telescope!” “Alas,” Hale answered, “The report you saw was made out of whole cloth. Pease wrote a paper about the feasibility of building a very large telescope but there is no money in sight to pay for it!”

Money was always the first problem for a big telescope. Men like Lick, Yerkes, and Hooker had been eager to have their names attached to telescopes, especially when they were promised that the instrument bearing their name would be the biggest telescope in the world. But the cost of the telescope George Hale and his colleagues had in mind outstripped the resources or generosity of any one donor, especially after the advent of income taxes had put a noticeable dent in the largesse of the wealthy. The income tax raised enough revenue to finance World War I and the ensuing peace; it also accentuated the trend toward organized, as distinct from individual charitable giving. No one was willing to come forward with
after-tax
dollars for a telescope.

Nor was any institution or corporation willing to fill the gap left by the decline of individual benefactors. Andrew Carnegie’s new pet project was the International Peace Palace in The Hague. During the war the federal government had supported weapons-related research by the navy and the hastily organized National Research Council—another George Hale project—but in peacetime the federal government was not in the business of funding scientific research at universities or other nonprofit facilities outside the government. Under the guise of its timekeeping mission, the navy ran the Naval Observatory
in Washington, with some excellent equipment. Most congressmen were skeptical of any proposal to spend government money on scientific research with no direct practical application.

Hale refused to give up. At meetings of the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences, he listened and watched. He was also a frequent visitor to New York, the financial capital of the nation. Although he had never lived or worked in New York, Hale was a member of the University Club, a bastion of what a later generation would disparagingly label the old boy network. It was a good place to watch and wait.

Like the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, the Cosmos Club in Washington, or the Century Association on Forty-third Street, the University Club on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-fourth Street drew its membership from men of education and social standing, university graduates of respected, mostly Ivy League schools. The members were conservative though not extremist; if they had doubts about income taxes and foreign entanglements, they also accepted the notion that their privileged births, educations, positions, and fortunes conveyed responsibilities along with privileges. The rules of the club forbade business papers in the public rooms, but presidents of large corporations, distinguished academics, former and present government officials, foundation officers, politicians, and other shakers and doers routinely called on one another for advice and counsel and sought one another for informal and formal partnerships, knowing they could find the mutual trust of shared values in the retreat of their club.

One of the men Hale saw frequently at the University Club was Wickliffe Rose, the president of the General Education Board (GEB), a Rockefeller fund dedicated to improving education. With his moonish face, stiff collar, and slicked-down hair, Rose looked more like a small-town southern preacher than the president of one of the wealthiest foundations in the world. He had been an administrator of various Rockefeller-funded health organizations for years, waging war against hookworm, malaria, yellow fever, and other scourges. More experienced at administration and less impulsive than his better-known rival Abraham Flexner, in 1923 Rose was named president of the GEB. Before accepting the presidency he persuaded John D. Rockefeller to set aside an additional $28 million to establish an International Education Board (IEB), which would complement the domestic mission of the GEB. Rose became head of both.

Rose’s education had been in the humanities, and he had been a professor of philosophy at Peabody College before coming to the Rockefeller funds. In his years as a headquarters commander in the wars against tropical diseases, his perspective changed, and he came to believe in the primacy of science over other forms of human activity, and of mathematics and the physical sciences over other sciences. “This is an age of science,” he wrote. “All important fields of activity,
from the breeding of bees to the administration of an empire, call for an understanding of the spirit and technique of modern science.”

Rose’s first official activity was a five-month trip through Europe, visiting nineteen countries and fifty universities, research organizations, and institutions to hunt out leaders in the sciences. Europe, he said, was “ground harrowed by the war, ready for new seed.” In fields like physics, European laboratories and theoreticians were unraveling the secrets of the atom. These were the heady days when Niels Bohr “quantized” the electron in the classic orbits we see on symbols of the atom, Werner Heisenberg added matrix mechanics and the “uncertainty principle,” Erwin Schrodinger developed an alternate theory treating the electron as a packet of waves, and Max Born demonstrated that Schrödinger’s waves were packets of probability. As these sophisticated theories evolved, experimentalists in Berlin and at Cambridge University were probing the nucleus of the atom, discovering new sub-atomic particles and the incredible energy inherent in the atom.

The funds for this remarkably productive research were minuscule. When Rose visited, in the 1920s, the annual research budget of the famed Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge totaled under one thousand pounds sterling. The possibility of Rockefeller money made Rose a very popular visitor. Wherever he traveled, to Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Gottingen, Stockholm, and Paris, he was received like a visiting monarch. On his trip Rose met Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Isidor Rabi, Samuel Goudsmit, T. Hogness, and Edward Condon—the leaders in theoretical and experimental physics—and made his first grant to Niels Bohr.

Rose unabashedly held views that later generations would label elitist. His favorite aphorism was: “Make the peaks higher.” When someone on his staff pointed to the long tradition of grants the GEB had made to unknown agencies and institutions, Rose answered, “The high standards of a strong institution will spread throughout a nation and will even cross oceans.”

His program was a radical departure for the GEB, which for a long time had directed its programs to rural schools in the south and improved education for blacks. To circumvent the inertia of the foundation staff, which was inclined to continue programs they had funded in the past, Rose reached beyond the foundation offices for advice and counsel, calling on an informal “club cabinet” drawn from the distinguished scientists he met in his travels, and from the men he saw regularly at the University Club, the Cosmos Club in Washington, and other familiar haunts. Foundation presidents make useful friends. Scientists who had known Rose before he became president of the GEB, and those who met him later, were eager to cultivate his friendship.

On questions of astronomy Rose turned most often for advice and counsel to George Hale, whose reputation, experience, and prestige
were exactly what Rose sought in his advisers. On his visits to New York, Hale would often have lunch or dinner with Rose. Between visits Hale sent books and articles to Rose, and Rose wrote to get Hale’s views on proposed GEB grants in support of observatories and astronomy programs. It was one of those mutually beneficial relationships that characterized the world of the University Club.

In the early spring of 1928, rumors circulated that Rose would soon retire from the presidencies of the GEB and IEB, and that a portion of the funds John D. Rockefeller had allocated for the IEB had not been committed. The unspent funds were not an endowment but a self-liquidating trust. When it was gone, if Rockefeller did not choose to renew the fund, the board would dissolve. The rumors among those who followed foundations were that the next president of the GEB would return the direction of the board’s activities to fields like southern and black education in the United States, and that the IEB, which had been created at Rose’s insistence, would be allowed to expire.

If the rumors were true, Rose’s IEB was an orphan with money to burn. George Hale had been waiting for a long time to hear news like that.

Hale prepared his campaign carefully. In early 1928 he drafted an article for
Harper’s Magazine
on “The Possibilities of Large Telescopes.”
Harper’s
was good seed ground. Foundation officials who see themselves as pacesetters, opening new frontiers of research, are profoundly influenced by the intellectual landscape around them. A serious but readable magazine was more likely to attract their attention than a scientific journal.

Hale had a knack for describing complex science in simple layperson’s language. “Like buried treasures,” he began, “the outposts of the universe have beckoned to the adventurous from immemorial times.” Hale chronicled the continuing efforts to build larger telescopes, from the medieval Arab astronomers in twelfth-century Cairo to his own work on the Yerkes and Mount Wilson telescopes. “The latest explorers have worked beyond the boundaries of the Milky Way in the realm of spiral ‘island universes,’ the first of which lies a million light-years from the earth while the farthest is immeasurably remote…. While much progress has been made, the greatest possibilities still lie in the future.”

Hale described the experiments Francis Pease had conducted on the one-hundred-inch telescope with an interferometer. The interferometer united the images from two smaller mirrors at the ends of a long beam into a single image. By comparing the images made with mirrors as much as twenty feet apart, Pease concluded that “an increase in aperture to 20 feet or more would be perfectly safe. For the first time, therefore, we can make such an increase without the uncertainties that have been unavoidable in the past.” Hale’s eloquent prose
made the construction of a new telescope sound simple: “As there is every reason to believe that a suitable Pyrex or quartz disc could be successfully cast and annealed, and as the optical and engineering problems of figuring, mounting, and housing it present no serious difficulties, I believe that a two-hundred inch or even a three-hundred inch telescope could be built and used to the great advantage of astronomy.”

It was a masterfully crafted article, clear enough for the untrained reader but with enough documentation and current information not to be dismissed as mere popularization by those who had followed recent developments. Hale elided over a few details that might have troubled a less optimistic reporter: No telescope disk had ever been successfully cast or annealed from Pyrex or quartz; no disk that large had ever been successfully figured; and there were no workable plans for a mounting that could precisely point an instrument that large or even support one in a stable configuration. Nor had anyone ever done the engineering for a structure that could house the instrument.

Hale’s article also didn’t admit that the challenge of casting, figuring, mounting, and housing the sixty- and one-hundred-inch instruments on Mount Wilson had far exceeded even the most pessimistic estimates. Hale did not mention the reservations of many astronomers, including Harlow Shapley, who questioned whether the seeing at any site was good enough to take advantage of the potential light-gathering ability of a huge telescope. Shapley’s own interest was in seeing many midsize telescopes built, rather than a single large instrument. His views may have been motivated, at least in part, by jealousy of the growing fame of Mount Wilson, but his pessimism was widely shared.

Finally Hale did not venture a guess of the estimated cost for a telescope that large. It didn’t take much extrapolation from the final cost of the one-hundred-inch telescope, which exceeded six hundred thousand dollars, to realize that it would require a larger grant than had ever been made by an individual or agency for any scientific instrument ever built.

Before the article appeared in print, Hale asked his editor at
Harper’s
to forward a copy of the manuscript to Wickliffe Rose.

There is no record of when George Hale and Wickliffe Rose first discussed a large telescope. Their earliest talk was probably at the University Club. Neither seems to have kept a diary of these meetings, but Rose wouldn’t have had to push hard to get Hale to talk about his favorite subject. They later met at the offices of the GEB at 61 Broadway. Rose, Hale reported to Walter Adams, was “so keen about a huge telescope that he [would] talk about nothing but the largest possible, and remark[ed] that there [was] no reason why fifteen millions should not be spent on such an instrument.”

When Hale and Rose finally exchanged letters on the subject, their correspondence was in the stilted language of men laying paper trails to cover negotiations in progress. The salutations were formal—“Dear Dr. Rose:” and “Dear Doctor Hale:”—unusual for fellow club members, and in Hale’s case correct only if you counted honorary doctorates. The language was formal enough to dispel accusations that these old boys had worked out too much in advance. Hale’s letter came right to the point:

We now have definite observational evidence that at such a favorable site as Mount Wilson a large increase in aperature could be made with confidence…. May I ask whether the General Education Board would consider the possibility of making a grant to determine how large a telescope mirror it would be feasible and advisable to cast, with the view of providing later for the construction of a telescope considerably outranking the one-hundred-inch Hooker telescope?