The Perfect Machine (2 page)

Only a year before, a much-publicized research expedition to Principe Island, off Africa, led by the well-known British astronomer and cosmologist Sir Arthur S. Eddington, had measured the deflection of starlight during a solar eclipse. When the measurements confirmed the predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravitation,
The Times
(of London) called Einstein’s work a “revolution in science.” The sudden newspaper publicity transformed the shy former inspector at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne into a world celebrity.

Despite Einstein’s fame and the pages that had been devoted to his theories in the newspapers and magazines, Abbot responded that a talk on relativity would be incomprehensible to a majority of the members of the academy, who came from all branches of science and weren’t necessarily familiar with Einstein’s writings. As an alternative Hale suggested a topic that some of the California astronomers had been debating in the scientific journals. On the basis of new sky surveys, some astronomers were convinced that the Milky Way, our own galaxy, was only one of many “island universes” in the heavens—an assertion many other astronomers found incomprehensible, untenable, or unreasonable. The primary evidence for the debate had come from Lick Observatory and Hale’s own Mount Wilson Observatory in California, but well-known European astrophysicists like Eddington and James Jeans had also written about the island universes debate. To an astronomer like Hale it was a hot topic.

Abbot responded that he was afraid the members of the academy also wouldn’t be interested in island universes. He refrained from telling George Hale that the only astronomical topic of widespread interest was Percival Lowell’s search for canals on Mars, or that to much of the public astronomers were the butt of jokes: boring old men with long beards who spent hours at the eyepieces of their telescopes, scribbling inscrutable numbers and making sketches that meant little to anyone else. Not too long before, a traveler had noted that one reason Westerners considered “the Chinese such barbarians is on account of the support they give to their Astronomers—people regarded by our cultivated Western mortals as completely useless. Yet there they rank with Heads of Departments and Secretaries of State. What frightful barbarism!”

In lieu of astronomers Abbot suggested that they get a speaker on a topic like medical progress in treating wounded soldiers. With the war fresh in memory, it would be a good response to the publicity recently generated by the antivivisectionists. Hale dismissed the topic as too pedestrian. The two men corresponded until Abbot, realizing that they were running out of time before the meeting, acquiesced and fired off telegrams to invite young Harlow Shapley from the Mount Wilson Observatory and Heber Curtis of the Lick Observatory to speak
on “The Scale of the Universe.” Abbot wasn’t the first to discover that George Hale, a mild-mannered, self-effacing man, who looked almost cherubic in his tiny wire-rimmed glasses, usually got his way.

Harlow Shapley accepted the invitation to speak immediately. A young man from Missouri who still wore his straight black hair slicked back in a rural “hick” style, Shapley was in a hurry, eager to make his mark. When, in his third year at the University of Missouri, he fell in love with a woman named Martha Betz, he told her, “Listen, I’m a busy man. If you want any more letters from me you will have to write my language.” Shapley’s language was the Gregg shorthand system, which they used to save time even after they married.

He had been a reporter on small-town newspapers before he went to the University of Missouri in the hope that a little more education would get him a position on a bigger newspaper. Shapley later claimed that he had chosen astronomy as an undergraduate major because there was no school of journalism and he couldn’t pronounce the first discipline he came across in the college catalog,
archaeology.
His professor at Missouri was Frederick Seares, who recommended him for a prestigious graduate fellowship at Princeton and later helped him obtain the plum of a first appointment at Mount Wilson after he received his doctorate. Shapley’s ready sense of humor and boisterous horselaugh took the edge off his unconcealed ambition, though some older astronomers thought him too eager to take credit.

At Mount Wilson, Shapley poured his energies into both his primary responsibilities, assisting other astronomers, and his own program of research, quickly building a reputation for what some called boldness and others saw as hasty conclusions. At the time bachelor astronomers at Mount Wilson were paid ninety-five dollars a month and were provided with a room at the “Monastery” on the mountain. Shapley, who had married just before he arrived at Mount Wilson, got a munificent $135 a month to cover rent in Pasadena and the cost of getting himself up and down the mountain. Hale, the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory and Shapley’s boss, offered him $250 for expenses on the trip to Washington, but Shapley would have gone even if he had had to pay for the trip from his meager salary. “We had already resigned ourselves to poverty,” he wrote.

For an ambitious young astronomer the debate in Washington, and the opportunity to address a wide audience, was the chance of a lifetime. George Hale had recently nominated Shapley for the prestigious position of director of the Harvard College Observatory, a remarkable coup for a man so young. A good showing in the debate could make or break his chances for the appointment.

Heber Curtis, the principal critic of Shapley’s new ideas, was skeptical of the proposed debate. Curtis was from an older, more restrained generation, gentlemen scientists wary of publicity, public
forums, and young men with half-cocked ideas who put unseemly ambition ahead of methodical science. Taciturnity, an understated senior-common-room style, and an instinctive mistrust of faddish notions were badges of distinction for serious scientists. Curtis finally agreed to participate, but only after some negotiation, insisting on the topic proposed in Abbot’s original telegram, “The Scale of the Universe,” and objecting to any title that would exclude his own research interests in favor of Shapley’s. The evening at the academy was scheduled as a symposium rather than a formal debate, but once the newspapers heard that Einstein would be present, they began ballyhooing the forthcoming evening as the greatest scientific debate since the trial of Galileo.

Neither man knew what to expect. Both had written primarily for scientific journals and spoken mostly to audiences of professional astronomers, a small world in 1920. Tempting though it was to discuss their qualms and apprehensions, they agreed when they first boarded the train that it would be best if they did not talk about the upcoming debate. And so, day after day, they rode on, avoiding the subject on their minds in favor of small talk or the books and notebooks they had brought in their briefcases.

The transcontinental railroad tracks were still a novelty, a tenuous tie to the remote coasts. In an age before the telephone was widespread, when radios were not yet in every home, when only businessmen in a hurry and the War Department reporting casualties used the telegraph, and when the network of highways had just begun to reach out from the cities, that thin line of railroad tracks was the only thread tying the country together. Across many routes travelers could ride for most of a day without seeing any settlements except tiny hamlets, watering stations, and mail stops along the tracks.

The America they crossed was a land of small farms, producing not only the crops they sold but their own milk, eggs, meat, and vegetables. Rural folk made do. In the summers families enjoyed the bounty of the land. In the winters they drew from the larder or the root cellar. Except for store-bought dresses and suits for special occasions, or the rugged ready-made garments that were becoming available in the catalogs, they wore homemade clothing, buying fabric and notions from country stores, catalogs, or itinerant peddlers. News about technology came from the Sears catalog, ubiquitous reading material in outhouses across America. In 1920 it featured .22 caliber rifles for $4.25; an upholstered, curly-backed rocker for $5.95; women’s middy blouses for $0.98; and a treadle-powered sewing machine for $29.95.

Farmers worked the land with draft animals. Only in the cities had auto exhausts replaced manure as the hazard of the streets. Speed limits in most cities were still twenty miles per hour. A few who happened to live near the railroad tracks could watch the speedy trains bridging
the land; to most the whistles of the trains were as remote as the contrails of jet planes to a later generation.

Nights were quiet time. The wireless wasn’t in many homes yet, although Westinghouse had broadcast early results of the elections in November. Victrolas were a luxury that plain folk considered showing off. It wasn’t unusual for a family to spend a summer evening outside, on the porch or in the yard, sitting on rockers or swing benches, staring at the stars. With no city lights, no highways with nightly columns of trucks and cars, and electric power unavailable beyond the fringes of the cities, families could enjoy the glories of dark skies that revealed the Milky Way not as an occasional lucky sight but as a regular evening spectacle.

The stars were a nightly wonder. Some accepted the canonical explanations of the Bible and thought of the heavens as one more impenetrable miracle of Creation. Others contented themselves with the thought that pretty soon scientists, using those big new telescopes out in California, would know what it was all about.

From the vast prairie land of the Midwest and the sharecropped farms of the Mississippi River Valley, the travelers rode on into the industrial belt of the eastern states, the largest single concentration of heavy industry in the world. The United States prided itself on superlatives—the most railcars of coal extracted from a mine in a day, the most tons of steel produced, the most feet of rail rolled. Corporations, armed with their new public relations departments, eagerly joined the chorus of hyperbole, issuing press releases to announce the largest electrical network ever built, the biggest turbine, the largest milling machine.

Some Europeans saw the American habit of superlatives as a sign of collective insecurity, but to Americans there was a comfort in the concrete symbols of achievement. From the lonely farmers on the boundless prairies, to the factory workers of the mill towns, to the men of untold wealth who were not ashamed to describe themselves as capitalists, Americans held up industrial might as a challenge and a response to the alleged sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and grandeur of Europe. The United States was on a roll. Business was booming. The smokestacks were going full-time. Although no one bragged about it, the United States could also claim the smokiest skies and dirtiest rivers in the world. What another generation would see as threats to health and the future were symbols of progress and prosperity in 1920.

In this America of the biggest, the grandest, and the greatest, science was on its way to a new, elevated status. Already hucksters, journalists, teachers, and advertisers were cavalierly tossing off the claim that “Science tells us” or “Science teaches us” as a preemptive answer to arguments. Einstein had not yet visited the United States, but already his name had entered the common vocabulary as a synonym
for genius. The mysteries of the General Theory of Relativity were widely touted as the most important scientific discovery of the century. A myth circulated that only twelve men in the world could understand the theory, but the alleged limits of comprehension didn’t stop editors and soapbox orators from extolling the importance of relativity, tossing off a casual
E
=
mc
²
,
or announcing that “there are no absolutes, everything is relative” to prove that they too were part of the great age of science.

Yet the intellectuals and poseurs who revered Einstein were a tiny minority of the American public. For much of the country formal science was too abstract, so obscure that it was somehow un-American. In 1914 a congressman questioning a witness at an appropriations hearing said: “What is a physicist? I was asked on the floor of the House what in the name of common sense a physicist is, and I could not answer.”

Even the august National Academy of Sciences enjoyed less than universal prestige. Andrew Carnegie typified the American reaction when he dismissed a request for funds for the academy: “Oh,” he said. “That’s just one of those fancy societies.”

Americans had their own science. To the ordinary folk of Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street,
science meant know-how, the ability to make cars, vacuum cleaners, electric irons, light bulbs, radios. America was the country that could build anything. Americans believed that they had won the Great War in the shipyards and mills and factories as much as the trenches, and few doubted that there was any problem of science that couldn’t also be solved by the same commonsense engineering that brought invention after invention out of the laboratories of Thomas Edison and car after car out of the factories of Henry Ford.

In 1920 few Americans had ever heard of Harlow Shapley or Heber Curtis. Most would have named Edison as the greatest living scientist. But the United States was a land of newspaper readers, and the newspapers had discovered the art of turning the commonplace into the kind of stories that readers demanded. A mine cave-in that killed seventy men earned a brief mention in the paper; a single man trapped in a mine was a story that could be developed and enhanced to hold readers for days. A good murder trial could hold them for months. The National Academy of Sciences wasn’t a usual newspaper beat, but then Albert Einstein in the audience wasn’t the usual lead. If there was ever a science story that would get readers, this was it. On April 26, 1920, the newspapers promised, at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, held in the central hall of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in the august presence of Professor Albert Einstein, the most basic questions about our universe would be answered.

By the second day of the journey, the travelers on the train were weary. The steady click-clack of the bolted rails, reassuring the first
day, was monotonous. The view through the miasma of black smoke from the soft coal that fueled the engine was no longer exciting. The panorama outside the windows, hour after hour of wheat or rice or woods or bottomlands, became tedious. Those who hadn’t prepared for the journey with reading material or games were soon bored.