The Perfect Machine (20 page)

In September a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
got access to some financial records of the Mount Wilson Observatory and began asking Adams about the rumors of a new telescope. Adams and Hale
debated using connections to squelch the news and concluded that the effort might backfire. Soon reporters were calling everyone they could find with rumors of the largest grant ever made in support of a scientific project, millions of dollars awarded to build the biggest scientific instrument in the world, a device that would require the largest single piece of glass ever cast and the largest bearings ever machined and gather more light and see farther into space and require more man-hours and demand finer tolerances and … It was impossible to put them off much longer.

Hale waited until the end of October. The big news in the papers were the presidential campaigns of A1 Smith and Herbert Hoover, another victory by Babe Ruth and the Yankees in the World Series, and the
Graf Zeppelin’s
maiden flight across the Atlantic. The great airship drew record-breaking crowds to the airfield in New Jersey, eager to see the newest triumph of German technology. Congress awarded a special gold medal to Thomas Edison, in recognition of his scientific achievements. With a bevy of photographers as witnesses, Andrew Mellon presented the medal on behalf of a grateful nation. Science and technology seemed to dominate the news.

On October 28, 1928, a Sunday, Hale issued a carefully worded announcement, hoping to head off the hyperbole he feared would follow in the papers: “It is our strong desire to avoid all sensational or exaggerated statements,” his release read. “With this type of telescope we do not expect to see very minute details on the moon or planets or to deal with the inhabitants or other hypothetical creatures…. Its object is not to detect skyscrapers on the airless moon or to search for indications of human beings on Mars.”

Few paid much attention to his caution when the newspapers picked up the release for their Monday editions. The front pages outdid one another in point sizes and hyperbole, with headlines like BIG BERTHA OF SKY WILL AID SCIENCE. The
New York Times
was only slightly more restrained: GIANT TELESCOPE OF IMMENSE RANGE TO DWARF ALL OTHERS. With gracefully concealed pride, the
Los Angeles Times
touted the newest achievement of Southern California: “Standing on the threshold of a vast uncharted space to be penetrated by the 200” telescope, the scientific world is frankly a-tiptoe with excitement. Men who ordinarily deal exclusively with uninspiring mathematical problems and cold, concrete facts find themselves engaging in imaginative flights. What, they are asking themselves, will the gigantic new telescope reveal?”

In response to the demand for more facts about the great machine, Walter Adams cautiously issued figures on the potential light-gathering power of the huge mirror. The newspapers, not sure what it meant, and insisting as often as not on calling it a
lens,
seized on his numbers. The telescope, they reported, would see stars “700,000 times as faint” as could be seen with the naked eye. It would be able to photograph “a
candle flame at 40,000 miles.” At least, Hale could console himself, they didn’t report that the telescope would see Martians or moon men holding the candles. A few papers, like the
London Daily Telegraph,
resisted the more extreme examples and explained quite simply that the new telescope would “penetrate to the limits of our universe.”

The
New York Times
reported that although the size of the grant in support of the telescope had not been announced, it would surely be far in excess of the $600,000 that the one-hundred-inch Hooker telescope had cost. Whatever the cost, the editorials agreed, the telescope was a great leap ahead for mankind.

Public reaction everywhere was quick, the interest in the great instrument boundless. From all over the world, letters poured into Pasadena from well-wishers sending their salutes and blessings. Thomas J. Johnston, a patent lawyer in New York, praised “the most astounding feature of the proposition. That is, the harmonious concentration of the best trained minds in the world upon a project of pure science, with the certainty of fully adequate financing and technical manufacturing facilities. The history of science shows no such thing, or anything near it.” Using an ethnic slur not uncommon in private correspondence in the late 1920s, Johnston reminded Hale of the struggle to get Congress to fund the old twenty-six-inch telescope at the Naval Observatory in Washington, and “the pitiable attempt in the Committee to jew down Alvan Clark the elder by $1000—What a contrast!”

A little girl sent a dollar to help the project. Hucksters, businessmen, amateur scientists, backyard engineers, promoters, quick-buck artists, dreamers, and schemers offered their ideas and themselves. Men of the cloth, seeing yet another threat in the hubris of science, sent curses and threats of eternal damnation to those who would unveil the secrets of the universe. Astronomers, hoping that they would someday get a chance to use the great instrument, sent their congratulations, sometimes barely concealing their envy.

Overnight, it seemed, the unbuilt instrument that would see to the limits of the universe became the symbol of an era of confidence, a metal-and-glass paean to science, knowledge, and progress. For the next twenty years the public and press would be relentless in their fascination with what the newspapers and radio reporters insisted on calling the giant “eye.” Never before, and probably never again, would there be such widespread attention devoted to a scientific instrument with such a benign aim.

10
Beginnings

Rumors of the big telescope had circulated among astronomers for years. Visiting VIPs at Mount Wilson who had seen the sketches and models were suspicious of the repeated denials from the Mount Wilson staff. Scientists and administrators who had dealings with the various Rockefeller Foundations could tell from the hush-hush of the program officers that something big was in the works. Harlow Shapley, accustomed to being consulted by the foundation staff on astronomy proposals, hadn’t been asked for his opinion on this one.

Shapley sent formal congratulations to Hale and Walter Adams, but they both knew he had been far from subtle in his opposition to the project. For years, he had been resentful of the money that the California Institute and the Mount Wilson Observatory had gathered under their control, and especially resentful of the publicity that the Pasadena institutions had gathered for the discoveries made at Mount Wilson. As the head of the astronomy department and the observatory at the oldest and most famous university in America, Shapley had the prestige to make his opinions heard.

H. L. Mencken, ever on the lookout for a chance to debunk the latest fascination of the “rubes of the booboisie,” met Shapley for a lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. At first Mencken thought Shapley, with his slicked-back hair and boisterous horselaugh, looked “inconspicuous and somewhat rustic.” After they talked for a while the rusticity vanished. Mencken knew little about astronomy. His interest was news, and he welcomed Shapley’s apparent candor about the much publicized two-hundred-inch telescope project.

“Practically everything it may be expected to accomplish could be accomplished by existing telescopes,” Shapley told Mencken. Studying the millions of stars astronomers had already reached would occupy them for the better part of the century. The real reason for the new telescope, Shapley said, was publicity. In particular he singled out Robert Millikan, the head of the California Institute, quoting the
famed physicist Ernest Rutherford, who had remarked that publicity seeking had finally become a learned science, with its own unit of measurement, the
kan,
a unit so large that publicity is normally measured in a workable fraction, the
Millikan.

It was exactly the kind of cynical barb Mencken liked.

Shapley also found a way to make his reservations about the project heard in astronomy circles. The design and ownership of the new telescope were entrusted to the California Institute. There was little Shapley or anyone else could do to change that. But the question of where the telescope would be sited was not mentioned in the grant. It was an issue on which Shapley had strong views.

One of the grants Harvard had received from Wickliffe Rose’s IEB had funded the move of the Harvard Southern Station from Peru, where they had a single year of good seeing during the initial testing of the telescope, and wretched conditions for thirty-nine years afterward, to Bloemfontein, South Africa. With the volumes of data they had accumulated over a long period at the Southern Station, Harvard dominated Southern Hemisphere astronomy. Henrietta Leavitt’s original study of Cepheid variable stars was only one of the projects based on these plates. It was not surprising that Shapley began a campaign urging that the new telescope be sited at the Southern Station, or failing that, “Tibet, Kashmir, Peru, Chile, the Argentine, or Australia”—in other words, anyplace but Southern California.

Shapley directed his campaign at Trevor Arnett, the officer in charge of science programs at the Rockefeller Foundation. Writing with the authority of his position at the Harvard College Observatory, Shapley reported that “the opinion of astronomers in general” was that the big telescope project had been initiated by Hale and the California Institute without consulting other astronomers, and that “naturally they would only consider sites in relation to their own institution,” despite the fact that there were superior sites in New Mexico or Western Texas that would make the telescope more accessible to astronomers from the East.

Shapley was joined in his efforts by other astronomers who feared that the new telescope, along with the sixty-inch and one-hundred-inch telescopes, would give a monopoly of deep-space research to Mount Wilson and what other astronomers saw as the Pasadena astronomy clique.

By the end of the summer the lobbying was so intense that Arnett went to Pasadena to show Anderson the voluminous correspondence he had received and his notes of meetings with visiting astronomers. Arnett assured Anderson that there was nothing personal against Hale in the questioning. Rather, he explained, there was widespread concern that Hale was skewing the search to make sure a site was selected close to the California Institute, instead of picking the best possible site for the telescope.

On the question of a site, as on most issues concerning the big telescope, George Hale had strong views. From the time he had organized the Yerkes Observatory, Hale had been convinced that the old days of an observer going up to a mountain with a sketch pad to record what he had seen were long gone. The new problems of astrophysics required that an observatory be close to well-equipped research libraries and laboratories in related disciplines like physics and spectroscopy. The modern telescopes Hale was building needed not only darkrooms and auxiliary equipment like blink stereo comparators, but constant attention and experimentation with new sensors, emulsions, photographic and spectrographic instruments, and auxiliary lenses. Astronomers were constantly proposing new observation programs at the limits of the telescope’s resolution and light-gathering powers, with complex instruments that could only be built, modified, and repaired in dedicated optical and mechanical shops. The road from the offices and shops on Santa Barbara Street in Pasadena to the telescopes and Monastery on Mount Wilson was well worn.

When Hale first built the solar telescopes, and then the sixty- and one-hundred-inch telescopes, Mount Wilson had been an ideal site. It was close to the laboratories in Pasadena, and the peculiarities of the local geography and weather created remarkable observing conditions on the mountain. Mount Wilson was soon famous not only for the instruments on the mountain but for the seeing. Many astronomers thought that on a good night the atmosphere over Mount Wilson was so still, the images of the stars so well defined, that it was perhaps the best seeing in the world.

Over the years the seeing (atmospheric turbulence) at Mount Wilson had not deteriorated, but for dark-sky work—photographic or spectrographic study of galaxies and other distant objects too faint to record on a photographic plate when the moon is up—Mount Wilson had begun to suffer from its proximity to Los Angeles. Other cities grew up, becoming more dense. Los Angeles, already the fastest-growing city in the nation, spread. By 1928 the city and surrounding towns reached right to the base of Mount Wilson. The San Gabriel Valley below the observatory glittered with lights at night, more than even the fogs could obscure. The Mount Wilson staff were sensitive to the issue. When Rose and Thorkelson visited Mount Wilson, Hale warned Adams to stay with them at all times; “if any questions about lights in the Valley” came up, Adams was to “show how easily they [could] be met.”

For 90 percent of the observations that a new telescope would do, including most spectroscopy, bolometric observations, and direct photography with moderate exposures, the conditions on Mount Wilson were still superb. But for very long exposures on faint objects at the limit of the telescope’s reach—exactly the work for which the bigger
telescope was most important—even Hale acknowledged that “the illumination of the night sky [below Mount Wilson] may be sufficient to make trouble.” To fulfill its mission of extending the limits of the observable universe, the new telescope would have to be at a site more remote than Mount Wilson, far enough from any city that even the unpredictable population growth and sprawling development of a Los Angeles wouldn’t interfere with the future use of the facility.

For Hale the siting question was a tricky balance: How far from Pasadena would they have to go to achieve the dark skies and good seeing they needed? How far was too far from the Santa Barbara Street laboratories and optical facilities, and the new astrophysics laboratory that would be built on the campus of the California Institute? Ferdinand Ellerman and Milton Humason, observers with considerable experience on the big telescopes, and both veterans of the early days when Humason had led mule trains up Mount Wilson, cautioned against a site that was too inaccessible. Hale also liked to quote a Henry Norris Russell story about a mining engineer sent to investigate a claim offered at a suspiciously low price, who telegraphed back east: ORE THERE. UP TO SAMPLE. LOTS OF IT. WILL NEED PACK TRAIN OF BALD EAGLES TO GET IT OUT.