The Perfect Machine (27 page)

Queries came in, but the Corning salesmen couldn’t land a large order. They could argue that their product was superior, but their prices were high, at least compared to the quotes that the universities had received from glass foundries abroad. A flurry of interdepartmental memorandums went back and forth, questioning whether Corning should make an effort to quote cheaper prices for the big disks. The initial answer was no. On the basis of the special equipment and man-hours the project would need, the small market for telescope mirrors didn’t seem a profitable business in 1929.

A year later the answer changed. By 1930 the depression had touched almost every sector of the economy. In some industries, like steel in Pittsburgh, more than half the workers were laid off, and companies devised schemes like the “stagger plan” to let men share jobs (which left them ineligible for unemployment compensation). The Houghton family were reluctant to lay off any workers at Corning, no matter how severe the economic situation. The chance to keep a few more workers busy, to strengthen Corning’s role in glass research, and to build more ties to university research departments was enough incentive to aggressively bid for the potential telescope business.

McCauley went to the Bureau of Standards, where he had worked before coming to Corning, to survey the procedures they had used to cast the mirror of the Perkins telescope, the first large glass disk ever made in the United States. The tank melting and ladling procedures Corning had already developed were as good as the Bureau of Standards procedures. But casting a disk was only half the battle. Annealing the disk, subjecting it to long, slow, controlled cooling to minimize strains in the glass, seemed to be the real challenge. The bureau experiences confirmed what McCauley had learned in his initial trials at Corning: The high temperatures and long duty cycle for annealing would destroy all but the most rugged, commercial-grade heating units.

McCauley spent more evenings at his oak dining table. To minimize the investment in what would clearly be a small sideline for Corning, he tried to use commercially available materials and facilities. The molds, furnaces, annealing kilns, cranes, and lifting slings could all be fabricated by Corning craftsmen, who might otherwise be idle. When McCauley demonstrated that the new business would require no large outlays for special equipment or custom-fabricated tools, and that it would provide work for underemployed Corning workers, the Corning bean counters recalculated their prices for disks.

In March 1931 the new cost estimates paid off. Corning received a firm order for an elliptical auxiliary disk for the Perkins telescope. McCauley was ready. But one order didn’t make a telescope disk business.

At GE’s West Lynn laboratory, Ellis got ready to spray a sixty-inch quartz disk that would be used for one of the auxiliary mirrors in the telescope. The huge sheet iron building, the custom furnace, built from special ceramics and graphite developed by the Carborundum Company and the National Carbon Company, and the huge, rigid copper bars and regulators to power the electrical furnace for this stage of the process had cost more than $115,000. Ellis justified the expenditure by noting that the building, the special ceramics for the furnace, and the electrical equipment would all be reused for the two-hundred-inch mirror.

Every time there was a choice in equipment or facilities, Ellis, with the approval of Thomson and the GE management, opted for the more versatile, and invariably more expensive, item, on the grounds that more versatile equipment could be adapted to larger mirrors and would have higher resale value. Instead of inexpensive insulated cables to bring electricity to the furnaces, he used expensive copper bus bars. The building was equipped with a seventy-five-ton gantry crane, far larger than needed to fabricate or move a two-hundred-inch disk. Whenever Hale or Anderson questioned the budgets, Ellis explained that each decision had been made in the interest of salvage value. No doubt his arguments were true, but it was also true that each choice favored continued productive capacity at GE over cost control and expediting the production of the mirrors for the telescope.

This time Ellis was confident. The latest disks to emerge from his furnace, though flawed, had been a great improvement over the earlier efforts, and the efficiency of the process had improved dramatically. At the beginning of 1929 the spray apparatus was depositing one cubic inch of quartz per hour while consuming two hundred cubic feet of gas. By the end of the year the nozzles were laying down two hundred cubic inches of quartz per hour and consuming only six hundred cubic feet of gas. A mirror could be built in one to 1.5 percent of the time the process originally required, which meant that the time during which
the furnace and disk had to be maintained at the torturous temperatures was substantially reduced. Ellis had finally abandoned hydrogen as a fuel, because it would have required a gas plant larger than they were willing to build. Dissociated ammonia wasn’t hot enough, so they had begun experiments on alternative fuels, based on research done at the Department of Agriculture, Du Pont Ammonia, Nitrogen Engineering in New York, the Fixed Nitrogen Laboratories in Washington, and their own experience in Schenectady and Lynn. The most promising fuel was cracked butane, which could be obtained in carload lots, evaporated at any desired rate, and promised a hotter flame than any fuel they had yet tried.

As Ellis and Thomson saw it, the entire development was progressing predictably. Ellis was “delighted” when the opticians in Pasadena found 80 percent of the surface of the last mirror shipped satisfactory. Ellis and Thomson considered the work that had gone before to have been experimentation, trials with different materials and procedures. The difficulties they had encountered were preproduction problems that could be expected in any experimental process. Although they hadn’t yet produced a fully satisfactory mirror, that was almost to be expected, and wasn’t really a problem in any case, since none of the smaller blanks were meant for use in the telescope. GE, and particularly Elihu Thomson, had been famed for turning experimental ideas into working products. The company’s claim to fame, and its prosperity, had stemmed from the translation of the inventions and discoveries of Edison and Thomson into routine production processes. Ellis was following the company tradition.

What Ellis and Thomson never quite understood was that Hale, Anderson, the Observatory Committee in Pasadena, and the astronomers who were waiting for the telescope were not after a perfected production process. All they wanted was mirror blanks—three sixty-inch blanks for the auxiliary mirrors, a two-hundred-inch blank for the primary mirror, and a one-hundred-inch blank they could grind into a flat for testing the primary mirror. They needed only five disks, good enough to be figured into mirrors for a telescope. So far, after two years of experimentation, 80 percent usable was the best GE had achieved on any disk. The opticians couldn’t make a telescope mirror out of an 80 percent usable disk.

Without the mirrors, or at least some assurance that a satisfactory mirror blank could be fabricated, Pease, Porter, and Anderson could not move ahead on a design for the telescope. And without a design, the rest of the work on the project—the search for a site, the mechanical and civil engineering for the observatory itself, the preliminary work on instrumentation and auxiliary lenses, the electrical engineering and calculations for a control system for the telescope—was on hold. No one objected if the work GE was doing on the fused-quartz mirrors ultimately led to techniques for regular production of astronomical
mirrors, if only they could produce the mirrors for this telescope.

The halting progress in West Lynn never stopped GE from issuing a steady stream of press releases and articles for the trade and popular press. While Anderson and Hale were having trouble coming up with excuses for the lack of progress on a mirror, John W. Hammond of the publicity department at GE was sending out articles with titles like “Greatest Venture in Mirror Making Ever Attempted,” “A Great Magnifying Glass to Help Read the Story of the Stars,” and “Building a Looking-Glass to Mirror Unknown Stars” to any magazine that would print them. Thomson, although he had left the day-to-day running of the project to Ellis, never turned down opportunities to speak on the subject of the mirror and the telescope. One of his talks on the two-hundred-inch telescope, in December 1929, was broadcast on radio from Philadelphia.

GE’s appetite for publicity offended the reticence of the astronomers in Pasadena, especially George Hale. Much that the GE publicity department included in their articles was wrong. They wrote that the smaller mirrors were needed as “finders” by which the heavenly bodies are first located; in fact the auxiliary mirrors were needed to focus the image of the primary mirror at different positions on the telescope, so the same telescope could be used for both deep-space research and for detailed spectrographic study of nearby stars. The GE publicists had no qualms about announcing that the new telescope would open an area of unexplored space thirty times greater than at present known, or that the most remote of the charted stars were 150 million light-years from the earth—both untrue statements. It wasn’t only the inaccuracy of the reports that bothered the astronomers. They were afraid that the newspapers and radio stations would read between the lines of the GE reports and speculate about the lack of progress on the project, and that the speculation would in turn feed the doubters like Harlow Shapley, H. L. Mencken, and others who enjoyed taking potshots at the California astronomers.

As the effects of the depression spread, with daily reports of bank failures, soaring unemployment, breadlines, and soup kitchens, Hale and the others were also embarrassed and worried that the scale of spending on the telescope project would prove difficult to justify. Six million dollars was still a lot of money, and astronomers were already the butt of jokes and cartoons about stargazing and heads in the clouds. Men who had lost their jobs and were now selling apples and pencils on street corners to feed their families might be less enthusiastic about a $6 million telescope than the ebullient newspaper readers and radio audiences of 1928.

The differences between the astronomers in Pasadena and Ellis, Thomson, and Swope at GE remained largely unwritten and unspoken. Theoretically, fused quartz would make the best possible mirror.

If GE could produce fused-quartz mirrors that would eliminate the problems that still troubled the one-hundred-inch telescope, the differences in style between the huge eastern corporation and its publicity department and the tiny West Coast university, the embarrassments over premature or inappropriate publicity—even the cost overruns wouldn’t matter.

On the early experimental disks, even on the twenty-two-inch disks, Ellis could in a pinch get together enough usable quartz by putting a couple of men on mortars and pestles, and grading the material with hand sieves. For the telescope mirrors, Ellis ordered quartz by the carload, had it ground in a ball mill in West Lynn, then used graduated sieves to separate the powder by particle size. Extremely fine particles, which would foul up the jets of the spray equipment, had to be filtered out by an additional process. Traditional separation methods, like air-blast filtration, didn’t work because the fine particles would become electro statically charged and cling to larger ones. Ellis finally instituted a wet-filter process, in which the fine material would be suspended in a solution that was then drained away. The procedure was excruciatingly slow. It wasn’t until late summer of 1930 that he was finally ready to begin spraying the first sixty-inch disk. The graded quartz waited in hundreds of large glass jars for the day when the spraying would start.

Two full years had elapsed since GE had agreed to fabricate the mirror blanks. The original budget of $252,000 had long been spent. Hale and Anderson repeatedly asked for a new budget. “It is of course impossible to make an estimate that will be hard and fast as final cost of producing the mirror, including the 200 inch,” Ellis answered. His new ballpark figure was an additional $50,000 for the furnace and accessories, and $12,000 per month for materials and development work, for a period of eighteen months. The total of $266,000, added to the $308,000 they had already expended, made a grand total of $574,000 for three sixty-inch mirror blanks, a one-hundred-inch mirror that could be ground to a flat for testing, and the two-hundred-inch mirror. The price tag for the mirror blanks had doubled in two years.

If the actual progress on the blanks was slow, Ellis and Thomson were still ever ready with ideas. Ellis drew up his own ideas for a mounting for the telescope—a project on which Pease and Porter had been working for years—and for the kind of facility in which the disk should be ground, polished, and tested. To minimize vibrations and temperature variations, he wanted the room entirely underground. He had suggestions on how the two-hundred-inch disk should be moved to a optical shop, equipment for minimizing air movement in the optics shop, and a dozen other ideas that touched the project. When Porter visited the West Lynn laboratories, Ellis regaled him with those
ideas, and with reports on their work on perfecting fire control on warships. The one thing Ellis didn’t offer was a date when a usable disk would be ready.

In Pasadena, Pease’s design work waited for progress on the mirrors. He turned his attention to the still-troublesome one-hundred-inch telescope on Mount Wilson. Hubble and Humason were using the telescope regularly, as were other astronomers, and on good nights it produced excellent results. But the falloff of the image quality in some areas of the sky was still disturbing, and the apparent inability of the mirror to settle down, after even modest changes in the temperature, remained troublesome.

Pease had worked out some ideas for edge mountings for the mirror of the two-hundred-inch telescope. He got permission to use the one-hundred-inch as a laboratory to test his ideas. What was happening, he concluded, was that the mirror of the one-hundred-inch telescope was changing shape, deforming from its own weight, as the telescope was tilted in various positions. The problem hadn’t caused great concern on earlier telescopes because it was thought that the massive solid disks in telescopes like the sixty-inch and the one-hundred-inch would minimize the deformation. But the demands of a telescope increase with the size. A distortion of one-tenth of a wavelength of light—a distance measured in millionths of an inch—may be difficult to measure on a small telescope; it becomes readily apparent in the image quality on a larger telescope. Pease worked during the daytime and during light-sky portions of the month, when the moon was up and the sky was too light for deep-sky observations of remote galaxies.