The Perfect Machine (37 page)

Cycle after cycle, the pour went flawlessly. By 7:30 the mold was filled. The ladles and wheelbarrows were moved away as the crew gathered around the mold, staring at the disk of molten glass through the pour openings. When the last ladles of glass were added, the glass on the top of the mold was hotter than at the bottom. The cooled glass around the molds stood out, outlining the geometric pattern of the ribs and cores. While McCauley and the glassmakers watched, the glass at the surface began to cool, and the molds became radiant against the dark ribs of glass. The changing image was so beautiful that the crew held off, mesmerized by the spectacle, before they finally lifted the igloo off and maneuvered the mold down its tracks to the annealing oven.

By four o’clock in the afternoon the mold had been lowered from beneath the igloo and slid down its tracks to a position under the annealing oven and raised again. An insulating seal of Sil-o-Cel powder was added between the edge of the mold and the oven cover. McCauley had calculated and recalculated his annealing schedule. For 11 days the disk would be held at 520°C. Then it would cool by 1.6°C per day for 140 days, and finally be allowed to cool at its own rate, limited only by the insulation surrounding the disk. The crew went
ahead pouring smaller disks during that period, but the 120-inch disk, the largest glass casting ever poured, was the test of McCauley’s procedure and the glass formulation. If it worked McCauley was certain they could cast the two-hundred-inch disk. If not? McCauley didn’t have contingency plans.

Theodore Dunham, of the Mount Wilson Labs, was at Corning to witness the pour, which he called a “magnificent spectacle.” Hostetter was Dunham’s guide in Corning, and he gave both Dunham and Hale the strong impression that much of the scientific and engineering work on the disk project was his doing. “Dr. Hostetter,” Dunham wrote, “does not trust a crane for such delicate work and thinks his experience with this table might be useful in designing equipment for the optical lab.” Hostetter announced that
he
was anxious to cast all the secondary mirrors at the same time with the two-hundred-inch in order to avoid the great expense of heating the furnace a second time with another melt of the special glass. Observers in Corning noticed how often Hostetter was calling the telescope project—which he oversaw as a project manager, but on which he had done no scientific or engineering work—
his
project.

While Hostetter claimed the credit, McCauley checked the annealing oven every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, for six months. As a senior engineer/scientist, he had no production responsibilities for the disk. He could have asked the production crew foremen to assign someone to monitor the equipment. But McCauley was an orderly man. He considered himself responsible for the telescope disk project, and he insisted on checking the oven himself.

George Hale fled to Europe again that fall, to get away from the pressures and the demons. On his way home he arranged his travel to stop in Corning while the disk was still in the annealer. Hostetter, who enjoyed the visits of the famous to Corning, joined McCauley in showing Hale the annealing oven in A Factory that held the disk, the casting equipment and molds, and the panel of electrical controls that regulated the heat. Hale was “delighted with everything I saw.”

At Christmas 1933, six months almost to the day after the disk had been poured, McCauley lifted the cover of the annealing oven to peek at the disk. There were no cracks, no pieces of the kiln broken away and embedded in the disk, no displaced cores to mar the ribbed pattern. The glass was clear, with the characteristic yellow color of Pyrex. Under close examination the strains in the glass were minimal, close to what he had expected after annealing. The only flaws in the disk were small bubbles (what the glassmakers call “vacuum bubbles”) near the tops of some of the round cores. McCauley knew the bubbles would not affect the disk.

“We were obliged to admit,” McCauley wrote, “that our product, while wholly suitable for the service for which it was to be used, was
not the sleek object, without blemish, for which we dreamed. We could only accept our disappointment and try for greater perfection in the 200 inch disc, the next chance to produce a flawless disk.” McCauley’s prose doesn’t quite conceal the pride of achievement. To avoid bubbles on the tops of the cores in the next disk he decided to make the large cores hollow, so the surfaces in contact with the glass would cool rapidly.

In Pasadena the optical shop on the Caltech campus was under roof and work had already started on a grinding machine for the 120-inch disk, which was to be ground as an optically flat mirror to use in testing the two-hundred-inch disk. Hale was encouraged, but had been steeled by long experience to anticipate the unexpected. “Large telescopes,” he wrote, “as I have learned before, are secular phenomena. But fortunately the Corning estimates of cost do not increase beyond their original figures.” He had been surprised too many times not to keep his guard up.

Still, when he heard the good news from McCauley, he couldn’t help a tone of confidence. “The point of doubt as to the possibility of getting a satisfactory 200” Pyrex disk,” Hale reported to the Observatory Council, “had been passed.”

17
“The Greatest Item of Interest … in Twenty-five Years”

At the annual meeting of the American Ceramic Society in Cincinnati, in February 1934, Arthur L. Day delivered the Edward Orton Jr. Memorial Lecture. Day, the director of the Carnegie Institution Geophysical Laboratory, began with the requisite pseudo-Shakespearean paraphrase—“All the world is a ceramic product”—as he traced the history of ceramics from the formation of natural glass in the earth’s crust to the current frontiers of ceramics research and to the most difficult of optical challenges, the mirror disk for the planned two-hundred-inch telescope. The ideas that had been pursued for the telescope disk, he reported to the audience, included everything from sawing off slabs of the obsidian cliffs at Yellowstone Park to fabricating disks of fused silica. There were problems with both extremes, which was why Pyrex-brand glass had become the compromise choice. Everyone at the meeting knew that Pyrex meant the Corning Glass Works.

Reporters hurried to ask Day questions. He confirmed that Corning was casting mirror disks for the big telescope, including the two-hundred-inch disk for the primary mirror: “This disk in all its details is a whale! Every detail of the process is on a scale so much larger than anything heretofore attempted that the setup is already somewhat appalling to contemplate.” When would the telescope be ready? a reporter asked. “So far as astronomy is concerned,” Day answered, “the existence of a 200” disk will remain a dream until such a disk emerges from the annealing furnace at ordinary temperature in one piece and free from strain. After that I am at your service for any
account of the disk or the manufacturing operation you may wish to publish.”

Corning—the company and the town—had not been accustomed to the attention of the outside world. There had been occasional hoopla when a new product, like the first Pyrex utensils, was announced, but marketing publicity was very different from the persistent questions of newsmen. When a reporter called Corning for details on Day’s comments, Leon V. Quigley, the newly appointed director of publicity for Corning Glass, dutifully explained the status of the project, the successful casting of the 120-inch mirror, and the preparations for the casting of the two-hundred-inch mirror. When the time came, he explained, Corning glassmakers would ladle the 20 tons of glass into the mold to create a two-hundred-inch-diameter, 26-inch-thick disk of Pyrex for the telescope. The reporter’s story became one more newspaper item, lost among the reports of Roosevelt’s frustrated efforts to deal with the deepening depression, Hitler’s first stabs into the maelstrom of European politics, and the morbid daily details of the Lindbergh kidnapping.

The story of the mirror might have remained buried in the news if an NBC researcher hadn’t picked up the item and put it into a script that was sent over to Lowell Thomas’s office in the new Empire State Building.

In 1934 America listened to the radio. Whole families gathered around a console in the parlor, or perhaps a tabletop unit in the kitchen, in the hours after supper. The immediacy of radio meant that for the first time, an entire nation could be focused on a single program, event, or news item. Rich and poor, black and white, men and women, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants—all heard the same broadcasts.

The most popular program on the air, from its beginnings in 1929, was the nightly
Amos ‘n’ Andy,
broadcast for fifteen minutes on NBC at 7:00 P.M., just after Lowell Thomas’s news broadcast. People were so eager not to miss a word of the stereotyped antics of the Kingfish, Brother Crawford, and Madam Queen that most tuned in early enough to hear Lowell Thomas and his news broadcast. It was said that the resonant tones of Thomas’s trademark sign-off, “So long until tomorrow,” and greeting, “Good evening, everybody” made his the most recognizable voice on the planet.

Thomas had made his fame traipsing across the desert in pursuit of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. A decade and a half later, books, lecture tours, and publicized adventures in faraway places had made the young, handsome, mustachioed Thomas famous. Damon Runyon claimed that Lowell Thomas was successful because he gave the impression of saying, “Now here is the news with some human slants on it and you can interpret it to suit yourself.” The columnist Cy Caldwell offered a different explanation in a proposed epitaph:

Here lies the bird
Who was heard
By millions of people—
Who were waiting to hear
“Amos ‘n’ Andy.”

Whichever the reason, for many Americans in the midst of the depression, the news was what Lowell Thomas reported. The superlatives in the story—
twenty
tons of glass, poured to create the
largest
glass casting ever made, for the
costliest
scientific instrument ever designed, the
biggest
telescope in the world, an instrument that would see
farther
into the cosmos—were the sort of tale Thomas delighted in reporting. He was never averse to hyperbole, and a list of superlatives was just what he needed to make a story that some would find “ordinary” into the kind of news that people remembered. Thomas knew a depressed America craved good news. He recognized a story about America’s greatness in the NBC script.

In his broadcast Thomas described the plans to cast the great mirror in the quiet upstate town of Corning, New York, then added a few superlatives of his own. This event, he reported, the creation of this mirror, this step forward for science and technology, was “the greatest item of interest to the civilized world in twenty-five years, not excluding the World War.”

The next morning Leon Quigley, the telephone receptionists at the Glass Works, and the Western Union office in Corning couldn’t keep up with the requests for information about the project. News services, newspaper reporters, and radio broadcasters wanted tickets to view the casting. Amateur and professional filmmakers besieged Quigley with requests to document the pour. Scientists and industrialists, eager to be present, rang up their old friends from school or clubs to request tickets for themselves, families, and friends. When Corning’s own paper, the
Evening Leader,
asked if Corning residents would also be allowed to attend the great event, Amory Houghton yielded to the circus atmosphere and announced that Corning employees and their families would receive tickets and that the Glass Works would make provisions for public viewing.

In Pasadena the Observatory Council tried to discourage the crowds that Corning seemed to be welcoming. Arthur Day, in Washington, was glad that Corning,
his
company, had finally gotten the attention of the press. Day even insisted on written confirmation from George Hale and Max Mason that they wanted only a few tickets for the great event.

Until Thomas’s broadcast the preparations for the two-hundred-inch disk had gone on quietly. Even the success of the 120-inch mirror wasn’t announced to the press. The optics labs in Pasadena weren’t
ready for the 120-inch mirror, so it had been crated in 8-x-8-inch timbers and left standing on its edge in a corner of Building 31 of the Corning Glass Works while efforts turned to the preparations for the two-hundred-inch mirror.

The 120-inch mirror had come out so well that McCauley decided not to tempt the fates with changes. The only modification in the casting procedure for the two-hundred-inch disk would be the use of hollow mold cores, which would cool rapidly with the disk, to form the pockets and ribs in the back of the disk. It would mean no more of the spectacular light-and-shadow show they had seen with the 120-inch disk, but also the end of the bubbles that had formed around the cores.

Building up the new hollow forms was laborious. Thirty-eight different forms were needed to create the complex geometry of ribs and pockets for the mirror supports. Altogether, 114 core forms had to be built up, out of 4,800 pieces of brick. McCauley derived formulas to calculate the cutting angles to build circular forms from pieces of rectangular brick. Draftsmen and engineers then worked out the exact dimensions of each piece for the mold makers, and the Corning masons, now practiced at the construction of these strange molds, cut the bricks on a modified table saw, finished them with a lathe, used a portable grinder to fair the edges of the assembled molds, and painted the inside with silica-flour coating. The task was complicated by the ultimate shape of the disk. Although it would be molded with a flat surface, the face of the mirror would ultimately be ground to a radius of curvature of 111 feet, which meant that the surface would be dished approximately 4 inches from edge to center. To maintain the proper thickness of glass over the forms, the cores had to decrease in height from 20 inches at the rim to 16 inches near the center.