The Perfect Machine (41 page)

Sinclair Smith had joined Anderson and Pease as a part-time Caltech employee. Smith was a brash young researcher in physics and astronomy, until he spent a year at the famed Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge, where James Chadwick and his associates were probing the secrets of the atom during the 1920s. He returned “much matured,” and Anderson recommended him for the lab staff at Mount Wilson. Smith had worked with electronic detectors and controls, so his special project became the drive mechanisms for the telescope.

Large telescopes like the one-hundred-inch and the sixty-inch were equipped with clock drives that turned the telescope synchronously with the sidereal rotation of the heavens, so that a star would appear to stand still in the telescope during a long exposure. Astronomers had long known that the apparent motion of the heavens is not simple. The rotation of the earth is not perfectly regular, and the apparent motion is also affected by atmospheric effects, gravitational influences from
the moon, and other factors which could be modeled in equations. Smitty took on the challenge of duplicating not just the simple rotation of the earth but the other minuscule motions, so the motion of the telescope would come as close as possible to mimicking the apparent motion of the heavens, minimizing the demands on the observers for hand-guiding the exposures.

He had the assignment of finding out all he could about photosensitive devices, time standards, servo controls, and other devices that might be useful to control the telescope. Like others who had pledged their time to the project, he soon discovered that the telescope could be all-consuming. Although Caltech was paying only half his salary, the project was eating up most of his time, cutting into the time he had free for research. And even as Anderson brought the engineers into the project, some basic and seemingly insoluble problems remained.

First the rough engineering calculations showed that the bearing for the split-ring horsehoe would have to support a weight of close to 1 million pounds—five hundred tons. The big telescopes on Mount Wilson had used drums of mercury and floats for their polar axis bearings, which produced a smooth motion along with a then-unrecognized danger to the staff from the quantity of mercury. The weight and size of the two-hundred-inch telescope precluded that solution. The consideration of other choices—ball bearings, roller bearings, or a plain bearing—were frustrating enough that discussions of the bearings, Anderson recalled, “usually resulted in a headache.” The bearing for the horseshoe, which would carry most of the 500,000-pound weight of the moving portion of the telescope, would be the largest journal bearing ever built. The load would deform any kind of ball bearing, and while Pease put roller bearings into his drawings, even his own calculations showed that roller bearings would require some 22,000 foot-pounds of torque to overcome the friction and move the telescope. Moving a telescope against that much friction would require huge electric motors; the resultant vibrations would be impossible to isolate from the telescope. The weight of the horseshoe would also ultimately distort the rollers, which would then introduce wobbles into the motion of the telescope.

Even if a bearing could be built, no one was sure that a structure as large as the horseshoe could be built with the rigidity the telescope required. Pease and Porter weren’t engineers, but their preliminary calculations showed that no matter what material or structure was used to build the horseshoe, the open end would deform slightly as it turned from one extreme to the other. A sag of one-sixteenth inch in the forty-six-foot diameter horseshoe would be enough to leave the telescope axis unacceptably misaligned.

Still, the horseshoe design solved so many other problems that the unresolved issues were shunted aside. Caltech was a cocky institution.
The engineers and scientists who worked on the project, some with little commercial experience or background in the strict hierarchy of an academic department, weren’t easily daunted by challenges that stodgier souls would call “uneconomical,” “impractical,” or “impossible.” And after the apparent success of the mirror casting in Corning, even Hale, Adams, and Pease—who had lived through the birthing pains of other big telescopes—were confident that the two-hundred-inch telescope
could
be built. Their optimism was contagious for the young scientists and engineers who worked on the project. Getting a job during the depression was an achievement. When the job was at Caltech, working on the biggest scientific project ever undertaken, with a committed budget, it was hard not to feel that there was nothing you couldn’t do, including solving problems that the books and experts said were insoluble.

John Merriam, at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, had been chafing at the publicity given the project ever since the grant for the two-hundred-inch telescope was announced. Every time a newspaper or radio report appeared based on the GE press releases, Merriam wrote George Hale to protest that proper credit had not been given to the Mount Wilson Observatory for their contributions to the project. Hale or John Anderson would write back, explaining that they had nothing to do with the GE publicity and that they had tried repeatedly to persuade GE
not
to publicize their work on the project. Merriam brushed the fine points aside. He knew only that adequate credit hadn’t been assigned to
his
institution, the Mount Wilson Observatory.

Mount Wilson—still the site of the largest operating telescope in the world—had stayed in the news. Edwin Hubble, with his tall stature, tweedy attire, omnipresent pipe, and affected British accent, was an ideal subject for the newsmagazines. He liked the attention, liked to be photographed with visiting celebrities, from Albert Einstein to movie stars, and the magazines liked to run photographs and stories on what they called Hubble’s “law” of the expanding universe. The favorable publicity wasn’t enough for John Merriam.

By early 1934, after Lowell Thomas’s broadcast made the telescope a household word again, Merriam was so angry at what he saw as slights of his institution that he appointed a committee “to give study to questions touching cooperation with California Institute in furtherance of the 200-inch telescope project.” Merriam named Walter Adams as chairman; the members were Hubble and Seares from the Mount Wilson staff, Fred Wright from the Carnegie board, and “Dr. Hale if he desires to associate himself with the committee.” Merriam had a way with words that could provoke even a peacemaker like George Hale.

Merriam pulled other strings as well, sending Arthur Day, the director of the Carnegie Institution Geophysical Labs in Washington and a vice president of the Corning Glass Works, to talk to Max Mason
at the Rockefeller Foundation. Day explained that he was concerned that the original spirit of the grant for the telescope was not being observed. The casting of the mirror seemed to increase the confidence of the Caltech people, and Day worried that the telescope might not be open to anyone else. Mason, reluctant to interfere, agreed that overlapping staffs of the Mount Wilson Observatory and Caltech were a good idea—a harmless concession, since Anderson, Sinclair, and Pease were already overlapping—and that Day should keep him informed if it appears that the “spirit” of the grant was not being observed. Mason marked his memo to the file on the meeting PERSONAL lest it fall into other hands and start a stir.

Merriam’s committee was a sham. He knew what he wanted: “As the greater weight of authority relative to matters that touch questions of astronomical study and operation lies with the Carnegie Institution, I assume that this contribution by the Institution may at least equal in significance the use of funds available to California Institute and the contribution made by California Institute in the general scientific and engineering sense.” Merriam’s concern was the same as it had been in 1928, when he almost aborted the project: He wanted credit, especially
public
credit, for the Carnegie Institution.

George Hale was too tired to fight. His health was faltering. With the mirror apparently successfully cast at Corning, the design process in full gear, the site picked, and negotiations underway for the actual observatory site, he was marshalling his energy, selecting which meetings he could attend, eager to see the project through to completion. He was frequently fatigued, more often than not confined to his dark room, reluctant to waste time on matters that did not contribute to the progress of the telescope. He had begun jotting autobiographical notes, recalling his childhood and early years.

There was also a minor scandal at the Mount Wilson Observatory that Hale wasn’t eager to publicize. A bookkeeper, James Herbert, had embezzled $13,000 by forging Adams’s signature. When Adams reported the theft to Hale, Hale reported that Herbert was an “untrustworthy thief” who had previously stolen securities entrusted to him, and that he had only silenced the earlier episode out of concern for Herbert’s wife and children. Herbert wasn’t prosecuted because Merriam feared that “radical elements” in California would pillory the Carnegie Institution for paying a bookkeeper so little as to drive him to theft.

When Hale heard that Merriam had been lobbying Max Mason, he took another train ride to New York to meet with Mason. Hale explained once again the circumstances that had led to the grant, Merriam’s effort to derail it, the actions of Elihu Root, and the overruling vote of the executive committee that had finally forced the matter. Merriam, he explained, was not
opposed
to the telescope. He just wanted to “proceed along different lines.” Far from urging stronger
cooperation between Mount Wilson and Caltech, he had actually objected that Adams, the director of Mount Wilson, was “too close” to the Caltech people.

When he got back to Pasadena, in April 1934, Hale answered Merriam’s charges in a sharply worded statement, pointing to the minutes of decision making by the Observatory Council; the de facto membership on the council of Adams, the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, and his record of attending every meeting; the fine working relationship between the Mount Wilson staffers on the project and the personnel at Caltech; and the use of lenses and other equipment developed as part of the two-hundred-inch project on existing telescopes at Mount Wilson, which had greatly contributed to the research of Hubble and others. “In the future,” Hale wrote, “unless effective cooperation between C.I.W. [Carnegie Institution of Washington] and C.I.T. [California Institute of Technology] is prevented by the action of C.I.W., the advantages to C.I.W. will greatly increase.” Elihu Root congratulated Hale privately on the statement and the progress of the project, commiserating that “an atmosphere of disgust, suspicion, and personal dislike and resentment” will stop the best work anywhere.

With the depression giving no signs of abating, with 13 million unemployed, with the pitched hatred of the weekly radio broadcasts of Father Charles C. Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith drawing even bigger audiences than
Amos ‘n’ Andy,
and with members of the American Student Union on college campuses openly demonstrating for Communist causes, the Observatory Council’s concerns about publicity for the project were exactly the opposite of Merriam’s craving for public recognition and credit: “In periods of social unrest subversive tendencies may at any moment make their appearance; and in a crisis there might not be time to convince an ignorant public that large sums of money flowing from the great foundations have always been used to useful public purpose.”

John Merriam had been too consumed with institutional pride to see what was happening outside his Washington office.

19
Revelation

At the end of May 1934 the two-hundred-inch disk was cool enough to view. George McCauley wasn’t willing to predict what he would find when he lifted the cover of the oven.

After the crowds finally left Corning the night of the pouring, it had taken McCauley and the Corning millwrights and electricians, with advice from the manufacturer, three days to change the lubricants on the screw hoists and retune the linkages so they were able to lift the disk into the annealer. By then the temperature of the disk had fallen to 300°C. McCauley raised the temperature to 530°C, at which annealing normally began, held it for thirty days, then set a rapid cooling schedule, dropping the temperature of the glass by eight degrees Celsius per day.

With the reporters gone and the attention of the fickle public shifted back to Hitler’s newest threats against Austria and the trial of the accused Lindbergh kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, McCauley enjoyed the breathing room. He knew the cooling schedule he set, approximately ten times faster than the annealing schedule they had calculated for the disk, wouldn’t produce a satisfactory disk, but with orders for other large disks backed up, he was anxious to free up the annealer. The rapid cooling was an experiment.

When he opened the annealing oven, the surface of the two-hundred-inch mirror disk was an ugly mask of scars and chunks of refractory brick, the remnants of the floating cores. McCauley wasn’t concerned about the surface. What mattered was the quality of the glass, how well it had annealed. With a polarimeter and a light source, McCauley tested the disk, shining the light source through the glass and measuring the residual strains in different sections of the disk. The strains were approximately ten times what he would have expected for a properly annealed disk. McCauley eagerly reported the good news to Pasadena. If the brief, rapid annealing had reduced the strains to that point, it meant that the full annealing schedule would produce a disk free of strains.

Enjoying the freedom from outside attention, McCauley began a salvage effort. His tool was a long chisel that had been fabricated in the Corning blacksmith shop. Another man worked alongside him with a portable sandblasting machine. They wore breathing masks and goggles, but after hours of digging and blasting, their ears and hair were filled with fine refractory dust. It took most of a day to dig and blast the remnants of the brick cores out of the surface of the disk. They then vacuumed the surface clean, and the disk was put back into the casting oven and slowly heated for five days, until it reached a temperature of 1100°C, hot enough for the surface to remelt and gradually smooth itself. When the last traces of the broken cores were gone, the disk was again consigned to the annealing oven for another annealing cycle.