The Perfect Machine (46 page)

The new lab was a huge building, designed in Russell Porter’s characteristic Art Deco style, with stone latticework on the ends to conceal the lack of windows. McCauley described the vast interior space as “large enough to enclose five six-room bungalows, with space enough above their gabled tops for a roof garden containing 5 badminton courts with side lines for spectators.” The machine shop next door assembled an impressive array of grinding and polishing machines for the optics lab. The smaller machines were familiar, modeled after machines at the Mount Wilson shop, but there were also big machines, of welded steel, large enough to hold the two-hundred-inch mirror and tilt it to a vertical position for testing. Brown started on the smaller machines, grinding test mirrors that had arrived from Corning. The mirrors would never be used in a telescope. They were figured solely to test the Pyrex disks and the grinding machines, to determine grades of carborundum and tentative grinding schedules, facing block materials, and procedures for holding the ribbed-back disks in the new grinding machines.

While Marcus Brown tested mirrors in a temporary laboratory in the basement of the astrophysics machine shop, the machinists upstairs worked on the big grinding machine. The machine was a challenge. It would cradle the largest and most valuable piece of glass in the world. SKF Industries proudly proclaimed in advertisements that the two 51-inch-diameter bearings they had provided for the 17½
-
foot-diameter grinding table were “the most accurate giant anti-friction bearings ever produced.”

The machine shop was also turning out models for the engineers who were close to a final design for the telescope and the observatory. Russell Porter had finished a design for the observatory building
itself, including the preliminary engineering for the dome. Up on Palomar workmen were leveling the site and excavating the foundations. While the flurry of work went on, Brown and a few men ground and polished test disks that would ultimately be discarded. From time to time he would look up at the majestic door, two stories high, at the far corner of the lab. Brown was waiting for the day when that door opened.

George McCauley arrived in Pasadena on the Santa Fe Chief. He had traveled in secret, picking up the ticket to Pasadena in Chicago so no one in Corning would know his ultimate destination. He had a private Pullman compartment, and tried to concentrate on sketches and data for his presentation to the Observatory Council. The Santa Fe seemed to conspire against him. Just outside the city limits south of Chicago, as his train passed a northbound freight, a wrecking crane on the freight train broke free, hitting the leading diesel of the Chief. McCauley arrived in Pasadena two hours late and exhausted with anxiety.

His meeting was at the Astrophysical Laboratory on Thursday afternoon. He was ready with his sketches of the disk, measurements of the location and magnitude of the scars he had found, calculations, and tables of data to convince the council that the scars would not affect the finished mirror if the surface thickness were ground to
3
? instead of the previously planned 4 inches. George Hale wasn’t there—he was too ill to attend—but McCauley anticipated a tough meeting with Anderson, Porter, Pease, and the others.

Anderson studied McCauley’s data and passed it around before giving his opinion that there would be no problem with a final thickness of 3? inches for the surface of the disk over the ribs. Anderson had already tested smaller ribbed disks that Brown had figured. They were more rigid than the preliminary engineering had predicted. With the project moving into its eighth year, everyone was eager to start the most important part of the project—grinding and polishing the mirror. Arthur Day, who had been notified of the condition of the disk, had met in New York with Max Mason and Sandy McDowell. They too had given their go-ahead.

Later that afternoon McCauley was taken to see Hale. Hale, confined to his darkened room, brightened at the news that the disk had survived the annealing intact. He said he was eager to see the grinding begin.

On the way back to Corning, in Chicago, McCauley received a telegram from Corning warning him that a “well-known science editor” was going to try to intercept him for a scoop on the mirror. He managed to evade the reporter, but it was obvious that news on the disk couldn’t be delayed much longer. The reporters were now joined in their queries by a book author, David Woodbury, a friend of Russell
Porter’s from Maine, who had begun interviewing anyone who would talk to him about the telescope project.

On December 8, 1935, with George Hale’s approval, the press was invited to see the disk lowered from the annealing oven. Hale urged that they be shown the bottom of the disk, instead of the face, both because it would be more interesting and because he wanted to quell possible rumors about the scarred face. But the newspapers wanted the whole show. Photographers were allowed to erect lights around the oven and along the tracks that led from below the oven out to the temporary building on the riverbank. The room was bitterly cold, heated by portable “salamanders.” When McCauley gave the order, the four screw hoists took twenty-four minutes to majestically lower the disk into view. When the surface of the disk was almost in view, a quick measurement showed that one edge might strike a radiator along one wall, so the operation halted while workmen with torches removed the radiator and its supporting hooks. The delay increased the suspense for the crowd of reporters and photographers, none quite sure what he would see.

When it was finally lowered into place, the surface of the disk was dusty, but observers could still see the ridges and pits, some several inches deep. When the disk was within an arm’s distance of a special balcony that had been built for the reporters, McCauley and Hostetter fielded questions and posed for photographs on the disk. “No effort had been made to get a perfectly smooth surface,” they explained, since the face of the disk would be completely reshaped in the grinding and polishing stages. The pits, they reported, were handmade, deliberate efforts with the sandblaster to explore the consistency of the glass. The headlines in the newspapers the next day, Monday, December 9, set off a wave of demands for a public unveiling.

There was plenty of news in the United States at the end of December 1935, most of it depressing. The weather had been terrible: Floods and storms had followed the summer drought. The Midwest had begun to turn into a dust bowl. Father Coughlin and his “Golden Hour of the Little Flower” were at their height; his anti-Semitic radio broadcasts generated so much response that he received more mail than anyone else in the United States, including the president. In Pennsylvania employers were deducting thirty-three cents per week from the pay of children to indemnify themselves for the $100 fines imposed for working the children ninety hours per week. The average steelworker’s clothes caught fire once a week. The average family income, excluding those on relief, was $1,348 per year, which typically supported a mother, father, and one or two children.

In the fifth year of the worst depression anyone could remember, the successful casting of the great mirror, the triumph of American technology, was the kind of good news many Americans were eager to celebrate. Corning yielded to the demands. The first public unveiling
was scheduled for Sunday, January 26. By then Corning millwrights, using the first two-hundred-inch disk as a model, had finished the steel crate for shipping the disk. The first disk was rolled out of the steel building on the riverbank, to be stored on a platform of heavy timbers, and the second disk took its place. The disk was nestled into the steel crate, swung upright with the four corner chain lifts, and the masons began the tedious work of chipping the mold cores out of the ribbed back. McCauley wanted to display the disk with the scarred surface hidden, and its best face—the ribbed back—showing.

The cores were only half out by January 26. A blizzard made roads in the Corning area nearly impassable. Still, two thousand people showed up to see the great symbol of American progress.

Two days later the rest of the cores had been removed. The disk was again open for public viewing on February 2. This time more than five thousand visitors came to view the disk. An observer described the audience as “filled with awe and puzzlement”—awe no doubt at the sheer size of the immense disk and puzzlement at just what this great waffle iron of glass would do. No matter how many press releases Leon Quigley put out, all but a few newspaper reporters called it an “eye” or “lens.” That the huge mass of glass was not to see
through
was a concept counterintuitive to all but the amateur astronomers and others familiar with telescopes. Most reporters chose to ignore the careful wording of the press releases.

On February 6 the press photographers were invited to take photographs of the disk before it was crated. One photographer, Robert Richie, stayed on long after the others left. Richie tried every possible angle to get the photographs he wanted, including lying on the floor and standing on ladders. Late in the day he finally had the angle he wanted, but announced that the photo needed human interest. Would McCauley be willing to pose?

McCauley agreed, and Richie asked him to climb up to the central hole in the disk, some nine feet off the floor, and pretend he was measuring the stress in the disk with a small polariscope. After much tinkering with the lights and camera angles, Richie finally snapped his photograph. The resulting photo, with McCauley looking very tiny in the middle of the great disk, was widely distributed, winning national recognition for Richie, even wider fame for the telescope disk, and a temporarily sore back for McCauley.

The cascades of publicity for the as-yet-unveiled disk, and the much reproduced photographs, brought a barrage of queries from all over the country. What had been an object of curiosity for those in central and southern New York was suddenly a focus of national attention. Schoolchildren, mayors of small towns, hucksters looking for a promotion, and reporters who had rarely covered anything more distant than their local county fair wrote to find out when and where they could see the great disk. Told there would be no more public viewing,
they asked when the disk would be shipped to California. Where would the route take it? What cities would it visit?

The mid-1930s had seen a wave of building projects, many with the kinds of superlatives that had been the triggers for national pride a decade before. Radio and the wire services had also tied the sprawling nation together. The nightly news and the familiar entertainment programs were shared from coast to coast. Still, hearing about the new Golden Gate Bridge on a Lowell Thomas news broadcast, or seeing UPI photographs of Hoover Dam in the newspaper, didn’t evoke the same pride as the possibility of actually
seeing,
up close, a great and unique achievement of American technology. In the eight years that the telescope project had been underway, none of the superlatives had been diminished. It was still the biggest and most expensive scientific device ever planned. The mirror disk—the largest and heaviest piece of glass ever cast—was the first tangible evidence of the telescope. Americans, in small towns and big cities, in rural hamlets that had never seen any telescope except in a Sears Catalogue, wanted to see the triumph of American achievement.

The railroads, aware of the popular interest, besieged the Corning Glass Works and the Observatory Council with requests to carry the disk. The Argonaut Steamship Line offered to ship the disk by sea, guaranteeing delivery in twenty days. Teamsters offered their services. Glen M. Wiley, the “designer and builder of Wiley Whirleys,” offered to truck the disk across the country, assuring Hale and Anderson that he could provide the maximum publicity for the disk. Hale scribbled on the letter, “This man must think we have the point of view of a three ring circus!” Wiley, not easily discouraged, wrote highway departments in every state on his proposed route for permission to carry the oversize cargo.

The final route was shaped as much by preferences at Corning and Pasadena as by questions of clearance for the huge cargo. George Hale, impressed with the Santa Fe’s handling of the 120-inch disk and the proximity of its station in Pasadena, favored it over the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific. Nate Cole, the traffic manager at the Corning Glass Works, preferred the “Big Four” route out of Corning, with the New York Central taking the shipment from Corning to Cleveland and handing it off there to the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway. The Erie Railroad and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western were turned down because the Erie route involved the switching yards at Chicago, which George Hale—a Chicago native—thought might involve shunting too rough for the disk. The Delaware, Lackawanna had low-clearance problems on portions of its route.

Although too sick to take part in the day-to-day decisions on the telescope, Hale took a special interest in the shipment. When F. E. Williamson, the president of the New York Central, wrote that they
planned to ship the mirror as the sole cargo on a special train, Hale, not eager to pay a special fare, wrote back that a car in an ordinary train would be fine. Williamson later explained that there would be no additional cost for the special train. McDowell suggested sending a dummy cargo, as large as the disk, ahead of the shipment, to make sure of clearances. Hale, the kind of man who complained when too many pencils were missing from his secretary’s desk, tried to take advantage of the competition of railroads to negotiate down the cost of the shipment. The western roads offered a rate of $1.80 per cwt. The eastern roads wanted $3.43. Hale wanted the whole shipment to go at the lower rate and tried to get an additional discount on the grounds that the disk would be insured by Lloyds of London, so the railroads would need no special insurance.

Insurance was a tricky question. The railroads insisted on a replacement value for the bill of lading. No one had ever put a price tag on the mirror. Corning had sent some interim bills for time and material, which had totaled less than $300,000. If asked, McCauley and the bean counters could have come up with the incremental cost for the second mirror. But that was back when a portion of A Factory had been set aside and a large melting tank was kept filled with 715-CF Pyrex for the manufacture of telescope mirror disks, and a special crew, including experienced ladlers, had been assembled for the pours. The tank had since been converted to regular production of baby bottles, and the ladling crew dispersed. Whatever the cost in man-hours and equipment, McCauley, who had sweated through the bobbing cores, floods, and earthquakes, would have been the first to say that there was no way to get insurance for the “luck” that Corning had needed to cast the disk.