The Perfect Machine (47 page)

As details of the train journey leaked out, the railroads began issuing press releases about “the most precious single shipment ever handled by the American Railroads,” and the extraordinary precautions that were being taken to crate, secure, and guard the disk on its journey. Sandy McDowell and John Anderson arranged a one-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy for the disk with Lloyds of London for a premium of nine hundred dollars. The railroads raised the possibility of dignitaries and scientists riding with the disk. McDowell, picking up Hale’s penuriousness, wrote that he had no objection to the use of a special train or to railroad people and others accompanying the disk if “no additional charges would be involved.”

The schedulers for the New York Central worked with the schedulers of the other lines for months to map out a route that would accommodate the disk. Heavier cargos had been shipped across the country by rail, including parts of the enormous turbines at the Hoover Dam. The challenge for the disk was its extreme fragility and size. On its side the disk would be too wide for most railbeds, so it had to be carried vertically. But even on a modified New York Central Railway
well car, with twenty-six-inch-diameter wheels instead of the standard thirty-three-inch wheels, and with the crate suspended in the well so that the bottom edge was only five and a half inches over the rails, the top of the crate would tower almost eighteen feet over the roadbed—higher than many tunnels and underpasses on the cross-country route.

It was March 1936 before the railroads and the millwrights building the crate were ready. The Chemung River, as if sensing the impending drama, acted up again. On March 9, when the disk was loaded onto a low-slung trailer provided by an Elmira contractor, the river was already at the floor level of the factory caves. The journey from the building on the riverbank behind A Factory, to the New York Central spur that led into the Corning yards, a distance of one-quarter mile, took thirty hours. The floodwaters were rising so quickly that many of the men who supervised the loading and lashing of the cargo were knee deep in water as the trailer started its journey. When the cargo wouldn’t clear the corner of one building, masons were called in to dismantle the bricks. Two sharp turns required teams of men with crowbars to hand-steer the trailer.

The next day, despite bleak weather—at least it wasn’t still raining, and the river had started to subside—a crowd of townspeople, newsmen, and movie cameramen from Fox, Paramount, Pathé, and Hearst showed up to witness the arrival of a huge NYCRR wrecking crane and the engine pulling the special well car. The car had been fitted with beams, rubber padding, and bolts to hold the crate. Hoisting the crated mirror, swinging it to a vertical position, and lowering the crate into the well of the railcar took most of a day. There were no mishaps, and the reporters—some of whom had come from as far as New York City—were left to fill their stories with clichés about the mirror fitting “like a glove” into the well and comments like, “It appears as if nothing short of an earthquake could jar the valuable contents of the package.”

The car disappeared from public viewing for a week in the Corning railyard, while the millwrights fitted tie rods and braces to support the crate. The weight of the mirror had sagged the crate closer to the rails than the anticipated 5.25-inch clearance, so gum rubber cushions and wooden planks were substituted for the sponge rubber pads that had originally supported the crate. Spring bolts increased the loading on the welded rails under the disk to a compression of approximately 60,000 pounds, which McCauley had calculated would be enough to dampen any bounce in the load. The millwrights finished by fastening steel plates, thick enough to deflect a bullet, to the sloping braces that held the mirror upright. The car was moved out of the factory yard to the NYCRR switching yard, just east of Walnut Street, and a crew from the Corning paint shop painted the crate bright white and lettered a huge PYREX and a smaller “200” TELESCOPE DISC” and “CORNING, N.Y.” in bold black block letters.

The assembled train was probably the shortest ever to set off across the country. Behind the steam engine, which flew the twin white flags of a Special, was only the tender, a single boxcar with the lifting sling and accessories for unloading the disk, the well car with the disk, and a caboose for the train crew. Every rail line on the route had to agree to George Hale’s orders for the journey: The train was never to exceed twenty-five miles per hour and was to move only during daylight. At night it was to be parked under bright illumination and heavy guards.

On March 25 the assembled train went to the NYCRR scales at the north yards with McCauley, a crew of millwrights, and a photographer riding on the well car. The weighing was a formality. The NYCRR had insisted that the car be ballasted against tipping with a load of heavy rails, so the 65,000 pounds of the crated disk was only half the weight of the loaded car. That night, the train was back on the Walnut Street siding, ready for a noon departure the following day. The Baron Steuben and other Corning hotels were again full with reporters and visitors.

March 26 dawned a chilly, bright day. A crowd gathered early, creating a workday traffic jam. There was no ceremony scheduled, so the newsmen searched for their stories. One sharp-eyed reporter found graffiti on the white sloping panels that protected the disk. Someone had scribbled, “I’d like to hear from you,” and given an address. Under it was a penciled, “Come up’n see me some time—Kitty.”

Representatives of each of the rail lines that would be carrying the precious cargo—the New York Central; the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; and the Santa Fe—had spent the final week of preparations in Corning. They would ride the caboose with the trainmen, special railroad detective Fred Phillips, and four railroad security agents who were entrusted with guarding the disk.

The waiting crowd hushed when NYCRR trainmen Phil Barrows raised his hand. Before he could signal the engineer, someone called out, “Where’s Murphy?” A search began for the jovial representative of the CB&Q, who had been the butt of jokes all week. Murphy was finally spotted on the run from the Athens Hotel, his breakfast in his hand. The crowd was still laughing when Murphy joined the others in the caboose, Barrows gave the signal, and the train slowly pulled away toward Watkins Glen.

McCauley felt a lump well up in his throat as the train eased over the grade crossings. It was exactly two years and one day since he had supervised the pouring of the first telescope disk, with the world watching. McCauley was still a young man, at the peak of his career. As a scientist, he was ready for whatever problem came along. He knew there would be other projects, other challenges. He also knew this glass disk would always be his masterpiece.

For fourteen days the four-car train wound its way across the United States, its journey chronicled daily in the newspapers and on the radio. Wherever it went the crowds were larger than anyone had anticipated, larger than any train had ever drawn. As interest built, even the increasingly garish stories about the trial of Bruno Hauptmann were crowded off front pages by reports of the stately journey of the great disk.

The first big city scheduled was Rochester, New York. A crowd turned out at the main station, only to discover that the closest the train would come to the city was across the Genesee River, north of the Ballantyne Bridge. Hundreds of people hurried to the bridge. Deputy sheriffs were hardly able to control the traffic.

Wherever the train went, crowds were waiting. Outside Buffalo, the train switched to the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western tracks, because the NYCRR route lacked adequate clearance. The DL&W route had two bridges with marginal clearance. As the train came to a near halt before the Bailey Street bridge, crowds pressed forward, and newspaper photographers snapped pictures of the clearance engineers and trainmasters giving the signals and the train inching forward. The crowd cheered when the top of the crated disk cleared the bridge by five inches.

The train averaged eighteen miles per hour during the day. At night, it was parked under guard. At Cleveland, Sergeant D. H. Simonson of the NYCRR, part of the guard crew, told the newspapers, “If anything happens to this tonight, I might as well start running.”

Some in the crowds turned away disappointed, when all they could see was the shields and the signs painted by the Corning sign-painters. For others it was enough. The train arrived in Indianapolis on a Sunday afternoon. Highways leading to the station were jammed to a standstill with cars, and the mob on the streets was so dense that the yardmaster had to call in city police to clear the tracks. Police estimated the crowd at ten thousand. The next day the train went through Terre Haute at noon. Schools and colleges were dismissed for the day so the students could see the disk.

At Charleston, Illinois, the disk was parked overnight under a heavy guard of railroad police. Murphy, the CB&Q man who had boarded late in Corning, wrote, “I estimate everyone in this town of 17,000 will see it.”

Eighteen-below-zero temperatures and a heavy snowstorm didn’t stop the science class of Cameron High School, in Cameron Junction, Missouri, from walking to the railroad tracks for a glimpse of the newest wonder of science. On the open plains, where the train rolled through tiny towns at twenty-five miles per hour, men and women lined the tracks, classes from one-room schools, mill workers, farmers, mailmen, housewives, and the unemployed. Grandfathers perched small children on their shoulders, so that some day they would be able to tell
their
children that they had seen the great “eye.”

Everyone insisted on calling the disk an “eye” or a “lens.” Even the Burlington Route, celebrating its role in transporting “one of the most precious single objects” ever moved, from St. Louis to Kansas City, titled its self-promotion brochure, “Transporting the World’s Largest Telescopic Lens.”

In Kansas City, where the cargo was to be transferred to the Santa Fe Railroad, the scheduled route led under the Broadway overpass. The official height would have cleared the disk easily, but the orders were that every questionable overpass was to be checked. The train slowed to a halt, then crept forward so the clearance engineer and trainmaster could measure the actual clearance.

The officials of the four lines had agreed that the final gauge of clearance would be the thickness of a pocket Bible. The crowd hushed as the trainmaster held the tiny Bible over the crate. It wouldn’t clear—frozen ground under the tracks at the overpass had heaved—so the train backed off and waited under guard while local routing agents devised a detour. That low overpass cost four hours of zigzag switching through and around Kansas City yards. No one kept track of how many trains had to be held up or rerouted to provide clear tracks for the special freight that for two weeks enjoyed priority over every other train in America.

As the train approached the Rockies, and again in the Cajon Pass between Barstow and San Bernardino in California, a local section crew rode a scooter car ahead of the train, searching the track for stones or debris from rockslides. The portion of the disk crate that hung below the level of the well car, less than six inches above the track, was as vulnerable as the top of the crate.

Outside Albuquerque, the train took a one-hundred-mile detour to avoid a questionable highway overpass. At Albuquerque a coal spout hung over the main line at sixteen feet above the track. The entire yard was shut down while the Special was routed through on a side track. Later, at the entrance to the Johnson Canyon Tunnel, the clearance over the westbound track measured only sixteen feet; the eastbound track showed eighteen feet. So, explained the freightmaster, “We went through on the wrong side,” though only after orders had been issued to halt or reroute all eastbound trains for the day.

Near Gallup, New Mexico, the train crossed the Continental Divide at an altitude of 7,300 feet. The disk was almost two thousand feet higher than it would be on Palomar. As it descended from the Cajon Pass into San Bernardino, a day away from its destination, a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
wrote: “Looking like an armored train ready for battle, the mirror special came into the Santa Fe yards just as the sun was setting. First a little old-fashioned locomotive puffing with importance … then the mirror, and last the all important caboose that always contained more railroad officials than train crew.”

On Friday morning, April 10, 1936, the train arrived at the little
Lamanda Park station in East Pasadena. It had taken sixteen days to travel three thousand miles. Hundreds of thousands of people had seen the train, making the journey to stations or to trackside in snow, rain, and cold. It looked more like
The Little Train That Could
than the most valuable cargo ever shipped.

Francis Pease was at the station in Pasadena to officially receive the cargo, along with Ferdinand Ellerman of the Mount Wilson Observatory, G. W. Sherburne of the astrophysics machine shop, and Marcus Brown. A crowd of more than five thousand gathered at the station to view the arrival, and police had to be called in to keep the area around the railcar clear as the crowd pushed close for a chance to touch the wondrous object that the nation had been watching in its journey across the country. By the time reporters showed to take photographs of the mirror before it was unloaded, Edwin Hubble had arrived and posed near the car.

McCauley had sent a detailed description of the crating and loading procedure and instructions for the unloading to George Hale. The crowd watched as workmen used acetylene torches to cut away the six steel rods that held the disk upright and the fifty heavy bolts that held the metal shields in place. When one plate buckled as it was cut away, the crowd let out a collective sigh. Pease inspected the crate before it was lifted off the railcar. He found the names of dozens of railroad men scrawled on it, but no damage.

A few hours after the mirror, the “Barstow Hook,” the largest railroad crane the Santa Fe operated, arrived at the station. The crane was rated to lift 150 tons; it was tested on a 116,000-pound locomotive before it was swung into place over the disk. It took five hours to lift the 20-ton disk, in its 15-ton crate, off the car and load it, horizontally, onto a 40-foot-long rubber-padded trailer rig provided by the Belyea Truck Co., which advertised that it could ship any cargo anywhere. The truck, escorted by Pasadena police officers on motorcycles, and followed by workmen in cars and boys on bicycles, drove through the heart of Pasadena to California Street and the astrophysics buildings at Caltech. For one turn greased steel plates had to be placed under the wheels of the truck. Movie cameras on trucks recorded the entire journey.