The Perfect Machine (53 page)

After he received a letter from Max Mason reporting that although they hoped “the glass would behave better as deeper depths were reached” the fractures seemed to be “distributed throughout,” Houghton asked McCauley to prepare quotes of a price and a delivery date for a new mirror.

The situation didn’t look promising.

When the grant was first awarded, $6 million—the budget figure George Hale had pulled out of the air of his room at the University Club—seemed generous enough for every eventuality. Eight years later, after close to a million dollars had been expended on the GE experiments, and hundreds of thousands more for the series of mirrors from Corning, the machine and optics shops and the astrophysics building in Pasadena, and the site work on Palomar, the grant no longer seemed bottomless. Westinghouse had estimated the cost of the fabrication for the mount and tube at $0.37 per pound, a low, depression-era bid. For one million pounds of telescope mount, it would still come to $370,000, which did not include the cost of transporting the huge pieces to Palomar or assembling them there. The control system for the telescope, and the various eyepieces, spectrographs, electronic sensors, and other auxiliary equipment would also make demands on the budget.

And even as the cost of the telescope mounted, there were new demands for additional instrumentation. The Schmidt camera on Palomar was performing beautifully on Zwicky’s searches for supernovas. The astronomers began to discuss the usefulness of a much larger Schmidt camera—as large as opticians could fabricate—to serve as a wide-area survey camera for the two-hundred-inch telescope. Hubble gave the proposed camera his blessing. When he had first searched for novas and Cepheid variable stars with the one-hundred-inch telescope, he had to guess at promising areas and photograph them with the narrow field of view of the big telescope. As he and Milton Humason expanded their search for distant galaxies, they were still using the same technique of
guessing
at the most productive areas to study. The eighteen-inch Schmidt camera had proved that the concept of a wide-field camera worked, but the limiting magnitude and image size of the small Schmidt camera weren’t large enough to serve as a survey camera for the two-hundred-inch telescope. Hubble urged that they build as large a Schmidt camera as possible, preferably a fifty-inch
f/2
instrument.

The astronomers and the Observatory Council all enthusiastically
endorsed the proposal, and Max Mason sent feelers to his former colleagues at the Rockefeller Foundation to see if they would approve the expenditure for a large Schmidt camera within the terms of the grant, which allowed for “the purchase of a site, and the construction of an observatory, including a 200-inch reflecting telescope with accessories, and any and all other expenses incurred in making the observatory available for use.” Mason was sure he could get the new Schmidt telescope approved, but money spent for a big Schmidt camera came out of the same $6 million budget. Would there be enough left to pour, anneal, transport, and do the preliminary grinding on a new disk for the two-hundred-inch telescope—which might prove no better than the disk they had? How much was a reserve mirror worth in the now-tight budget?

George Hale had been able to discuss questions like that one with Mason. Now Mason had crossed over to the Observatory Council, to being the grantee instead of the grantor. His relationship with his former colleagues at the Rockefeller Foundation was more personal than consultative. Their correspondence, sometimes marked PRIVATE, interspersed comments on mutual friends or fine wines and cognacs and armagnacs into the commentary on projects. When Mason reported on developments on the telescope project, he mentioned that they were still finding fractures at the point when all traces of fractures and checks should have been long gone. But the mention was quickly glissaded over in favor of a discussion of the difficulty of getting a decent 1926 Chambertin.

With no one to ask for advice, and with the pressures of a dozen other aspects of the project pressing on him from all sides, Mason set the figure they would be willing to pay for another disk at fifty thousand dollars, exactly half of McCauley’s estimate of Corning’s cost, not including overhead or profit. If Corning could quietly produce a new disk for fifty thousand dollars, the council would go ahead with the order. In private correspondence Mason negotiated with McCauley and Houghton, pointing out that the problems with the disk weren’t due to the shutoff of power during the flood or the earthquake—the sort of “Acts of God” that are exempted in warranties and guarantees—but were instead striae in the glass from contamination with alumina from the walls of the melting tank.

McCauley’s estimate of one hundred thousand dollars for a replacement disk was arbitrary. He had already dismissed two procedures for avoiding contamination in the glass as impractical. A melting tank large enough not to show a significant drop in level from the removal of the glass for a two-hundred-inch disk would cost more than one-third of a million dollars to construct. And pouring the disk in layers, over a period of days or even weeks, would require that the mold withstand the high temperatures for the entire period; it wasn’t
clear that any refractory brick and any technique for cementing the complex surfaces of a mold could withstand that heating.

Those options were so unpromising that McCauley decided that all future disks would be made by an entirely different process than any they had tried. They would use only glass that had been in contact with unused refractories. A newly lined tank would be filled with the glass mix, heated, and held long enough to fine the glass. The tank would then be cooled, and the glass would be mined from the tank in blocks, with cleanly fractured faces. To make mirror disks, the blocks of pure glass would then be placed on a mold under the beehive oven and heated until the glass sagged into the mold. They had already tried the process with smaller disks. No one knew if it was possible to sag the glass for a two-hundred-inch ribbed disk into a mold.

McCauley could make no assurances about a delivery date. With enough glass on hand for the back orders of telescope disks, and with a growth of orders for commercial products in 1936, the 3A melting tank, which had been used to melt Pyrex for the telescope disks, had been converted back to use for baby bottles. Much of the equipment for the casting and annealing ovens had been dismantled, and many of the experienced personnel dispersed to other projects. Even if they succeeded in producing a mirror by the new process, it would require a year of annealing—with all the perils that entailed—and another journey across the country.

The negotiations went slowly. McCauley’s analysis suggested that the glass that had been poured into the mold first should be better than the glass added later. Even in the heated casting igloo, the viscosity of the molten Pyrex permitted only limited homogenization of the glass in the mold, so the contaminants that affected the later pours of the ladles might not have reached down into the layer of glass close to the mold. If he was right, Anderson and Brown should start seeing a rapid decline in the frequency and gravity of the fractures.

All any of them could do was wait and see.

25
Big Machines

The Westinghouse South Philadelphia Works was an enormous factory, acres of space with machine tools as large as any in the world. Their specialty was machining hydroelectric equipment and steam turbines for ships, but American shipbuilding had been slack for years, the union movement of the 1930s had made inroads at the South Philadelphia Works, and the large work force meant a very expensive payroll for Westinghouse. The company already had slack capacity and what public relations firms would later call an “image” problem.

Fortune
magazine wrote that Westinghouse wore “seven-league boots” and straddled the “entire market.” Its irons pressed gowns in penthouse apartments and red flannels in dude ranch laundries, its generators provided the current to run chippers in Canadian pulp mills and air drills in Arizona copper mines, its motors drove steel slabbing mills and “one-mouse-power” electric razors. But so little of its production was products that the public had seen that most Americans had heard of Westinghouse only in association with broadcasting or home appliances. The contract to build the mounting for what the newspapers now routinely called “the greatest scientific machine in the world” would not only keep machinists and machines busy but would provide marvelous opportunities for publicity that would promote a corporate identity.

Eager as it was for work, Westinghouse was also a company and a shop with a long tradition of doing work its way. The engineers were accustomed to working from large-scale drawings that covered every detail of the proposed work. They would then fabricate, weld, machine, and heat-treat the components, preassemble the turbine on the shop floor to make sure every part fit as intended, and finally disassemble the parts for transport to the shipyard, where they could be reassembled by shipwrights and mechanics. It was a solid, reliable procedure. Since even the largest turbines could easily be accommodated in the factory and foundry buildings, and the workers were accustomed to the procedures involved in assembling the machinery, the extra cost for the conservative
approach was modest. Jess Ormondroyd, in charge of the experimental division and with many years’ experience on large machinery behind him, was convinced that the procedure was the only safe and reliable way to build large fabrications.

The Caltech engineers had a different idea.

As early as January 1935, when many features of the design of the telescope were still undecided, McDowell heard that Corning had received orders for one-tenth-size models of the telescope mirror—disks with the same ribbed-back design as the big mirror, but only twenty inches in diameter. He proposed that Caltech order one of the smaller mirrors and use it to build an exact one-tenth-size model of the telescope, with every system used on the big one. Not only could the model pinpoint design and engineering problems, but it could ultimately serve as a guide scope for the bigger telescope.

The astronomers patiently explained to the navy captain that his idea wouldn’t work. The guiding mechanism for the two-hundred-inch telescope, like those on the sixty- and one-hundred-inch telescopes, would have to be internal to the telescope, relying on the main optics. Even if an external guide scope were needed, a. twenty-inch f/3.3 telescope would not make a good guide scope.

The guide scope idea was abandoned, but McDowell was still intrigued with the possibilities of building a model of the telescope. As the design stages progressed, he had Russell Porter build a celluloid model of the telescope at one-fiftieth scale. By then Corning had begun producing the twenty-inch-diameter replica disks; one arrived at Pasadena for Caltech; and McDowell again took up the model idea, arguing that systems like the oil bearings and the spoked declination-bearing supports could all be tested on the model.

The engineers pointed out that a model wouldn’t really test the design, because many of the engineering concepts couldn’t be scaled. The loads of a one-tenth-scale model were so much smaller, and the harmonic frequencies of the parts so much higher, that deformations, friction of moving parts, or vibrations of the model weren’t a useful indication of what would happen with the full-size machine. McDowell was quick to concede their points, but a model, he argued, would test how the various assemblies mated with one another and would provide a working demonstration of the new ideas, like the horseshoe bearing and the oil pads. He ordered the machine shop to build the model. Except that there would be no observers cage—even Caltech freshmen weren’t that small—and that the hydraulic piping ran in external pipes instead of lines within the mounting, the small telescope was meant to be an exact working scale model.
^*

For some problems the model provided valuable data. Although the deflections of the tube in the model would be much smaller than in the actual telescope, the engineers put together a system of mirrors that could accurately measure deflections of 1/100,000 inch, fine enough to prove that Mark Serrurier’s tube design would work and that the complex forces in the yoke assembly would cancel one another out.

Westinghouse built its own model of the mounting out of celluloid, using small brass weights to load the model while micrometers and electrical microswitches and microammeters measured the deflection of various components. Stress lines would also show up in the celluloid.

McDowell originally wanted to solicit competitive bids for the mounting, the way he had done with navy projects. The bid from Westinghouse was a minimum of $800,000 and a guaranteed maximum of $1,100,000, far more than the Observatory Council could afford. Hale urged that instead McDowell negotiate a cost-plus arrangement, essentially the same sort of agreement the council had with Corning Glass. The new agreement held the cost down, but the bills from Westinghouse still raised questions.

George Hale, eagle-eyed despite his increasingly frequent attacks, was the first to notice the problem. In January 1936 he read through the correspondence with Westinghouse and noticed what seemed like enormous “miscellaneous” expenditures, including revamping the foundry building ($81,250) and building a new turning rig ($62,500). There were also large expenditures proposed for moving sections of the mounting to the Sun Shipbuilding Company for annealing in their furnaces, and to other Westinghouse plants in Pittsburgh for portions of the machining too large to be undertaken in South Philadelphia. Hale was worried about the expenditures. Between the work in the optics shop and the machine shop, the grading and site work on the mountain, and the proposed contracts at Westinghouse, the expenditures for 1936 were rapidly sliding toward $600,000—one-tenth of the entire grant.

McDowell had pushed for Westinghouse to build the large components of the mount because they had the facilities to fabricate, weld, and machine very large structures. Why, then, did Caltech have to pay to expand the Westinghouse foundry building or build a new turning rig to machine parts of the assembly?