The Perfect Machine (54 page)

The answer was that Westinghouse planned to preassemble the entire structure in its South Philadelphia plant before it was shipped to California. Just the tube of the telescope was so large that to assemble it vertically would require excavation of the floor of the foundry, the tallest portion of the plant. Assembly of the huge horseshoe and
testing of the oil pads would require major modifications to the plant. As the negotiations went on, the Westinghouse metallurgist, Norman Mochel, urged that the annealing all take place at the South Philadelphia plant, where the exact positioning of the various components during the annealing could be controlled. If fabrications were heat-treated in the wrong positions, heat-induced sagging could spoil the alignment so that components designed for precision fits would not match. To anneal the parts in the plant, a temporary furnace would have to be built to accommodate the large components.

Mark Serrurier, sent east to investigate, thought the Westinghouse estimates were based on “meager information and very little detailed study.” Sherburne, the machinist in charge of the astrophysics machine shop at Caltech, agreed. Between the faith of the Caltech engineers in their design, and McDowell’s trust in his one-tenth-scale model, Pasadena was confident that the mounting did not need to be test-assembled at Westinghouse. The savings in money and time would be considerable. The Westinghouse engineers were equally stubborn and willing to budge on the billing if their procedures were followed. As Guenther Froebel argued, “a maximum investment of fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars now may assure the complete success of an undertaking which has to live through the years.” McDowell replied that he was sure that Westinghouse would have preferred to erect and test the huge generators they built for the Boulder Dam at the plant before they were shipped, but just as they could only be assembled and tested on-site, so the telescope could really only be assembled at Palomar. Froebel answered that the Boulder Dam generators
had
been preassembled for testing in the shop.

The negotiations went on and on, and around and around. The Palomar side—McDowell by mail, Serrurier and Sherburne in person, Pease and the others agreeing from Pasadena—were eager to save money and time and confident that their own engineers and staff could put the telescope together. The Westinghouse officials were equally confident that their experience with large welded structures, not the upstart confidence of the Caltech engineers and scientists, should be trusted. Their name would be on the mounting, their publicity officials had already prepared a campaign to attract attention to the Westinghouse contribution to the project, and the last thing they wanted was a glitch and news articles about problems with the Westinghouse-built mounting.

The customer is always right. The Westinghouse officials ultimately came around to a compromise: the tube of the telescope—Serrurier’s trusses and Kroon’s spoked declination bearings—would be assembled in South Philadelphia, to make certain the boring for the declination bearings was exactly true. The rest of the mounting, including the huge horseshoe bearing, would be fabricated in pieces,
predrilled for alignment pins and bolts, and shipped to Palomar for assembly. Although Westinghouse publicity touted the telescope mounting as an “all-welded” structure, a description that sounded modern and advanced, welding the assemblies together on-site was not an option for a precision device like the telescope because the heat from welding could introduce distortions or strains. The sections would be bolted together on the site. Frank Fredericks, a Caltech engineer, would be at Westinghouse during the fabrication, and then at Palomar during the assembly, to make sure it all went together as planned.

Sandy McDowell urged the Westinghouse officials to hold down their publicity about the project. “I know that what Dr. Hale worries about,” McDowell wrote, “is misleading or pre-mature newspaper discussion of the various parts of his project.”

Like almost every other company that had associated itself with the now-famous telescope, Westinghouse was eager for a part of the glory that seemed to travel with the triumph of technology. The Westinghouse officials commissioned a series of papers on the process of building the mounting, and arranged talks for selected representatives of Westinghouse at sites like Harvard University. Edward Pendray, the director of publicity at the main Westinghouse offices in Pittsburgh, issued a series of press releases about the project, touting the magnitude of the fabrications required, which would only be “handled by a company possessing the necessary equipment and facilities,” and the accuracy required for the assemblies, which, though exacting, was “nothing beyond the usual accuracy of Westinghouse practice.”

The most demanding tolerance in the fabrication of the tube and mount was the alignment of the declination axis of the telescope tube. The tube of the telescope, in its final configuration, would be twenty-two feet in diameter, fifty feet long, and would weigh 150,000 pounds. The most critical dimension, measuring for boring the declination axis, demanded a measurement accurate to .077 inches over a length of twenty-six feet—a far cry from the accuracy demanded in the optics shop or even the .001-inch accuracy that is more-or-less routine in machine shops.

Yet, what made the mounting fabrication exacting was the sheer scale of the pieces and the uniqueness of the project. By Westinghouse standards, the fabrications were lightweight. The largest unit they had ever built previously in the plant, a turbo generator installation, comprised a huge condenser that weighed twenty-two pounds per cubic foot, and a generator that weighed fifty pounds per cubic foot. The tube of the telescope, built up of hollow box or tubular sections, weighed only eight pounds per cubic foot.

In many ways the telescope was a relatively easy fabrication project. It was large—the largest structure ever machined—but there was no need for superlightweight design or materials like those used in the
manufacture of aircraft. Ordinary mild carbon steel was fine for the telescope, although they did take the precaution of ordering all the steel for each component of the telescope from a single heat batch, to guarantee uniformity of composition. The chief difficulty was finding or building machines large enough to handle the huge sections and devising means to accurately measure and align the sections. Each outer band of the great horseshoe bearing required a piece of plate steel four and one-half inches thick, five feet wide, and forty-seven feet long. Bethlehem Steel used a 12,000-ton forging press to form these sections to the desired curve. To align components prior to welding, and particularly while machining, the factory used surveyor’s transits on the floor of the shop. All the welding, except for the circumferences of the hub and spokes of the declination bearings, was done by hand. Rein Kroon’s design of the interior of the horseshoe had left enough room for the welders to get to every seam.

The foundry at South Philadelphia was one of the tallest industrial buildings in the world, but even with low-slung rail cars to move the telescope sections, the tracks leading into the building had to be lowered five feet so the sections of the mounting would clear the doorway. And even the large furnace Westinghouse built at the South Philadelphia Works would only anneal the fabrications in sections. The cage that formed the top of the telescope tube, twenty-two feet in diameter and twelve feet high, would just fit into the furnace. The biggest machine tools at the South Philadelphia plant couldn’t do the finish machining on the horseshoe, the largest journal bearing in the world. The complete horseshoe bearing would weigh 400,000 pounds, and even the huge floor mill at the Westinghouse East Pittsburgh Plant had to be extended with supplementary rollers and tracks to handle the final machining.

The engineering calculations, in South Philadelphia and in Pasadena, went on as the work was in progress. When the final drawings and calculations were finished for the horseshoe, it was obvious that even with the superb internal framework Rein Kroon had designed for the bearing, the horseshoe would sag out of round as it turned. The
turned on its side, would become a C and the top horn of the C would sag from its own weight. Manipulating a large structure to mill a shape other than a circular arc or a straight line was a challenge. The 400,000-pound horseshoe was the largest and heaviest single piece of equipment ever handled by Westinghouse, and possibly the largest single unit ever machined. The floor mill at the East Pittsburgh plant, which had previously been used to machine the thirty-foot gates for the Boulder Dam, was the only mill large enough to machine the surface.

The solution to milling the shape was proposed by one of the engineers, whose name, like the names of so many who worked on the telescope, is lost. His suggestion has the clean simplicity of Mark Serrurier’s
trusses or Rein Kroon’s bicycle-spoke mounts for the declination bearings. If the ends of the horseshoe were “pinched” and the center pushed out
before
it was machined, he suggested, when the tension on the horseshoe was relaxed, the shape it assumed would be exactly correct. The calculations of how much to pinch were done by Rein Kroon. To Kroon the calculations on a slide rule seemed simple and obvious; to others, including the machinists who ran the big floor mill, the numbers seemed mysterious black magic. The calculated forces—450,000 pounds pushing out in the middle and 260,000 pounds squeezing the horns in—were optimized for observations of stars that would be within forty-five degrees of the zenith. The difference in dimensions from the new procedure to boring the horseshoe unstressed was a few hundredths of an inch—the difference between the telescope maintaining a proper alignment or sagging.

The Westinghouse workmen welded a brace across the middle of the temporarily assembled horseshoe, and a huge turnbuckle across the horns to apply the needed force. The engineers tried a test run and discovered that the horseshoe expanded as it turned on the boring mill. By late afternoon sections of the horseshoe had expanded as much as 13/1000 of an inch, more than two and one-half times the permitted tolerance of 0.005 inches. And the expansion wasn’t even. Part of the horseshoe expanded by only 7/1000 inch in the course of the day.

An engineer watching the test figured out that the problem was sunlight through the overhead skylights heating the horseshoe unevenly. The Westinghouse engineers filled reams of paper trying to chart the expansion of the steel so they could adjust the grinding wheels of the mill to compensate. When the figures weren’t reliable, they painted the skylights with dark blue paint. That helped, but to keep the temperature even enough they finally had to build a forty-six-foot-diameter sunbonnet a few inches over the horseshoe. The milling went on for weeks. Stewart Way, a Westinghouse research engineer, studied the surface of the bearing with a microscope to search out ridges and valleys until the entire surface was within the 0.005-inch tolerance. When they pulled the 318,000-pound structure off the boring mill and removed the bracing, the horseshoe “sprung” open a few hundredths of an inch to the shape that would compensate for sag. They would know if it worked when the telescope was assembled on the mountain.

Westinghouse completed the tube for the telescope first. In press releases Westinghouse liked to point out that turbines of that size—fifty feet long and twenty-two feet in diameter—were routine stuff for the South Philadelphia Works. But this product was different. In April 1937 Westinghouse sent out invitations and press releases to announce a ceremony marking the completion of the tube. William Ladley, an employee of Westinghouse for forty-eight years, was to have the honor
of tightening the last bolt. The guest of honor would be none other than Albert Einstein.

For the great day, April 30, 1937, rows of chairs were set up on the factory floor, and a dais was erected at one side of the tube, high enough so speakers could reach out and touch the immense structure. Ormondroyd’s celluloid model of the telescope shared the front of the dais with a microphone. An audience of dignitaries and reporters were joined by newsreel cameras to hear A. W. Robertson, the chairman of Westinghouse, trumpet the potential of the great telescope: “Sometimes one almost thinks the Good Book was right when it said that man was made to be only a little lower than the angels.” The
New York Times
reported that Ladley “skillfully inserted the bolt and tightened it.”

Einstein, with his familiar halo of hair and an old-fashioned stiff collar, looked uncomfortable on the dais. His remarks that day have been lost. Afterward, at a reception, he met with several of the Westinghouse engineers. Einstein was clearly awed by the sheer size of the structure. “What happens if somebody makes a mistake in manufacturing?” he asked Rein Kroon.

Kroon, awed by the presence of the great scientist, shrugged. The answer seemed so obvious. “We build it over again.”

Einstein winked. “My work is so much simpler. When I make a mistake I just tear up the paper I wrote on.”

Hale had said from the beginning that the need for the big telescope was so acute that it should be built as rapidly as possible, though not by sacrificing the capabilities of the instrument. He had made that speech during Sandy McDowell’s initial interview in Max Mason’s office. McDowell, who liked nothing better than to manage a complex project against a demanding schedule, had taken Hale’s words literally. Even before he arrived in Pasadena, he had begun to organize the telescope project as if he were preparing a warship for battle. John Anderson remained the executive director of the project, but his interest was optics, and with the arrival of the mirror, he had his hands full. The construction of the observatory and the telescope was McDowell’s bailiwick, and he flung himself into it, pressing the project as if to make up the lost years of preparation. He had been there only a few days when he reported, “I have been quite upset at the slowness of things getting under way.”