The Perfect Machine (59 page)

Even as his health deteriorated, in lucid periods Hale kept his fingers on thousands of details of the telescope. He would fire off memos on salaries for starting engineers and draftsmen, or budgeting five hundred dollars for improvements to the old road up the mountain. As late as the fall of 1935, when vertigo attacks had joined the demons to plague his days, Hale still planned trips east to inspect the machining work on the mirror cell at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Eddy-stone, Pennsylvania, to see Robert McMath’s recent work on telescope drives in Michigan, and to consult with Vladimir Zworykin at RCA on the latest work on photocells.

In 1936 Harlow Shapley invited Hale to attend a symposium in his honor at Harvard. Hale was too ill to go. With typical modesty, he urged that the honor be conferred on someone else. “Old and battered fossils retain a certain antiquarian interest,” he wrote. “But in the midst of recent revolutionary advances, they are rapidly outclassed.” At the gathering, in the library of the Harvard College Observatory, Shapley announced that he had planned the symposium with two thoughts in mind: to recognize “Hale’s remarkable contributions to science and to the techniques and equipment of science” and to call the attention of younger astronomers “to the great debt we all owe to one man for the commendable position of astronomy in America at the present time.”

In its obituary the
New York Times
urged that the two-hundred-inch telescope be dedicated to George Hale. The suggestion was
echoed privately in the coming months. A few years later Millikan raised funds to commission a bust of Hale from a Danish sculptor named Jensen who just “happened along” in Pasadena. The bust, replaced many years later by a new bust by Marian Breckenridge, a friend of the Hale family, was installed in the entrance to the dome of the two-hundred-inch telescope.

In an era of simpler science, the deaths of three men as central as Smith, Pease, and Hale might have ended the project. But the two-hundred-inch telescope had gathered a momentum of its own. By the spring of 1938 hundreds of men were working on the telescope, in factories in Philadelphia, glass foundries in Corning, labs and shops in Pasadena, offices in New York, and on a lonely mountaintop. The telescope had already touched the lives of thousands of men and women all across America—mechanics, engineers, supervisors, professors, workmen, and researchers. The great telescope, an achievement of American science and technology in the midst of the most terrible depression anyone could remember, had become a part of the American consciousness, a symbol of pride and achievement. Railroad engineers with thousands of miles of service would tell of the greatest honor of their railroad lives—the time they had driven the shortest train of their career, only two cars, at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour, carrying the “great eye.” Glassworkers who had worked an entire lifetime at Corning, who had watched hundreds of thousands of bottles, casseroles, and dishes leave the factory and seen their products become part of every American household, would remember most of all the role they played in casting the most famous piece of glass in the world. In 1938, while the first components of the telescope had just begun to arrive on Palomar Mountain, the perfect machine had become part of American folklore.

The unveiling of the telescope tube, in the august presence of Professor Einstein, was Westinghouse’s last great publicity venture on the project. As the teams of arc-welders finished the other sections, assembly after assembly went through the boring mills and the annealing ovens. Some of the fabrications, especially the three sections of the great horseshoe, were larger than the tube, among the largest structures ever machined. But the Caltech engineers had refused to pay the costs of modifying the factory and test-assembling the sections, so the full majesty of Westinghouse work couldn’t be demonstrated to the reporters and public. Even without photographs, the numbers were impressive. The largest journal bearing ever constructed had a diameter of forty-six feet and a face width of fifty-four inches; it weighed 375,000 pounds. But to the press and public the horseshoe looked even less like a telescope than did the bare frame of the tube. A lucky photographer caught glimpses of the huge sections on railcars, on their way to the docks in Philadelphia. The gargantuan
components of the horseshoe spanned two tracks on the siding where they waited.

McDowell was eager to get the components to Palomar before winter weather set in. He used his navy pull to get access to the Philadelphia Naval Yard and to get local rail traffic rescheduled to make way for the huge sections of the telescope mounting. The only crane large enough for the job was commandeered from the yard to load the tube and the other parts of the telescope mounting as deck cargo on the
American-Robin,
the
Pacific,
and the
Pennsylvanian.
The assembled telescope tube was the largest single deck cargo ever shipped, but a journey through the Panama Canal could not generate the popular appeal of the slow train carrying the disk across the country.

The ships began arriving in San Diego in mid-October. The mounting components were the first major cargo to go up the new road to the summit. Snow had begun to fall as the sections of the horseshoe went up on a massive trailer, pulled by two heavy tractors and pushed by a third. The trucks moved so slowly that men walked in front and alongside the cargo.

In its press releases Westinghouse said of the telescope mounting, “On the site a fine job of rigging will be necessary to get the telescope parts into the dome and to erect it.” It was a gracious understatement. For Byron Hill and the workmen on the mountain, the arrival of each piece was like opening another box at Christmas. Mark Serrurier had written long memorandums explaining exactly how the pieces were to be assembled, but as so often happens with Christmas toys, the assembly didn’t go quite as easily as the instructions suggested.

The landowners on the mountain welcomed the completion of the new road, their joy prompted less by the improved access than because the closing of the WPA camp meant an end to the Saturday-night rowdiness. For years Captain Bolin’s store had sold out of Don Leon wine each payday. The resulting hilarity from the WPA camp and from the “zombies” on the mountaintop had led to some hijinks that Byron Hill, and Colonel Brett before him, had to smooth over with apologies and reassurances.

The closing of the WPA camp also meant that there was no longer a resident physician on the remote mountain. One workman had first-aid training and his wife was a nurse, and there was a well-equipped dispensary, but one man’s death from a heart attack during the earlier work and the potential danger of the work with the heavy telescope components prompted McDowell to appoint a resident physician. The work camp hired a cook who had worked at the Agua Caliente racetrack. The rude mountain was turning into a research facility.

Cottages went up for the resident staff. Hale had specified that the residences should be simple, but Byron Hill, knowing that what was built on the mountain would have to be fixed on the mountain, added
his personal touch to the designs. Hill liked concrete. It didn’t rot, woodpeckers didn’t eat it, and squirrels didn’t bury their winter cache in it. He provided each residence with a six-inch-thick concrete woodshed. The walls were steel lath with stucco, the floors concrete, the roofs copper foil. The mountain wasn’t a ski resort. The cottages would be there as long as the telescope.

The question of power for the observatory had come up early in the planning. The telescope and its instrumentation would require steady, uninterrupted, regulated power. Variations in voltage that would cause no more than a dimming of lights in a home would be crippling for a telescope and its instruments. Mount Wilson had at one time generated four-hundred-volt DC on the mountain, then later purchased electrical power from a local utility. The purchased power suffered frequent outages that shut down telescopes and lab equipment. A generating plant on the mountain entailed the risk of vibrations that could be transmitted to the telescope, noise that would be distracting to astronomers and residents, and poorly regulated power from the smaller equipment available for a local generating facility. E. M. Irwin, a Caltech engineer assigned the task of researching the question, concluded that “the desirability of the two systems is about equal.”

Enough astronomers had lost a night of observing to blackouts on Mount Wilson for the independence of a generating plant on the mountain to win out. Two diesel generators from the Enterprise Engine Company in San Francisco, a primary unit and a backup, were installed in a powerhouse, with tunable spring mounts to isolate the vibrations and heavy insulation to mask the noise. The units Irwin selected, and the installation on the mountain, were quiet enough to not disrupt work on the telescopes, although the rumble of the big diesels was hard to miss from the recreation room next door.

With the dome finished, the footings in place, the powerhouse installed and running, and huge machined sections arriving by truck up the new road, Byron Hill and his men set about building a telescope.

The Caltech design engineers who had produced thousands of detailed blueprints of the assembly of the telescope tube, yoke, and mounting, had designed an overhead crane for the observatory, a fifty-ton unit built into the dome, to unload the cargoes. The crane ran up and down a track from the edge to the top of the dome. With rotation of the dome, the crane could service any area inside. A second, five-ton crane supplemented the main crane. In addition to the blueprints and Mark Serrurier’s memos, Hill had Russell Porter’s drawings of finished assemblies. For machinists, who often understand a machine better by taking it apart and remembering how it goes together, the vivid three-dimensional images in the Porter drawings were sometimes more useful than the file cabinets of blueprints. Porter’s charcoal drawings, with beautiful cutaways, translated design sketches and engineering
drawings into reality. The subtle shading of his drawings, much of it done with smears of a thumb to represent the grit of machinery, conveyed better than photographs or the most complete set of engineering drawings the feel and scale of the telescope.

The Caltech engineers had calculated the size of the hatch in the dome the way a mover can calculate whether a sofa or piano will fit through a doorway. The opening was mathematically large enough for the largest components—the sections of the horseshoe and the lower section of the yoke mounting, which held the two tubes that connected to the horseshoe. A draftsman with a slide rule could demonstrate that with the right twists and turns the hatch would accommodate everything that had been shipped.

As each component arrived, Hill and his crew swung into action immediately, eager to get the cargo unloaded and into the observatory. Hill, an efficient man and proud of his record, would do anything, including working all night long, to avoid demurrage charges from the trucking companies.

Most of the unloading went well. Hill would take the controls of the crane himself—a tricky operation because the motion involved rotating the dome and raising the crane on its tracks as well as the hoist itself—to lift the assemblies off the trailers and through the hatch. For one piece, the bottom section of the yoke, the engineers at Caltech had designed a special lifting harness to bring the assembly off the truck and up through the hatch. The harness didn’t arrive in time for the unloading, so Hill and his crew did it with lifting hooks and slings they put together on the spot. The unit had been trucked lying on its back and had to be tipped onto its side to fit through the hatch. Tipping a structure while it is hanging from rigging is a tricky operation, because the center of gravity of the item shifts as it turns. The fit was tight. The next day, when the yoke had been squeezed through the hatch and the exhausted crew had gone to bed, Hill said he finally understood what women went through at childbirth.

The only damage the structures suffered in the trip from the Philadelphia factory to the observatory floor was some minor denting, nicks, gouges, and defacing with green paint by the stevedores in transit. One piece was dropped from the rigging and made a dent in the concrete floor of the observatory. It would have no effect on the telescope, but Frank Fredericks raged for days at anyone within earshot. There weren’t supposed to be dents in the floor of a perfect machine.

The shipment of the big Westinghouse components got enough publicity to attract carloads of tourists up the new road. There were no facilities at the top, not even a paved parking lot. The trees and brush had been cleared from the area around the observatory, leaving a barren moonscape; there were no pathways or signs; and only the intrepid could find their way to the door of the dome. Still tourists showed up, eager to see the great machine.

The area that had been designed as a gallery for visitors, just inside the main entrance, wasn’t enclosed yet, except for a hastily erected chicken-wire partition. Visitors crowded into the area, watching the workmen and asking enough questions to distract them from the complex assembly procedure. Finally, after he had been interrupted with questions so many times that he couldn’t concentrate, Ben Traxler put a neatly printed sign on a pipe standard outside the chicken-wire enclosure:

DON’T TALK TO THE PRISONERS ASK THE GUARD

It took Byron Hill a few days to figure out why the tourists had suddenly quieted down. Hill was capable of laughing at a dry joke, but he could imagine the reaction when rumors reached Pasadena that the telescope was being built by chain gangs. He tore the sign down.

Frank Fredericks had been at the Westinghouse plant in South Philadelphia when the alignment and bolt-holes for the components of the mount were bored. He came to Palomar to supervise the assembly. Some of the holes had to be rebored because of dents in the structures through shipping. Hill argued against relying totally on the alignment pins. He was a Caltech engineering graduate but, with a mechanic’s sense of a machine, skeptical about paper specifications.