The Perfect Machine (6 page)

This time George’s father refused to indulge what seemed yet another whim. But George argued and pleaded until William Hale ultimately relented and surprised George with the Clark telescope in time for George to observe a transit of Venus on December 6, 1882. George no sooner had the telescope when he started planning to equip it with a spectrograph and other ancillary devices. He dreamed of bigger and better telescopes and his own fully equipped observatory.

He dutifully trudged off to MIT for college study, but found the courses in his major of physics dull. Arthur Noyes’s course on qualitative chemistry hinted at the excitement of scientific research, but George was marking time in Cambridge. The only activity he looked forward to each week was on Saturdays, when the famed Edward Pickering allowed the eager young man from MIT to work for ten hours as a volunteer at the Harvard College Observatory. Astronomy, George had already decided, would be his future.

When George was close to graduating, William Hale, reluctant to see his son plunge headlong into a future with so few options, tried to divert him with the enticement of a large block of stock and a directorship in a new building the elder Hale was putting up in Chicago. George countered with his own proposal for his future: He would continue his research in solar astronomy and marry his childhood sweetheart Evelina Conklin, whom he had met on summer vacations at his grandmother’s home in Madison, Connecticut. In the end George got his way, but the strain of what he called the “interview” with his father left George prostrated with a splitting headache and nervous indigestion—the same symptoms that had invalided his mother for as long as he could remember. For George they were a harbinger of things to come.

Poor Evelina, who had known George only on summer holidays, had no idea what was in store for her. They got married two days after George graduated from MIT. For a honeymoon they took the traditional trip to Niagara Falls, but only as a stop on a trip across the country to California, where he planned to visit the Lick Observatory.
When they paused in Chicago on their way to California, George’s mother wrote of her newlywed son: “I wish he cared a
little
more for Society, but now he cannot be induced to make calls or do anything in that line that is not
absolutely
necessary. He is as absorbed in his studies as his father in business—otherwise a model son.”

In 1875 James Lick, a wealthy Northern California businessman, asked a friend to witness the signing of his will. Lick’s proposed bequests included a marble pyramid larger than that at Cheops, which he wanted erected on the shore of San Francisco Bay; giant statues of his father, his mother, and himself on North Beach; a home for old ladies; and on Market Street in San Francisco, a telescope larger and more powerful than any other in the world. His draft will included funds to endow each bequest, from five hundred thousand dollars for the telescope to three thousand dollars to provide for a previously unacknowledged illegitimate son.

As far as anyone could recall, Lick had never seen a major astronomical telescope. There is no record of where or how he stumbled on the notion of the glory of astronomical discovery. But the explanation for his bequest may not be difficult.

James Lick was one of many who had prospered in the real estate booms that followed the California gold rush. “O this California,” one transplanted New Englander wrote home during that wild era, “what a madness there is about it.” There were easy fortunes to be made. Businessmen and real estate moguls gambled on the next boom; those who played their cards right emerged with sudden and tremendous wealth. Blasted in the press as greedy parvenues and robber barons and excluded from both eastern and transplanted western society as nouveaux riches, these wealthy Californians were left to hope that by leaving suitable endowments behind, they would be remembered by future generations for something other than their moneymaking. What better symbol of open-mindedness, scientific dedication, and vision than a large telescope, permanently named after its donor? Built on a massive foundation of granite, under a majestic dome, literally and symbolically reaching out to the heavens, a telescope would be a glorious memorial for a man eager to transform a quick fortune into an eternal monument.

Lick’s friend, David Jackson Staples, tried to persuade him that the traffic on Market Street in San Francisco would disturb an instrument as delicate as an astronomical telescope, and that the location would certainly be too foggy to be useful. Lick was reluctant to abandon the location where people would be able to see his great telescope, so a battery of lawyers was called in to negotiate with Lick. They were as skillful at getting the money as Lick had been at making it. When they finished, Lick had bequeathed seven hundred thousand dollars to the Regents of the University of California for “a powerful telescope, superior
to and more powerful than any telescope ever yet made.” There were few constraints on the bequest, and the grant was generous enough to allow the planners of the new telescope free rein to design any kind of instrument they wanted.

Their first decision was whether to use a lens or a mirror to gather the light. Galileo’s telescope had been a refractor, using lenses to bend, or refract, the light from distant objects. Newton, a century later, used a reflector, with a parabolic mirror to gather and focus the light. Each had advantages and problems, and, as with so many technologies, over the years the pendulum of astronomical preference swung back and forth.

By the late nineteenth century, refractors—the familiar telescope built with an objective lens at one end of a long tube and an eyepiece at the other—had been the telescope of choice for many years, especially in the United States. The disaster of a huge reflector attempted in Australia in the 1850s had stopped reflector building for decades, and there were several American opticians who had built fine refractors, but few who had ground large mirrors. A refractor, which excels at high-magnification study of planets and nearby objects, and at photometric and statistical measurements, also fit into the observation programs then prevailing at most observatories. The Lick Trust decided on the safe course of a refractor and ordered two thirty-six-inch-diameter glass disks, each larger than any piece of glass ever cast, from Feil & Cie. of Paris. France had been for many years the only country with glass technology and experience adequate to cast large glass disks of the required clarity and consistency.

The objective lens of a refractor is normally built of two elements, one of flint glass, the other of crown glass, figured and sandwiched together to function as a single lens. The combination of two different formulations of glass is an effort to counter or correct chromatic aberration, the varying refraction or bending of light of different colors. Without correction of the aberration, it would be impossible to focus a sharp image of a star.

The flint-glass element for the Lick telescope was cast successfully, but the initial effort at a crown-glass blank cracked when it was packed for shipment. The Feil brothers worked for two years to cast a second satisfactory crown blank and ultimately went into bankruptcy before the elder Feil came back, took charge, and in 1885 shipped a satisfactory disk to be figured for the Lick telescope.

The mounting of the big telescope was entrusted to the firm of Warner & Swasey of Cleveland, Ohio. Worcester Reed Warner and Ambrose Swasey, both born on New England farms, met as apprentices and worked at Pratt and Whitney in Hartford, Connecticut, before starting their own business designing and manufacturing fine machine tools. Swasey’s skills were designing and building machine tools; Warner was a production line expert and amateur telescope
maker. Their first effort at a telescope mount, for Beloit College in Wisconsin, proved so successful that a Warner & Swasey mount became the mark of a fine telescope.

They were the high bidders on the mounting for the Lick telescope, but with an obviously superior design that the Lick Trust accepted. The mounting for a large refractor has to hold and point the long, heavy tube of the telescope with exacting precision and move it around a polar axis for east-west motion parallel to the axis of the earth, and a declination axis for north-south motion, so that the telescope follows the apparent movement of celestial objects as the earth turns during the night. The only practical design for a refractor was one that supported the long tube in the middle, which meant that as the telescope rose and fell in altitude from the horizon to the zenith, the eyepiece would swing in a large arc up and down. To allow for the motion the telescope had to be mounted on a tall pedestal, with ladders, a lift, and a movable floor provided to make the working end of the telescope accessible to observers and for the installation of cameras, spectroscopes, and other devices. To achieve the rigidity required for astrophotography with a structure this large was a considerable challenge of machine design and construction.

The third big decision about the telescope was location. This was in some respects the biggest innovation of the project. In a bold move the new observatory was sited not on a university campus in a large city, which had been the norm for telescopes, but on remote Mount Hamilton, a coastal peak near San Jose, far from the loom of light pollution of the cities and high enough for the night atmosphere above the observatory to be still and clear. Carrying the components of a huge, high-precision optical device up the steep paths to the mountaintop proved a greater challenge than anyone had anticipated, and it took longer to finish the observatory than even the pessimists prophesied. Lick died in 1879 without ever seeing the completed instrument that would bear his name. His body was interred beneath the pedestal of the telescope.

The telescope saw first light later that year and was an immediate success. Astronomers from eastern universities, hearing of the number of cloud-free nights, the quality of the seeing, and the light-gathering power of the new telescope, clamored for invitations to the observatory.

Hale heard about the Lick telescope from his mentor Sherburne Burnham in Chicago, but it was not until his honeymoon trip that he had a chance to visit the famed site. Access was by a rugged trail, six hours and 366 hairpin turns by horse-drawn stage from San Jose; the peak, even with the telescope and housing facilities, was bleak. But the skies were all that Burnham had described. Evelina was bored in California, eager to leave after a short visit, and frustrated when Hale
extended their stay on the mountain. She didn’t realize that George Hale had found his destiny.

Hale declined an offer to stay and work at Lick. He had already planned a career as an independent astronomer, his father had agreed to build him a private observatory in Chicago, and the equipment had been ordered: an excellent twelve-inch refractor from the fine firm of John Brashear, with a mounting from the same Warner & Swasey shop that had built the mounting for the Lick telescope.

When they returned to Chicago, George and Evelina moved in with George’s mother, now a recluse in her darkened upstairs room. George spent all his time at his new observatory, leaving Evelina to care for his mother. Evelina proposed that they set up housekeeping on their own, but George’s mother wouldn’t hear of it. Other people, she said, would think she had thrown them out.

About the time that George’s Kenwood Observatory was almost finished, William Harper, the president of the new University of Chicago, was taking advantage of the seemingly limitless backing of Rockefeller money to recruit the finest talent in every field to his faculty. He proposed that Hale and his observatory join the University as the nucleus of an astronomy department. Put off by Harper’s aggressiveness, Hale turned down the offer.

Harper could be as stubborn as George Hale. He negotiated with George’s father, and after he persuaded the famed physicist Albert Michelson, the first American recipient of a Nobel Prize in physics, to accept the chair of physics at the new school, he used the prestigious appointment as leverage to strike a deal that would give George Hale a year to evaluate a university appointment before his father gave the Kenwood Observatory and $25,000 to the University of Chicago. A clause of the agreement specified that the University would subsequently raise $250,000 for a larger observatory facility. William Hale was a good enough businessman to expect a proper return on his investments, including those he made in his son’s career.

George was so absorbed in his work at the observatory that he begged off almost all social engagements and other distractions. It was months before Evelina could drag him away for a vacation at Lake Saranac, New York. Even on holiday George couldn’t relax away from his telescope. He finally abandoned the pretense of fly fishing to sneak off to Rochester and a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There he overheard Alvan Clark talking about a pair of glass blanks—the largest ever cast—which were in his shop.

Clark explained that shortly after the opening of the Lick Observatory, a group of supporters of the University of Southern California, anxious that Southern California not be outdone by anything in Northern California, had made plans for an even larger telescope. They organized their publicity before their funding and made sure that
Scientific American
reported that although the new telescope would be only one-ninth greater in diameter than the Lick telescope, its light-grasp would be one-fourth greater and that “the existence of a large city on the moon would readily be detected by the telescope.” They ordered two forty-inch glass blanks from the Paris firm of M. Manto is—there was still no American firm that could pour large glass castings. The blanks were successfully cast and shipped to Alvan Clark, who had built George Hale’s first telescope, to be ground and figured. Warner & Swasey got the contract to build a mounting for the new telescope.

Before Clark began grinding the disks, the crash of 1893 popped the real estate bubble in Southern California. The businessmen who had pledged funds for the telescope decided that they had other priorities more important than beating Northern California in a telescope race, and the huge glass disks, unground and unpaid-for, languished in Alvan Clark’s Massachusetts shop.