The Perfect Machine (62 page)

The astronomers began to worry about the direction of the project. Especially at Mount Wilson, where the telescopes had been designed by working astronomers, they worried that the calculations for the two-hundred-inch telescope were by engineers and physicists rather than people with experience on big telescopes. “The tendency,” Walter Adams wrote, confidentially, “is toward an instrument equipped with a multitude of experimental devices instead of a simple and rugged telescope.” To counter the trend he urged that Hubble be appointed astronomical director of the Caltech project.

Others on the project tried to avoid McDowell, but except for the optics shop, where “only God and Brownie” were allowed and John Anderson had the absolute say, McDowell’s authority extended to every corner of the project. No one was exempt from his memos. In confidential letters Max Mason admitted that some “improperly considered and ill-advised moves by McD[owell] … rather thoroughly shocked the observatory crowd.” To mend the damage an Engineering Advisory Committee was established that had to approve in detail all of McDowell’s decisions. Nobody liked the arrangement.

The final blow came late in 1938. David Woodbury, who had been following the project since 1935, had visited Corning and spent three weeks in Pasadena interviewing anyone who would talk to him. Woodbury was hoping to have his book appear when the telescope came into use. John Anderson told him that the telescope “
may
possibly be ready for use by the end of 1939, but this is on the assumption that everything goes perfectly from now on. It probably will not.” Undeterred, Woodbury submitted an article from his manuscript on “The Glass Giant of Palomar” to
Reader’s Digest,
got what he considered “a large price for it,” and decided to go ahead and publish the book. At the request of his publisher, Woodbury sent copies of the manuscript to Walter Adams, John Anderson, George McCauley, and others, hoping that Caltech would endorse his book and that he could get a jacket blurb from one or more of the major figures on the project.

Woodbury had written a lively though sometimes fanciful book. He had workers at Corning swimming around the flooded basement of the factory, sparks flying as the water shorted the annealing circuits, a state of total confusion in Pasadena before McDowell rode into town to save the telescope, Brown as an untrained man who took over the glass grinding with the sheer force of his ambition, a landing strip at
the observatory where astronomers would arrive by small plane for their observation runs, and all manner of marvelous, charming stories about the individuals that were captivating to readers but not quite true. He apparently never heard an anecdote he didn’t believe. Woodbury hadn’t so much made up his material from whole cloth as selectively created his story, exaggerating the role of a few individuals as suited his narrative fancy, omitting facts that were inconvenient, and muddling the scientific and technological details of the telescope.

Woodbury didn’t get the endorsements he sought. Adams wrote that full corrections would require a rewrite of “a large portion of [his] text,” and questioned whether Woodbury needed to write “an interesting romance rather than a bit of history of the Mount Wilson Observatory. Certainly it could not be used for purposes of reference in the future.” George McCauley sent Woodbury a list of “statements [from the manuscript] that are in opposition to facts, notwithstanding their value as fiction,” and pointed out that news articles, which seemed to have been Woodbury’s chief source, were notoriously inaccurate and certainly not a useful source for an “accurate historical account” of the building of the telescope. “You will pardon me,” McCauley concluded his letter, “if I seem to wish for facts along with my fiction.”

Even Harlow Shapley, at Harvard, was unhappy over Woodbury’s manuscript, because it left the impression that astronomers were jealous of the small group in Pasadena who would have the opportunity to use the great instrument. Shapley, who had privately argued that the two-hundred-inch telescope wasn’t really necessary and probably wouldn’t yield the expected results, still maintained cordial relations with a few of the astronomers at Mount Wilson and Caltech. Once the telescope was going to be a reality, he didn’t want to burn his own bridges.

Copies of the manuscript were passed around, and before long every scientist who had worked on the project “was disturbed, to put it very mildly” by what Woodbury had written. Some thought the manuscript so completely bad in general spirit and organization that it was pointless to make detailed objections. Others argued that since it would be published anyway, it was better to correct as much as possible. Together the scientists objected to about 50 percent of the book as misstatements of fact.

Scientists are notoriously reluctant to see personal details and human disputes in a narrative about their scientific work. Some of the mistaken details that Adams, McCauley, Anderson and others pointed to were picky, the sort of mistake that could be excused as a reporter’s license, especially in a manuscript pitched at a
Reader’s Digest
audience. Other mistakes suggested that Woodbury didn’t really understand glassmaking, the process of figuring a telescope mirror, the function of the various systems in a large telescope, or the significance of recent developments in astronomy.

Woodbury’s sources were obvious to those who worked on the project. “Many of the stories in the book evidently originated with Dowd, Brown, Porter, and McDowell,” Anderson wrote. Not surprisingly these four emerged as heroes of Woodbury’s story. As Woodbury told it Jerry Dowd, a Mount Wilson electrician who returned from retirement, was the one man who could make sense of the complexities of the wiring. Marcus Brown was the untrained, dedicated workman whose passion and commitment made the grinding of the mirror possible. Russell Porter was the amateur designer and outsider whose fresh, brilliant notions cut through the squabbles of those who were mired in old ideas. And Sandy McDowell, a man destined for flag rank in the navy, sacrificed his career to work on the telescope for the good of science.

Woodbury hadn’t taken the time to confirm his sources. Jerry Dowd, a superb Mount Wilson electrician, worked in the electrical workshop on the Caltech campus. He did almost no work on the Palomar project except for some early wiring on the “little” Schmidt telescope. Marcus Brown liked to present himself as self-educated, but he had been trained to grind mirrors in a demanding apprenticeship at the Mount Wilson optical laboratory. Russell Porter had been isolated from the others in Pasadena because of his age, his impaired hearing, and his lack of scientific credentials and experience with engineering on the scale of the Palomar project; he was bitter enough at his isolation and the lack of credit given his designs to exaggerate his own contributions.

But the portion of the Woodbury manuscript that aroused the strongest reactions in Pasadena was the portrayal of McDowell and his role in the project. “The whole account of McDowell is exaggerated and much of it is contrary to fact,” Max Mason wrote. “The tale of confusion in Pasadena and how he set it right is nonsense…. The picture of a man like Henry Robinson of the Observatory Council being stunned by McDowell’s energy is ridiculous.”

From the beginning the scientists and many of the engineers had resented McDowell’s condescension and his insistence that
his
procedures,
his
friends, and
his
contacts in industry were the only course for the telescope. The version of events McDowell fed to David Woodbury was grossly unfair to men like George Hale, John Anderson, Francis Pease, and others who had borne the bulk of the responsibility for the design and construction of the telescope. Even if he hadn’t exaggerated his own role and made many in Pasadena look like bumblers, McDowell’s stories were, in the minds of scientists, “conduct unbecoming.” They had struggled to avoid sensationalism, to keep public information about the telescope accurate. After the manuscript circulated, and it was clear that McDowell had been the chief source of what many thought a badly distorted book, Max Mason quietly asked McDowell to leave the project at the end of 1938. After the firing Mason reported that “the somewhat complicated personnel situation now seems to be entirely straightened out.”

McDowell put a good face on it, explaining to anyone who would listen that while the telescope wasn’t
finished,
“so far as I can see, all the work that has come under my jurisdiction will be completed within the estimates set up.” In his final report he commented favorably on several of the engineers on the project. The only scientist about whom he had a kind word was Sinclair Smith, who was dead.

Forty years later a picture of Sandy McDowell, posing with the one-tenth-scale model of the telescope, was still hanging in the basement offices of the astrophysics building. No one on the Palomar staff was quite sure who it was.

29
Almost

The world was too busy to pay much attention to Palomar in the fall of 1938. Shooting wars of surprising passion were being waged in almost every corner of the globe. The Spanish Republic had been fighting the Franco rebels for more than a year, with German, Italian, and Russian “volunteers” and the International Brigades using Spain as a warmup for the expected death struggle of fascism and communism. The Japanese were campaigning in China, forcing the Chinese government to abandon its capital; Jewish and Arab groups were in open rebellion against the British government in Palestine; fascist movements were bidding for power in South America; Italy had invaded and annexed Ethiopia; Germany had annexed Austria and was in the process of dismembering Czechoslovakia. No one needed a telescope to see the coming world war.

Most Americans, urged on by Charles Lindbergh, the America First movement, and the isolationists in the Senate, did their best to ignore the stirrings of war that threatened every continent except their own. The United States had already turned down membership in the League of Nations; in 1935 the Senate rejected adherence to the World Court; and in the following years neutrality laws canonized the oft-quoted injunctions of George Washington’s Farewell Address. A few critics pointed out that the American army and navy were not prepared for war, but their warnings went largely unheeded. After sending armies to fight the “war to end all wars,” much of America had no enthusiasm for seeing more of its young men fall on foreign soil.

Still, it was impossible to ignore the whirlwind that seemed to have gripped much of the world. News from Europe was on the front pages every day. Commentators read the tea leaves of Hitler’s speeches. Occasional frightening articles outlined the extent of Japanese military and naval might and territorial ambitions. By 1939 even the two great oceans didn’t seem enough to keep America isolated. The only consolation
was that a few far-seeing entrepreneurs suggested that war business might end the lingering depression.

Many Americans hoped that progress—the technology that had built the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Boulder Dam—would be enough to bring the United States out of the doldrums. That same technology, the newspapers occasionally reported, was finishing the greatest scientific instrument ever built. By 1938 the articles about the telescope included photographs of the disk, the mount, or the observatory—concrete proof of America’s unique mission: Let other nations fight their wars. America would build a better world.

For visitors to Caltech and Pasadena, a stop in the observers’ gallery of the optics shop and a walk through the halls of the astrophysics building, where Russell Porter’s drawings of the telescope hung, were the height of the tour. Visiting astronomers and observers at Mount Wilson were often treated to a visit to Palomar to see the telescope. Even men who had spent many hours on large telescopes had trouble believing the scale and precision of the machine they saw going up. When John Anderson took Vannevar Bush, Walter Adams, and their wives up in April 1940, the telescope was still 15,000 foot-pounds out of balance, but the oil bearings were working well enough to demonstrate that a milk bottle on one side of the great horseshoe would actually move 1 million pounds of telescope. To answer the most common question, Anderson said that the summer of 1942 was a likely completion date. The last step would be the installation of the mirror. Once that was ready and installed, he said, the telescope would be in operation within two days.

Even the most cynical of eastern skeptics had put a moratorium on voicing doubts about the telescope. Hubble, Baade, and others were already planning how they would use the new telescope. Baade had concluded that only the light-gathering power and resolution of the two-hundred-inch telescope would give him evidence to support his new and important theory of stellar populations. Hubble and Humason had used the special Ross lenses developed for the two-hundred-inch to stretch the range of the one-hundred-inch telescope beyond the limits anyone had anticipated. Hubble had plans for an extensive program with the two-hundred-inch telescope, beginning with a extensive sky survey by the forty-eight-inch Schmidt telescope. Pleased by the popular attention his research had attracted, and caught up in his own celebrity inside and outside the world of astronomy, Hubble believed that the first priority for the new telescope should be his work.

The astronomers at Mount Wilson and in the spacious library on Santa Barbara Street could talk and plan, but Caltech had the keys to the two-hundred-inch telescope. They also had the nucleus of an astrophysics faculty in Fritz Zwicky, spectroscopist Ira Bowen, and cosmologist
Richard Tolman. There were some at Caltech who suggested that the institute should run the telescope alone. The lack of experience at building large telescopes certainly hadn’t stopped the ambitious and confident engineers and scientists. Maybe the lack of experience administering a large observatory could also be overcome. The Caltech boosters overlooked the fact that Caltech had no funds to operate the observatory.