The Perfect Machine (65 page)

There were three big gears, one for the declination axis, tipping the telescope tube in the great yoke, and two for the right ascension axis, turning the yoke on the great horseshoe bearing. One right ascension gear was for slewing the telescope, moving at relatively rapid speeds when the observer wanted to point the instrument at a new area of the sky; the second gear was for the slow-motion drive that would keep the telescope moving synchronously with the motion of the earth. By using a separate gear for the relatively rapid slewing motion, wear and tear on the main drive gear would be reduced.

Earle Buckingham of MIT had done much of the design work on the gears, working without compensation. Each gear was fourteen feet in diameter and weighed ten tons. The gears were cast by Westinghouse and rough-machined at their South Philadelphia Plant, then shipped west. Special gear-cutting machinery had been designed and built in the astrophysics machine shop.

These were the largest high-precision gears ever made. One second of arc equals 0.000445 inch on the pitch circle of the gears, which meant that the 720 teeth on each gear had to be machined to a tolerance of one ten-thousandth of an inch, crude stuff by optical standards, but demanding for mechanical work on that scale. The process, from the rough-cutting to the fine-polishing of the gears, took two and one-half years. To limit the expansion and contraction of the gears, the work was done in a subroom inside the machine shop, where air-conditioning could maintain the temperature at an even seventy-five degrees. The mechanics who ran the machines needed patience to match that of the opticians in the building next door. They examined the mating surfaces of the gears with microscopes. Soon only special measuring gauges could record the fine change in the surfaces.

Even in the sealed optics and mechanical shops, where men worked at the relentless pursuit of perfect surfaces, the world of war was closing in. In 1939 and 1940 a group of scientists, remembering
the lack of preparation for World War I, had tried to organize a national research effort to harness the strength of American science. Vannevar Bush, from his office in Washington, had taken the lead, drafting an executive order that would establish a National Defense Research Council (NDRC) in 1940. His idea was that the need for close cooperation between the scientific community and the military could best be assured by having a scientific organization with its own funds that reported directly to the president. Franklin Roosevelt signed the order on June 15, 1940, a day after the fall of Paris, and Bush soon had James Conant, president of Harvard; Karl Compton, president of MIT; Frank Jewett, president of the National Academy of Sciences; and Conway Coe, the commissioner of patents, working with him. Vannevar Bush wasted no time: the NDRC promptly recruited scientists on university campuses and private industry for projects as prosaic as periscopes and as dramatic as cornering supplies of uranium ore from the Belgian Congo in case experiments then going on at Columbia University and the University of Chicago proved successful in unleashing the power of the atom. The United States wasn’t officially at war, but on campuses and in defense plants, the scientists and engineers were already fighting.

Caltech, which had played a role in World War I research in its earlier incarnation as the Throop Institute, was quick to rally and offer its services. By mid-1940 Caltech facilities were engaged in contract work for military-related research and production projects. Max Mason, who had worked on sonar research at the Sound Laboratory at New London during World War I, supported the effort, and by mid-1941, fully half of the optical shop had been turned over to war-related work. At one end of the room Brownie and a crew worked on the big polishing machine, isolating smaller and smaller zones for fine corrections to the surface. The rest of the shop was gradually given over to opticians working on roof prisms for periscopes and optical range finders, mirrors, and corrector plates for Schmidt-type aerial reconnaissance cameras, and optical parts for aircraft research in wind tunnels. In the astrophysics machine shop next door, machinists who had been finishing components of the control and drive system and the mounting of the big Schmidt camera put the work aside to work on fire-control computers for naval and antiaircraft guns, and navigation computers.

The optics and machine shops had prided themselves on their quick response to problems. Rein Kroon, coming from the more structured world of Westinghouse, had been astonished that the machine shop could immediately produce the models he needed without paperwork or special authorization. The same quick response made them a productive prototype shop for military research and development. Engineers and scientists on military contracts could take new ideas to the shops and get quick test models. The staff of the shop expanded from the normal twenty-four to seventy. By late 1941 the defense-related
activities were so extensive that the accountants at Caltech couldn’t distinguish charges for the telescope project from charges for NDRC projects. Specialized machines that had been designed and constructed for figuring auxiliary mirrors for the telescope were now grinding mirrors for aerial reconnaissance cameras. High-precision machine tools that had been purchased to bore and hone components of the telescope mountings were being used twenty-four hours a day for defense work.

The Rockefeller Foundation could have insisted that the equipment, which had been purchased or built with funds it had awarded for the telescope, be bought or leased by the NDRC. Robert Millikan, eager for the contract work, didn’t want to be bothered with the details of distinguishing one project from another, and Max Mason, who had authority over the various shops as head of the telescope project, knew the Rockefeller Foundation would not insist on the letter of its grant agreements. Many Americans still hoped and prayed that the United States, and especially American boys, would stay out of the fray, but there was no question of withholding science and scientific facilities, including those funded for peaceful activities, from the national preparedness effort. The old boys who had gotten together to conceive, plan, and fund the telescope were the same old boys who threw their energies and their institutions behind the NDRC in an effort to bring the United States from the neutrality and deliberate unpreparedness of the 1930s to readiness for the total warfare of the 1940s.

The late summer and fall of 1941 felt odd. The weather was freakish: drought in New York and New England, hurricanes in East Texas, floods in Arizona, early snow in Montana and Utah. Factories were belching smoke and the breadlines had disappeared, Ted Williams was batting over .400 and Joe DiMaggio’s incredible hitting streak reached fifty-six games, but it was hard to ignore a pervasive uneasiness, an ominous feeling that a storm loomed on the horizon.

If the attack on Pearl Harbor in December was a surprise, the entry of the United States into the war wasn’t. Senators and press commentators had long accused the president of plotting with Winston Churchill to get the United States into combat. And even as Americans still hoped that American boys wouldn’t be in the fighting, by the beginning of December 1941, the spread of the war in Europe, Asia, and Africa had already turned into a global conflict.

The Japanese attack and the unexpected declaration of war by Germany meant little immediate change in America’s involvement. But the day President Roosevelt said would “live in infamy” brought on an enormous transformation in attitudes. Those who had been involved only on the periphery willingly worked harder when they knew the products they were making would help win America’s war. For the young the dreariness of the workaday world was replaced by the glamour
of war. Lines formed at recruiting offices, as young men who had dreaded the search for a job now turned down a choice of jobs to enlist.

Many in Los Angeles feared a Japanese invasion or, at the very least, bombing and sabotage. Caltech, with its wind tunnel in the Guggenheim Aeronautics Laboratory and war-related research and production in various labs, seemed particularly vulnerable. Millikan appointed a special committee for campus security and recruited Caltech seniors as special campus guards, armed with ax handles (rifles and pistols were rejected as too dangerous) to patrol the buildings. The students heard banging noises, which they thoroughly investigated in the best Caltech engineering fashion, only to conclude that the suspicious tapping was routine steam noises. Fritz Zwicky, though not an official member of Millikan’s security committee, offered his services and some special inventions for the emergency, including an inexpensive gas mask made of flour sacks, bicarbonate of soda, and a rubber “raspberry” from the noisemakers used to produce “Bronx cheers” at baseball games. Zwicky tested the gas mask in his bathtub, using chlorine gas. The next morning, for the first time anyone could remember, he was subdued and had a nasty cough.

“Something was wrong,” he explained in his strong Swiss accent. “Maybe a leak. Maybe the seams need to be sealed. Maybe it just doesn’t work.”

Zwicky shifted to experiments on gluing cellophane to window-panes to prevent shattering from a bomb blast. Zwicky, who liked to show off his strength by doing one-arm pushups on the floor of the faculty dining room in the Atheneum, threw a deflated football against glass panes to test the distribution of shards. He tested for an appropriate color of cellophane by taking panes to the foothills north of the campus with a flashlight and asking students on campus balconies to record the light intensities. Like the gas mask trials, these experiments led nowhere and did little to endear Zwicky to his colleagues.

While Zwicky experimented and the students guarded buildings with ax handles, Max Mason secured military exemptions for the workers in the optics and machine shops. Much of the work in the shops was already war related, and with the initial demand for fighting men easily met by enlistments, there was no pressure for the army or navy to take men from critical jobs.

Still, the attitude in the shops changed. Patriotic posters went up on the walls next to the pinups. Idle chitchat turned to the war and to the maps in the daily newspapers, showing the spreading amoebalike movement of the Japanese and German empires. The nightly radio broadcasts brought reports of German victories in Russia and the consolidation of Japanese conquests across the Pacific. Daily someone would report a rumor that the Japanese had shelled the U.S. mainland or that Japanese submarines were landing spies on the California
coast. The unfinished drive gears were still the largest precision gears ever cut, but in the face of the call to build fifty thousand airplanes in a year, the tedium of two years of machining a single gear lost its allure.

The can-do confidence that hadn’t hesitated at the impossible task of building a perfect machine would take time off to fight an impossible war.

Instead of the usual estimated budget he submitted each year, in January 1942 Max Mason asked the Rockefeller Foundation to make an appropriation of fifty thousand dollars to cover the current year without an exact accounting for the funds. The Caltech accounting office, he reported, was overwhelmed with the switchover to defense research in the various laboratories and shops.

The astrophysics machine shop, with an augmented staff, was working twenty-four hours a day on defense projects. All remaining work on the control and drive mechanism for the two-hundred-inch telescope, the final cutting and polishing of the gear trains, and the mechanical work on the mounting and drive mechanisms of the “big” Schmidt telescope had been suspended, some of it within months of completion.

In the optics shop all equipment except the big machine for the two-hundred-inch disk was committed to defense work. Crews working two and sometimes three shifts polished roof prisms for navy range finders and mirrors for wind tunnels. Machines that weren’t useful for defense work, like the grinding machine for the 120-inch disk, were shunted to the sides of the room.

Marcus Brown and a small crew of men persisted on the two-hundred-inch disk. Brownie had been fighting trouble with his legs—the “bone was gone,” he explained. He had been working on the big mirror for six years. War work, both in the shop and outside, had lured many men away, including some of the most experienced. The project was far enough along that Brownie thought he could persist with a small crew. If more men left, he would train others. He would keep polishing, getting ready for the Saturday tests. The war work might mean that instead of six months, the figuring would take a year. He had already been working in the Calfornia Street optics shop for almost ten years. What was another six months?

John Anderson had been ill on and off, but he regained his health by late 1941. Using his new testing technique, in January 1942 he pronounced the mirror to be within one wavelength of a true parabolic shape. A wavelength of light is a very small distance, approximately 0.000055 cm (5500Å). The only meaningful unit of measurement is the angstrom, a ten-millionth of a millimeter. It had taken more than six years to get the mirror that close. Brownie and his crew had used tons of polishing rouge. As the surface got closer to the elusive perfect
shape, they mixed talcum powder with the rouge to cut down the abrasiveness. The mix gave them better control, but the polishing went even slower. The changes in the mirror from one week to the next were imperceptible except under the critical Saturday tests.

Up on the mountain, the domes for the two big telescopes were almost complete. The wiring and telescope mounting hadn’t been installed in the dome of the “big” Schmidt camera, and the gear train and a few components of the control system were still missing from the two-hundred-inch telescope. With no further components expected from the machine shop, work on the telescope wound down. Some men worked on landscape and construction details, replacing telephone cables that the squirrels ate as fast as they were laid, rebuilding the roof of the Monastery after the woodpeckers had punctured the copper to store nuts, or planting trees to ameliorate the barrenness of the mountaintop.