The Perfect Machine (66 page)

Except for the figuring of the big mirror, the telescope project was at a standstill.

Every pundit offered daily predictions, but no one knew how long the war would last. Production plans were for the
duration.
What would happen to the telescope and to the crew of workmen, engineers, and scientists who had worked together for more than a decade on the project? Max Mason, who had been through a period of wartime research before, wanted to hold together as many of the workmen and engineers who had worked on the telescope as he could, by getting them involved on a war research project. Even better would be a project that also employed some of the Caltech scientists. Trained and experienced men, accustomed to working with one another, could prove an efficient war research group. In the back of his mind, Mason never forgot that the pace of work on the telescope could resume that much more easily after the war if the team stayed together.

Some key men were recruited for the war effort elsewhere. Hubble went to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to head up ballistics research. Fritz Zwicky, whose sometimes-undisciplined ideas had included a water-burning torpedo, a terrajet that would drive through the earth, capturing an asteroid to mine its mineral resources, and creating an atmosphere on the moon, went off to do rocket research for newly created Aerojet General in Asuza.
^*

John Anderson took on optics projects for the navy, army, and the
NRDC. By the middle of the summer of 1942, with American men already engaged in battle in the Pacific and the Atlantic theaters, even the stalwart crew working on the two-hundred-inch disk was unwilling to do anything but war work. Reluctantly Marcus Brown shut down the polishing machine. A few months later there was hope of reviving the polishing. Max Mason even got assurances from the regional draft coordinator that a team of five could be excused from active military duty.

But the fury of war swept up even those five. The priceless disk was covered with heavy timbers for protection. Brownie moved over to the other end of the shop to work on prisms. From where he worked, he could see the idle polishing machine and the timber-covered disk. Sometimes he and Anderson would discuss how long the final figuring would require. At least another year, they agreed. Perhaps two. How long could the war last? they asked each other.

Max Mason, experienced at directed war research from his work on submarine sonar at New London, organized a new naval research project at Caltech, directed toward rocketry and underwater ballistics, with laboratory facilities at Morris Dam and in the basement of Robinson Hall, the astrophysics building. Their goal was to build a rocket-powered antisubmarine bomb. The project expanded quickly, recruiting engineers like Bruce Rule and much of the staff at Palomar. Byron Hill, Ben Traxler, and others packed up on Palomar and moved to Morris Dam, where they built and tested the rockets and torpedoes. Bruce Rule lost part of a finger in one test, when he fired a miniature nonexplosive torpedo from a compressed-air gun in the Robinson Lab. With the typical reticence of an engineer, Rule explained the incident tersely: “It misfired.”

On Palomar, with the work crew gone, the buildings were closed. Harley Marshall stayed behind as a caretaker, and once a month, a small crew came up to the mountain to “exercise” the machinery, checking equipment for corrosion, starting up the oil pumps on the two-hundred-inch telescope, turning the dome, and slewing the drives from one limit to the other to avoid the ravages of inactivity. When they left Marshall was again alone with the machines.

Marshall had been in charge of public relations and visitors before the war. Navy pilots in training at Southern California bases sometimes used Palomar as a navigation point, so Marshall would see planes overhead, but there were no more visitors to the observatory and no press releases. The world had forgotten the perfect machine.

The Mount Wilson astronomers, like Hubble, were also recruited for war projects, with one exception. Walter Baade had taken out citizenship papers soon after his arrival at Mount Wilson in 1931, but he had lost them when moving from one house to another and with cosmic absentmindedness, had done nothing about the matter. When war
was declared the German astronomer was officially an “enemy alien.” He elected to remain at Mount Wilson for the war years. With the other astronomers occupied on war research, Baade had the big telescopes to himself. The scares about a Japanese invasion led to nightly blackouts in the Los Angeles Basin, eliminating the light pollution that had begun to limit observing at Mount Wilson. Baade found himself with an astronomer’s dream: virtually unlimited time on the biggest working telescopes in the world, with unparalleled observing conditions.

Baade had been studying the Andromeda galaxy for a dozen years. He had photographed Andromeda thousands of times, identifying novas, supernovas, and Cepheid variables in the outer reaches of the galaxy. But no matter how careful his observations, and how superb the seeing conditions, he had not succeeded in resolving stars in the central region of Andromeda. The core of the galaxy remained a mysterious glowing blob on his plates.

The only observer on Mount Wilson, with a skeleton maintenance crew, Baade resumed his pursuit of Andromeda. He chose nights when the combination of a blackout in the basin below and the superb seeing of Mount Wilson provided optimum conditions. He opened the dome of the observatory early in the afternoon so the temperature of the air and equipment inside would stabilize with the ambient air temperature, and made sure the slit of the dome pointed away from the sun so he wouldn’t inadvertently repeat the disaster of the first light with the one-hundred-inch telescope when the sun had heated the mirror. He developed a technique of guiding on the off-axis image of a faint star magnified 2,800 times. Baade had learned to read the striations in the fuzzy coma image of the guide star for signs of turbulence in the atmosphere and minuscule changes in the focus of the mirror of the telescope during the four-hour exposure.

Night after night he tried. Each noon, when he showed up for breakfast at the Monastery, everyone on the mountain would know from his mood whether the previous night had produced a good plate. Through the best seeing months of late summer and early fall 1942, Baade got closer and closer to his elusive goal. He estimated that some plates showed “incipient resolution,” that he could
almost
discern individual stars. All he needed, he estimated, was a tiny increment in limiting magnitude, not more than 0.3–0.5 magnitude, to resolve the stars of the distant nucleus. He had pressed the equipment to the limit. With the largest working telescope in the world, nearly ideal observing conditions, and every extraordinary precaution he could conjure, the stars still eluded him. The task, like so many other unresolved problems of observational astronomy and cosmology, would have to wait for the completion of the two-hundred-inch telescope.

It wasn’t the only problem that cried out for a bigger telescope. Rudolph Minkowski, another Mount Wilson astronomer, had been
studying the Crab Nebula, a supernova that Chinese astronomers had first observed in 1054. Minkowski was eager to get spectra of the two faint stars at the center of the nebula, which he suspected were remnants of the supernova. But even with Baade’s careful observations, in the very best seeing, using a special three-inch Schmidt camera at the Cassegrain focus of the one-hundred-inch telescope, it was impossible to achieve sufficient contrast between the central star and the surrounding nebulosity for satisfactory spectra of the stars. By 1942, after dozens of tries, Baade and Minkowski had succeeded in getting only one satisfactory spectrogram. The Crab Nebula was left as another problem for the rapidly filling agenda of the two-hundred-inch telescope.

In the summer of 1943 Baade tried again to resolve the central region of Andromeda. He had previously used emulsions that were sensitive in the blue end of the spectrum, because the evidence from spectrograms of the stars in the arms of the Andromeda Nebula showed a predominance of high temperature blue-white stars there. After his failed efforts of the previous summer, and on the basis of studies he and Hubble had made of the Sculptor and Fornax stellar systems, Baade suspected that the stars in the central region of Andromeda belonged to an entirely different stellar population, that they were cooler and less luminous red stars. He also reasoned that red-sensitive photographic plates might cut down on the sky fog from the background of light scattered by interplanetary dust and scattered starlight.

He set his campaign for late summer, when Andromeda would be highest in the sky at midexposure, and when Mount Wilson has the best seeing. He waited for perfect nights, with optimal seeing and optimal figure in the sensitive mirror of the one-hundred-inch telescope, and exposed his plates from 11:00 P.M. to 3:00 A.M., the four-hour window around the time when Andromeda was on the meridian (at the highest point in the sky). Before he exposed the plates, he bathed them in a dilute ammonia bath to increase their sensitivity. Then he would patiently guide the telescope for the full four hours.

Finally he got his perfect night. The plate was labeled

M32—the brighter, round companion of Andromeda, 103E plate (ammoniated) behind a Schott RG 2 filter, λλ 6300–6700—exp. 3
^h
30
^m
, Aug. 25, 1943.
^*

The next day the shy, normally reticent Baade was all smiles at breakfast in the Monastery. “After shooting was over,” he recalled, “it
was quite clear that all the precautions had actually been necessary; I had just managed to get under the wire, with nothing to spare.” To the naked eye, his plates show only the dark (the plate is a negative) disk of M32, the unresolved blob he had captured on hundreds of plates before. Then Baade, with his wonderfully trained eyes, showed that under a magnifying eyepiece the surface of the disk was powdered with thousands of pinpoint stars.

The margin of visibility was so slim that when the
Astrophysical Journal
received Baade’s article announcing the achievement, they would not trust reproductions of the plates. Instead individual enlargements were printed directly from the negative and bound into each issue.

Baade’s achievement has been called the greatest “scoop” in the history of big-telescope astronomy. The consequences went beyond the extraordinary observational feat, as Baade used the evidence he gathered to distinguish two different populations of stars, a major step that would have broad consequences in the determination of cosmic distances. That those observations required years of effort by the finest observer on large telescopes, and the peculiar circumstances of a wartime blackout, proved how much astronomy needed the two-hundred-inch telescope that languished, half finished, in the laboratories in Pasadena and on a remote mountain.

31
Endless, Damnable War

War transformed America. For a generation that had grown up knowing only the depression, the nation suddenly seemed whole again, united and mobilized in a cause that few opposed.

The boom hit everywhere. Corning production lines shifted overnight from baby bottles and Pyrex baking dishes to lenses for gun sights. The Westinghouse plant that a few years before had been eager to build a telescope mount to keep its workers and machines busy was working full shifts on ship turbines. As men went to war, women left home for the factories. Rosie the Riveter showed up in cartoons, radio editorials, and patriotic speeches. Prudish critics were shocked when some women
liked
work outside the home, and when others, freed from the protection of the home, found entertainments and amusements outside work. Servicemen got “Dear John” letters or came home to surprises. The moral crisis the naysayers had predicted as far back as the 1920s, with the rise of hemlines and the sight of women smoking in public, had arrived with a vengeance.

The war also transformed the scientific and technological underpinnings of America’s industrial might. Before the war an undertaking as complex as the two-hundred-inch telescope, a national engineering and design effort that drew on the resources, facilities, skills, and wisdom of dozens of companies, large and small, and hundreds of scientists and engineers from universities, private industry, government, foundations, and the military—had been a unique enterprise. There had been no formal institutional structure to bring together that vast spectrum of individuals and institutions except the regular if informal connections of the white, well-to-do, educated, Protestant, urban men George Hale drew into the enterprise. In the early days of the war effort, many of the same old boys whose companies, institutions, and agencies had designed and built the two-hundred-inch telescope showed up in positions of prestige and power in the war effort. But modern war on two fronts brought a demand for coordinated research
and production that soon far outstripped the manpower, organization, and resources the old boys could command from their clubs.

Projects like the two-hundred-inch telescope were dwarfed by the magnitude of the war effort. Vannevar Bush and James Conant, under the authority of the NDRC, swallowed up laboratories, faculties, scientists, and programs, channeling the efforts of thousands of researchers and vast manufacturing facilities into war research and development. When the resources of existing laboratories and production facilities weren’t sufficient, they could call for the construction of vast new plants and secret labs. The NDRC/OSRD took over the administration of atomic energy projects from a committee headed by Lyman Briggs at the Bureau of Standards, and in 1942 handed it over to the U.S. Army and General Leslie Groves, who formed the Manhattan Engineering District to administer a far-flung empire of facilities in New York, Chicago, Berkeley, Hanford, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos. The facilities in Hanford and Oak Ridge, and the secret laboratories in Los Alamos, dwarfed every previous scientific venture. The full cost of the two-hundred-inch telescope, the most expensive scientific instrument ever started before the war, would have been a footnote to the budget of the Manhattan Project.