The Perfect Machine (70 page)

At the end of October, Hall sent out a press release asking all reporters and press agencies to cooperate by not announcing in advance any details of the move. Those who cooperated would be provided with opportunities for photographs, film coverage, or a place in a vehicle accompanying the move.

The reporters respected the news embargo, even on November 12, 1947, when the great doors in the optics shop opened for the first time since the disk had arrived eleven and one-half years before, and a huge sixteen-wheel trailer from Belyea & Sons was moved into the optics shop. Jack Belyea was famous for trucking impossible cargoes, from oil rigs in the Middle East to ships that he had moved from seaports to inland lakes.

Inside the shop Marcus Brown ordered a final wash for the mirror. To the men with the hoses and sponges, it seemed no different from the thousands of times they had washed the disk, often several times a day. This time, when the disk was clean, the rubber skirts that covered the edge to keep water out of the support mechanisms were stripped off for good. The disk was tipped up on edge, in the position normally used for Saturday testing. John Anderson and Ike Bowen showed up with a Caltech photographer, and the entire optical lab crew posed in front of the disk. The crew wore their cotton surgical suits. Anderson and Bowen wore three-piece suits. Brown and Anderson shook hands for the photographer. For some shots one of the workers sat up in the central hole of the disk, giving a better scale. There was an air of festivity, but Brownie didn’t smile in the photographs. When the workmen went home at the end of the day, Brownie stayed late in the optics shop, as he often did.

The next morning Brownie told Mel Johnson to operate the crane to load the disk onto the trailer. Brownie would stay at the trailer, supervising the lowering of the priceless cargo. They spent much of the morning securing the slings to the disk, measuring and remeasuring the trailer and the heavy timber case, twenty feet square and eight feet high, that had been built for the disk. Lifting the disk in its heavy cell, moving the crane the length of the room, and lowering it horizontally onto two I-beams that had been welded to the trailer took most of a day. Sponge rubber was used to cushion the disk. The mirror cell was fastened to the trailer at three points, two fixed and one movable, to allow for flexure in the trailer. Brownie paced the floor on his bad legs, signaling each move to Johnson.

When the disk was finally on the trailer, workmen climbed onto the big crate to put a sheet of paper and a wooden cover, one inch thick, on top of the disk. One worker saw what looked like a scratch on the surface of the glass in the central hole in the disk. A scratch on the inside of the hole wouldn’t have any effect on the mirror, but everyone in the shop knew that the central hole had been ground smooth and true before the temporary plug had been put in. The plug had later come out cleanly, and the hole had been carefully washed. From his perch the workman leaned down to examine the scratch.

It wasn’t a scratch. He read the letters etched into the glass:
Marcus H. Brown 1947 A.D.
Brown said nothing about the signature. Craftsmen and artists had always signed their masterpieces.

With the protective wooden cover in place, a radio-crystal detector was mounted on top to measure vibrations the disk received, and connected to an indicator in the cab of the tractor pulling the trailer, where an assistant driver could monitor the vibration. The disk was then covered with aluminum foil insulation and a heavy square cover of two-inch planks. Belyea and Pacific Rigging had brought a banner they wanted displayed on the outside of the crate.

The mirror, cell, and wooden case weighed forty tons. The trailer was another twenty, making a total load of sixty tons, just within the limits of what one of the huge Belyea diesel tractors could pull on a level highway. The civil engineers had estimated that speeds of up to 15 miles per hour would be safe on the best stretches of road; for the final stretch up the road on Palomar Mountain, the speed would have to be held to 4 miles per hour. At those speeds they would need one long day for the 125 miles from Pasadena to Escondido, and another day for the 37 from Escondido to the Observatory. Krick, the meteorologist, had been told to aim for a window of two days of clear weather.

On Monday, November 17, the trailer was pulled through the archway outside the optical shop with winches. An engineer had calculated that the trailer and disk could make the sharp right-angle turn, but it took a whole morning with heavy steel slip panels to get the cargo
through the arch, with inches to spare on either side. By 3:00 in the afternoon a Belyea diesel tractor was coupled to the trailer in the driveway. The area was roped off under heavy guard.

The California Highway Patrol had been asked to provide ten officers on motorcycles to escort the mirror. Towns along on the route were asked to have police on alert for crowd control. The Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads agreed to station extra signalmen at each railroad crossing on the route, to stop any ongoing trains if the mirror got stuck on a crossing. On the afternoon of November 17, Krick rechecked his weather maps and predicted that the next two days would be clear. The time of departure was set for 3:30 A.M. on November 18.

The reporters and film crews were already gathered outside the optics shop when Bruce Rule placed a final phone call to Byron Hill, who had gone down to Escondido to check the weather at that end. Hill said the sky was clear, and Rule gave the go-ahead signal. At 3:15, the Belyea driver started the engine of the big diesel tractor. Minutes later, amid a blaze of flash bulbs, the trailer eased out of the driveway. Highway patrolmen on motorcycles rode in front and along both sides of the trailer. Bruce Rule sat on the trailer with a portable chart recorder, testing the level of vibrations as the driver moved down California Street at five miles per hour.

It wasn’t until they were outside Pasadena that the speed picked up to eight, then ten miles an hour. By then it was early morning. Farmers working close to the highway and workers held up by local police closing off the roads stopped to watch the strange procession. “What is it?” people asked. Those who kept up with the stories in the newspapers answered with the ubiquitous-if-wrong moniker the reporters had adamantly assigned to the mirror: “the Giant Eye.” Those magic words were enough to silence crowds, who knew what they had seen was something to tell children and grandchildren.

The procession ignored stop signs and red lights. The lead motorcycle officers were far enough ahead of the truck to block intersections and order approaching motorists to pull over to the curb. Two patrol cars behind kept irate motorists from trying to pass. Every time the road or grade surface changed, Bruce Rule monitored the vibration gauges before he authorized an increase to fifteen miles per hour on Rosemead Boulevard, or ordered a cut to eight miles per hour on Los Alamitos Boulevard in Norwalk. As the day went on, the crowds got larger. Local police were called out in small towns, “in case.” But there were no disturbances. Everywhere people watched in awe.

America had changed in the twelve years since the raw glass disk had crossed the country by rail. In 1936 the United States was in the midst of the depression. Americans were hungry for a focus, for reassurance of the capabilities and promise of science, technology, and industry. By 1947 Americans were accustomed to the prosperity of
wartime production, jaded by atomic bombs, television, and the possibility of owning their own homes and cars. Yet even people who knew nothing about Palomar or telescopes knew from the escorts and the slow pace of the procession that this was a sight they would never again see.

It took six hours to reach the junction with Highway 101 near Santa Ana. On the smooth four-lane highway, the tractor-trailer could safely speed up to 20 miles per hour. At the Galivan Bridge, five miles north of San Juan Capistrano, where the highway spans the Santa Fe Tracks in a ravine 50 feet below, the procession stopped while the riggers from Pacific Rigging bolted dollies onto each side of the trailer. Everyone was itchy as they waited. The highway patrolmen parked their motorcycles and stood at the perimeters, guarding the disk. The additional sixteen wheels on each dolly spread the load of the disk over fifty-eight wheels. As the lead tractor and then the front wheels of the trailer inched onto the span, the bridge sagged. Caltech engineers monitored deflection gauges they had affixed to the bridge. When the entire load was on the bridge, the gauges showed a maximum deflection of three-eighths of an inch. The reporters wondered why Rule and the other engineers were smiling as the dollies were unbolted on the other side.

At 2:34 in the afternoon, in Carlsbad, a second heavy diesel tractor was hooked to the rear of the trailer in preparation for the grades of the coastal mountains. The speed dropped to only a few miles per hour as they approached the slopes. Toward sunset clouds scudded in from over the ocean. The drivers needed windshield wipers for the misty drizzle. It was dark enough for headlights when they reached Escondido at 5:02 P.M. and parked for the night. They had covered just over 126 miles at an average speed of just under 11 miles per hour. Everything was on schedule but the weather. The mist had turned to rain, and the thermometer was falling.

By morning, the rain was steady and cold. The weatherman said the visibility was 150 feet. Workmen remembered it as 50. There was nothing to do but set off. Despite the conditions, the drivers, now used to the load, covered the 20 miles to Rincon at an average speed of 6.4 miles per hour. There a third huge diesel tractor was hitched behind the trailer for the final climb up Palomar Mountain. The highway patrol motorcycles left at Rincon. The road up the mountain was wide enough only for the tractors and trailer.

Bill Marshall had grown up on the mountain. His father had worked in the office and as the wartime caretaker, and his mother was the schoolteacher. After years of waiting, the arrival of the mirror was too exciting to miss, so Bill took a day off from college in San Diego. Byron Hill assigned him to the crews that braced each bridge from Valley Center to the top of the mountain with twenty-to thirty-foot-long timbers. Moving the timbers was hard work, but there was an
excitement in the air as they watched the truck majestically cross each bridge.

On the drive from the coast highway to Escondido, the driver of the tractor at the rear of the trailer had coordinated his speed and gear shifts by watching the puffs of exhaust from the stack of the lead tractor. Now the visibility was so poor the drivers of the two tractors at the back couldn’t see the exhaust of the one in the front. They kept their throttles and gears synchronized with one another and with the lead tractor by listening to the sounds of the engine and transmission of the lead tractor.

They passed the Native American village of Pala. Caltech officials had been sent to explain how astronomers would use the telescope to solve the great questions of the origins of the sun, moon, and stars. The Pala had listened politely and nodded. They had their own explanation. Their myths told of a great bird that had flown into the sky, with a branch of flaming tule reeds in its beak. The Pala stood by the road, watching the strange procession toward the mountain.

The grades were steeper after Rincon. The temperature dropped at the higher elevations, hovering around freezing. The rain turned to freezing rain, then sleet, and the road surface froze in patches over the culverts and overpasses. There were some hurried discussions about waiting for a clearing. The drivers wanted to go on. The schedule had called for a speed of four miles an hour up the road on Palomar Mountain, but with the weather worsening, the drivers picked up their pace to double that. Caltech engineers and the reporters in the cars following the big tractors felt their tires slip and skid on the slick road surface. They wondered how the drivers of the big rig did it.

At the bottom of the mountain Byron Hill met the trailer. After thirteen years on the mountain, he knew the treachery of the weather. The temperature on the mountain could drop suddenly. Sleet and freezing rain could turn to snow, covering the road so fast that the centerline and edges would be invisible. The switchback turns of the road were hard enough to follow on a clear day with a dry surface.

Hill climbed on top of the crate encasing the mirror, so he was high enough to signal to the front and rear. The final climb was a dozen miles, most of it on steep grades, the turns just wide enough that if the drivers took exactly the right line, they would keep the wheels of the trailer on the pavement and the mirror would clear the trees. Men walking alongside the lead tractor marked the edges of the pavement as the sleet began to stick in patches. There was no place to turn around. The drivers were reluctant even to risk stopping.

The sky was too gray to reveal the passage of time. When the reporters’ cars stopped for photographs of the tractors and the trailer with the disk, men would have to get out and push to get them going again. While the reporters struggled, the tractors kept up their steady pace, shifting down to low-low, then back up through the range of
gears to keep their speed steady on the changing grade. Men walking alongside counted the puffs of diesel exhaust for each shift, watching the three tractors synchronize their moves. After a mile it was hard to keep count.

At eleven o’clock in the morning, four hours ahead of schedule, the lead tractor rolled through the gate of the observatory grounds. Despite a dozen close calls, with much shouting and arm signals, there had been no real mishaps. A crowd was waiting at the dome, huddled in the wind and sleet, as the tractor pulled to a stop outside the big doors. One after another the cars that had followed the mirror up the mountain pulled up to the dome. The anxiety of the climb showed on every face. Someone said there was a pot of coffee on inside the dome, and everyone rushed in for warmth, hot coffee, and small talk. It was ten minutes before anyone inside realized that no one was outside with the mirror.

The trailer was exactly where they had left it. The wind and sleet were still blowing, and everyone was exhausted with the anxiety and fatigue of the trip up the mountain. There was talk of delaying the unloading for a day, but Hill and Rule had been told to watch expenditures, and demurrage for a tractor and trailer sitting on the mountain overnight was expensive. Byron had the big doorway opened and positioned men on either side of the trailer, and back at the doorway, to direct the driver. Lloyd Green, a Belyea driver with twenty-five years’ experience, climbed up into the cab of the huge diesel and waved them all away. He pulled forward, leaned out of the window to look over his shoulder, and backed the huge trailer straight through the doorway. Like the highway patrolmen who later received souvenir photos to thank them for their help, Green would have stories for his children and grandchildren about the day he drove the most valuable cargo on earth up the mountain.