The Perfect Machine (86 page)

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Escaping to Europe to cure nervous exhaustion was another American custom. In the James family a trip to Europe was the “reward” for whichever child was most ill. Henry often campaigned for as long as a year with hypochondriac symptoms to finagle the trip for himself over his brother William and sister Alice.

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Chrétien later said that the exposure had only been forty-five minutes. The experience seems to have left no scars: In the 1920s Chrétien collaborated with Ritchey on the telescopc design that was to bear their names.

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Adams later said it was Vega, and in her biography of Hale, and again in her history of Palomar, Helen Wright repeats Adams’s account. Vega is a summer star. At three in the morning in early November, Vega would be below the horizon. A more likely candidate would have been Capella, in the constellation Auriga. Hale’s diary said only, “With Alfred Noyes to Mountain. First observations with 100”-Jupiter, Moon, Saturn.”

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Astronomers use a variety of measurements for distances that are far too large to express conveniently or usefully in terrestrial units like the mile or kilometer. The AU, or astronomical unit, used for relatively small regions like the solar system, is the mean distance from the earth to the sun, or approximately 93 million miles. The LY, or light-year, is the distance light travels in one year, approximately six trillion miles. The parsec, sometimes abbreviated pc, is approximately 3.26 light-years. Kiloparsecs (kpc), one thousand parsecs, and megaparsecs (Mpc), one million parsecs, are used for extreme distances.

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The discussions at the Monastery table are legendary. By tradition the astronomer observing on the one-hundred-inch telescope took the place of honor at the head of the dinner table and was granted the privilege of guiding the discussion for the evening. Hubble was famed and feared for his habit of arriving for dinner fifteen minutes early, looking up an article on some obscure topic in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the library and channeling all discussion during dinner to the obscure topic about which he and he alone could be expected to know anything.

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The exceptions, the few spirals that were not receding, we now understand, were nearby galaxies that are gravitationally bound to the Milky Way and therefore do not participate in the expansion.

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Like so many ideas that emerged in the design of the two-hundred-inch telescope, Ritchey’s idea took many years to realize. In the 1990s several telescopes are under construction with composite mirrors, built up of thin segments, and ultralightweight mirrors with precast honeycombed backs. These new technologies rely on computer-controlled devices to adjust the precise alignment and shape of the mirror many times each second.
    Ritchey finally succeeded in building a working Ritchey-Chrétien telescope at the Naval Observatory in Washington. He proved as intractable there as at Mount Wilson. Once, while removing the forty-inch primary mirror, he dropped it from the lifting slings to the steel deck of the observatory. The mirror miraculously survived, but Ritchey was banned from the Naval Observatory. The Ritchey-Chrétien design, refined with a Cassegrain lens originally designed by Gascoigne in Australia, and fifth-order optics developed by Ira Bowen, is currently used for most large telescopes, including the Keck telescope in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope. Modern mirror-grinding and -polishing techniques, using computer-controlled polishing machinery, have made the complex hyperboloid shapes easier to figure; modern instrumentation favors the Cassegrain focus for most research programs; and the relatively short tube adapts well to modern, lightweight mountings.

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Hale’s concept was regularly employed after the 1960s by using a mercury torus, enclosed in a bag, under the mirror of new telescopes like the Du Pont one-hundred-inch telescope at Las Campanas. A later variation of the idea has been adapted in the 1990s for large telescopes built with meniscus mirrors, glass or quartz surfaces too thin to hold their shape without external support. The shape of the mirror is continously adjusted, many times each second, with computer-controlled actuators. The actuators are mechanical rather than the air or water cushion Hale envisioned. Telescopes with this design are currently under construction in Arizona and Chile.

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Recently cosmologists have begun exploring the possibility that a cosmological constant may be necessary after all.

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Caltech seemed to have no fears of nepotism or inbreeding. By 1930 Bowen’s colleagues on the physics faculty-Jesse DuMond, Charles Lauritsen, Victor Neher, and John Anderson-were all Caltech Ph.Ds.

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Cylindrical distortions are like the corrections put into eyeglass lenses to correct astigmatism. Rotate a cylindrically distorted lens, and the shape of the viewed objects changes with the rotation.

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Hale called it friction. An engineer, describing the frictional inertia of a heavy component in contact with another, would probably use the term stiction.

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Einstein saw the writing on the walls in Germany earlier than many other scientists. “If my theory of relativity is proven successful,” he wrote, “Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”

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When Ellis later tried to fuse the two halves of the disk, the power at the GE factory unexpectedly shut down. In little more than an hour, the temperature inside the furnace dropped from 1050°F to below 700°F. The alloy shield suspended over the mold to protect the disk from firebrick fragments contracted from the sudden temperature change and scaled off, contaminating the glass. That final disaster marked the end of GE’s work on telescope disks. The sixty- inch disks sat for a long time at Lynn, ignored. In the 1950s Robert McMath of the McMath-Hulbert Observatory at Pontiac, Michigan, explored possible use of the disks for a solar telescope, but nothing came of the project. By then Thomson and Ellis were dead, and no one at GE seemed eager to revive a failed project.

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Curtis and Hale discussed the possibility of Curtis coming to Mount Wilson. Hale offered him access to the research facilities, but no job.

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The grade was officially named after Nathan Harrison, a black man who called himself “the first white man on the mountain.” Harrison had come to Palomar as a slave in 1848, to work at a mining claim in Rincon. No one knew how he survived year-round on the mountain; his only apparent source of income was tips from travelers grateful for the buckets of water he brought for their struggling teams. “Uncle Nate” died in 1920, at the age of 107.

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The model was used at Robinson Hall by Caltech undergraduates in astronomy for many years. It was recently traded to a community college in Corning for a newer fourteen-inch telescope. The community college plans to renovate the one-tenth-scale telescope.

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As late as 1955, when Margaret Burbidge, a superb observer, applied for a position at Mount Wilson, she was told that there were no toilet facilities for women on the mountain. With aplomb, she replied that she would use the bushes. Her husband, a theorist, was hired as a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, which granted him privileges at Mount Wilson and Palomar. Astronomers looked the other way when she showed up at Mount Wilson to use her husbands allotted time on the one-hundred-inch telescope. He read books in the darkroom while she observed.

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Telescopes like the two-hundred-inch are measured by the diameter of their primary mirrors. Schmidt cameras are measured by the diameter of their correcting lenses, which are smaller than the primary mirror. The forty-eight-inch Schmidt camera has a mirror seventy-two inches in diameter. Comparing that mirror to the mirror of the sixty-inch telescope, which had been the biggest working telescope in the world twenty-five years before, is an interesting index of the growth of astronomical instruments.

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Zwickys penchant for the peculiar and the lack of self-censorship in his ideas were just the qualification for no-holds-barred weapons research. He maintained his affiliation with Aerojet General after the war. He later claimed that a project of his in 1957 had achieved the launch of a small pellet of aluminum into interplanetary space-a first that paled alongside the news of Sputnik that year.

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M32 is the Messier catalog number, 103E is the Eastman Kodak emulsion type. The Schott RG 2 filter cut out the green and red auroral emissions but transmitted the red spectrum between wavelengths 6300 and 6700 angstrom.

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Bill McClellan, who for many years was the machinist with responsibility for Palomar, and who is famed for successfully rising to Richard Feynman’s challenge to build an electrical motor no larger than 1/64 inch on a side, has built a model of the telescope to demonstrate the balancing procedure.

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The insurance companies wanted $35,000 to insure the move of the mirror from Pasadena to Palomar, far more than Caltech could afford from the already stretched budget. In view of Caltech’s record of safety with the mirror, the underwriter finally agreed to insure the journey for $ 1,800.

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Byron Hill is infamous for saying that the observatory would run just fine if they didn’t have astronomers coming up there and messing with the equipment. Astronomers who tangled with Hill were certain he was not joking.

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Bruce Rule, in an interview shortly before his death, claimed credit for the design of the new support systems. He also told a reporter that the support mechanisms, with more than a thousand parts each, were so complex that no one else really understood them. Rules contributions to the telescope were extensive, but he did not design the supports; they contain closer to one hundred than one thousand parts and are not computers but simple though sophisticated and finely machined lever mechanisms. Hans Karoloff, a Finnish engineer at Caltech, did much of the reengineering on the longitudinal portions of the support mechanisms. Draftsmen had plans for the new supports ready before Ira Bowen decided to have the supports rebuilt.

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Actually Bowen had exposed five plates a year earlier with the labels P.H.-l through P.H.-5. Bowen, who cared little about publicity, let Hubble have the honor of the official first plate. Bowens plates were stored at the Santa Barbara Street headquarters of the Carnegie Institution.

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Some observers got nauseous, but as precarious as the swinging chair felt, it was a great relief to astronomers who had seen Russell Porters original drawings of a seat suspended on cables, like a child’s swing.

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At the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas, a disgruntled employee vented his anger by emptying a revolver into the surface of the eighty-two-inch primary mirror of their telescope. When the university tried to collect from the insurance company, the company paid only a prorated percentage of the cost of the mirror, on the grounds that the mirror had lost only a small percentage of its light-gathering ability.

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At the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas, a disgruntled employee vented his anger by emptying a revolver into the surface of the eighty-two-inch primary mirror of their telescope. When the university tried to collect from the insurance company, the company paid only a prorated percentage of the cost of the mirror, on the grounds that the mirror had lost only a small percentage of its light-gathering ability.