First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (26 page)

Enter James A. Westphal.

Westphal is an astronomer who grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his father ran an auto-repair shop. When Westphal graduated from high school, he got a job as a “jug hustler” for a seismic crew exploring the Oklahoma panhandle for oil and gas. The jug hustler plants a string of geophones, which pick up sonic vibrations from explosives, and Westphal’s pay was thirty-five cents an hour; for overtime, he got
half
pay. After a few promotions Westphal managed to save enough money to go to the University of Tulsa, where he picked up mostly B’s, along with a bachelor’s degree in 1954. He went back into the oil industry, where he got a job running a well-logging crew in Mexico. Then he got a job with Sinclair Oil, in Tulsa, to investigate what he calls “unorthodox” methods for finding oil. Westphal pointed sensors at the ground, hoping to pick up gamma rays coming from oil. He pulsed radio waves into the ground, hoping to get an echo from something greasy. With a giant computer Westphal analyzed gravitational warps that might hint of petroleum. Westphal passed word around Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana that Sinclair Oil wanted to talk to any person or persons who knew or believed they knew something about finding oil—and diviners and psychics showed up at Westphal’s lab, to demonstrate their witching wands and their bottles filled with vitamins and hung on strings, bottles that were supposed to wiggle when dangled over oil. The management of Sinclair Oil had little idea of what Jim Westphal was up to, which was all right by him.

Shortly after the Soviets put up the
Sputnik
satellite, Sinclair’s management began to wonder if there might be some business opportunities in outer space. Management invited Westphal to a meeting of the board of directors in New York City, to tell them whether Sinclair ought to be in outer space and, incidentally, to tell them what he was doing out there in his lab in Tulsa. After advising the directors to avoid outer space, Westphal placed a small black box on the table. He said that recently his Tulsa lab had had a breakthrough. He would like now to share it with the board of directors. He said that the box wasn’t dangerous, although it could produce mental effects. The atmosphere in the boardroom became hushed. He said, “This is a model of a manager.” He hit a switch
on the box. There was a whir. The box’s lid opened. A hand shot out, seized the switch, turned it off, and went back into the box. Westphal said, “As you can see, you put in some input to a manager, and in a little while, why, that’s what happens to your input.” The hush turned into total silence, which was suddenly broken by a choking sound—one man laughing hysterically—the comptroller of the corporation. (The device was first imagined by Claude Shannon, of AT&T Bell Laboratories, who also invented information theory. Westphal heard about Shannon’s idea through the grapevine, and Westphal was probably the first person to actually build the device. Westphal’s Model of a Manager became a popular item in joke shops, although Westphal never made a dime from it.) “We were a bunch of free spirits,” Westphal once said, “and we torqued the system and brought Sinclair Oil kicking and screaming into the new world.”

After doing that, Westphal landed at Caltech as a laboratory technician. He became, in effect, a jug hustler for Caltech. He proceeded to build a high-pressure aquarium tank capable of holding living marine organisms brought up from deep-sea trenches. He took photographs of the moon and of coral reefs. He became interested in volcanoes and gold mirrors and infrared stars and galloping glaciers in Alaska and the atmosphere of Venus. His problem at Caltech, as he described it, was that “I was never able to figure out what I was supposed to do around here.” Westphal began fooling around with night-vision tubes, turning them into cameras for the Hale Telescope. He and an astronomer named Jerry Kristian built a camera containing a Silicon Intensified Target vidicon—a high-voltage night-vision tube. They took the camera up to prime focus. Prime focus is meant to hold one person. With the help of ten or twenty yards of Palomar Glue, Westphal and Kristian installed their night-vision tube in prime focus, along with a computer, a tape recorder, an oscilloscope, a television monitor, a ten-thousand-volt power supply, a tangle of power cables, and both of themselves. They aimed the Hale Telescope at the Milky Way, and then, just for the hell of it, they charged the night-vision tube with ten thousand volts of electricity—maximum redline power—and let first light fall into the tube. A bunch of stars came up on the television screen. Kristian, peering at a star-finder chart,
began to complain. He said that the telescope must be pointing poorly. He said he could not recognize any of the stars. Then Kristian began to scream, and that was when they realized they were seeing stars that had never appeared on any star chart. They had warped the Hale into hyperspace and had zoomed into an unknown neck of the galaxy. Westphal let out an Oklahoma wildcatter’s “Yaa-hooooooooo!” and Kristian laughed until he gasped—“I almost peed my pants,” he said. (With all those high-voltage wires around, that could have killed them both.) Westphal and Kristian’s camera is now in Washington, D.C., in collections of the National Air and Space Museum. Jim Westphal had become a Palomar gadgeteer.

Meanwhile three engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena—their names are Gerald Smith, Frederick Landauer, and James Janesick—had been investigating CCD sensor chips for use on the Galileo space probe, an unmanned NASA spacecraft then planned for a voyage to Jupiter. Westphal, talking with these engineers, came to understand that a CCD chip would be a good sensor for a ground-based telescope. He passed that rumor along to Jim Gunn. “It dawned on us,” as Westphal tells it, “that if we could improve these chips a little bit, they could just wipe out everything else in ground-based astronomy.” The engineers were saying that a chip could be made one hundred times more sensitive to light than any photographic film. To hang a supercharger like that on the Hale Telescope would be exactly equivalent to building a telescope with a mirror one hundred times larger than the Hale’s, only much cheaper.

On October 19, 1976, Jim Westphal attended an all-day meeting at Caltech, as an onlooker. The main participants were the members of the Space Telescope’s Phase B group—a NASA team in charge of the early design of the Space Telescope. The question at hand was critical and immediate: What in the world should be done about a main camera for the Space Telescope? Smith and Landauer, from the Jet Propulsion Lab, stood up and talked about CCD chips. Westphal presented some lore on CCDs. Robert O’Dell, the group’s chief scientist, drew a picture on a blackboard of a mirrored pyramid that could be used to break a beam of light into four parts and bounce them into an array of CCD sensors.
O’Dell said, “You guys think about that.” By the afternoon, the group had thought about that and had voted to advertise an open competition, hoping to encourage somebody, somewhere, to surface and solve the problem of the main camera on the Space Telescope. A couple of days later, as Westphal tells the story, Jim Gunn walked into Westphal’s office and said, “Jim, we have got to build the camera for the Space Telescope.”

“What?” Westphal said. “Buzz off, Gunn.”

Gunn said that he was not joking.

Westphal started to feel nervous. He said, “No way, Jim! That’s not our style.”

“If we don’t build the camera, Jim, Caltech will be out of business in astronomy,” Gunn said.

“So who do you want as Principal Investigator?” Westphal asked, feeling a weird sensation in the pit of his stomach.

“I want you to be P.I.,” Gunn said.

“What? Hell, no, Jim! You can cram it,” he said.

Gunn pleaded with Westphal.

“There’s just no way,” Westphal said.

Gunn insisted that there was a way.

At that point Westphal understood that what he, Westphal, needed was a way out. So he said that he would consider the notion—provided that Gunn would agree
in advance
to be the Deputy Principal Investigator. He felt sure Gunn would not agree to that.

Gunn agreed.

“I have been had,” Westphal said. Then Westphal had an idea. He said to Gunn, “Let’s each put three or four names on the blackboard. If we can get half of these people to join us, Jim, why, then I’ll do it.” (“That was my way out,” he would later admit. “Right quick I could think of several people who I just
knew
would refuse to get into this thing with us.”)

During the following weekend Gunn and Westphal got on the telephone. Westphal called up Jerry Kristian. “Yes,” Kristian said. Westphal called someone else—he can’t remember now who it was, but he remembers hearing the unfortunate word, “Yes.”

“I figured I would have to call Roger Lynds, over at Kitt Peak,” Westphal remembered. “I just knew he would bail me out. He said, ‘Hell, yes.’ At which point I knew in my gut I had had it.”

“I twisted Westphal’s arm,” Gunn would admit. Gunn believed that only Jim Westphal, who had been torquing bureaucracies for most of his life, could successfully build the camera. Gunn feared megascience. He had been secretly terrified that Westphal or somebody at NASA might nominate him, Jim Gunn, to drag the Space Telescope kicking and screaming into the new world. “When I told Westphal that he had to lead the project,” Gunn said, “I was merely trying to protect my tail.” The team, which eventually grew to twelve astronomers, began to meet regularly, throwing around ideas for how to build a CCD camera for the Space Telescope. They decided to call it the Wide Field/Planetary Camera, or the Wiffpick for short (the word comes from the acronym WF/PC). The Wiffpick would contain a reflective pyramid that would break up a shaft of starlight coming from the telescope’s main mirror and bounce it into an array of CCD cameras. It would operate in two modes: a wide-field mode, for making images of faint galaxies, and a planetary mode, a telephoto action for zooming in on planets. (It is interesting to note that Gunn’s first good amateur telescope, the one he built in high school, featured a Wide Field and Planetary Camera—as Gunn called it even then.) According to Westphal, “In a technical and a scientific sense, Jim Gunn is the brain behind the Wiffpick.”

“Absolutely not,” Gunn said. “Westphal is the brain.”

In any case, the Wiffpick team saw that it would not be easy to convince NASA that the Space Telescope needed a Wiffpick. One way would be to build a prototype CCD camera, to demonstrate that the idea would work. So Westphal went to a restaurant supply store down the street from Caltech and bought a spaghetti pot for eight dollars. He built a CCD camera inside the spaghetti pot. He took the pot up to the Hale Telescope and fastened it to the Hale with a handful of bolts and a lash-up of Palomar Glue. He let first light into the spaghetti pot. Describing what happened next, Westphal said, “There is just nothing like taking a five-minute exposure and seeing deeper into the universe than anybody ever has before.” In the summer of 1977, his team submitted a design for a Wiffpick to NASA. Competing against two other designs, the Wiffpick won.

Jim Westphal has a white beard and a crew cut. His team sometimes refers to him as Captain Fuzzy, although never to his face.
His hands, I have noticed, are usually into something. One day I found Westphal in a lab underneath Caltech with his hands inside an antique (circa 1975) computer tape drive. Anybody but Westphal would have thrown it out years ago. “Not having the tape on the capstan will get you every time,” he said as a loop of tape spat out of the drive and circulated around Westphal’s hands. “It was a brave act for NASA to select us,” he said. “See, legally, I’m an amateur astronomer.” He still does not have a Ph.D.—no paper credential other than his bachelor’s degree from Tulsa. The Wiffpick was assembled by aerospace engineers in pressurized clean rooms at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working under contract with NASA, and neither Jim Westphal nor Jim Gunn touched the camera with a soldering iron.

Nobody at NASA wanted any roaming, septic gadgeteers rooting hog inside the Wide Field/Planetary Camera, even if those gadgeteers had dreamed up the camera in the first place. According to Westphal, NASA has traditionally discouraged the Principal Investigator of a space experiment from trying to engineer the spacecraft. “You don’t let people like Jim and I build flight hardware,” Westphal said. “It might vibrate apart on launch.” The Principal Investigator is supposed to plan the scientific experiments, but trained engineers, hired by NASA, are supposed to build hardware that will not vibrate apart on launch. In effect, the engineers told Westphal and his crew to give them the basic idea for the camera and let them worry about the details. One does not tell a gadgeteer not to worry about details.

At one point Westphal hired an optician named Art Vaughan to do a preliminary design of the mirrors and lenses that would go inside the Wiffpick. Vaughan sat down at his kitchen table with a pocket calculator and invented all of the glass for the Wiffpick. He gave his plans to Westphal, along with a bill for a couple of weekends’ worth of work. Westphal sent the plans over to the Jet Propulsion Lab, and then the trouble started. The engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab took one look at those drawings, panicked, and sent them to a major corporation for evaluation. The major corporation sent back a bill in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars and an answer that Westphal characterizes as, “Yeah, it’ll work great.” Westphal blew up. “I went absolutely nonlinear,” he
said. The resulting uproar caused the aerospace people to nickname the Wiffpick team the Woof Pack, apparently because the Woof Pack had snarled at them and slobbered all over them and bit their ankles.

“Those guys wanted to take a picture of the beginning of the universe,” one engineer complained.

“It has not been a real smooth interaction,” Westphal put it.

“Those Calteckers can be a pain in the ass.”

“Catastrophic differences in philosophy.”

“We aerospace types need those people in left field or we’d go rolling downhill. But would I try to fly something Gunn or Westphal had built? Sure. I would take it up in the space shuttle and launch it at the sun.”

As a part of his blood pact with NASA, Westphal demanded the right to review and authorize any large requests for money by the engineers. “I followed the Golden Rule,” Westphal said. “Those what’s got the gold makes the rules.” Westphal got his hands on the gold—he signed for every major expense. “I could turn the money on and off,” he said. “I could stand up in places where I shouldn’t stand up and say, ‘This is a bunch of crap.’ ”