The Perfect Machine (11 page)

The great one-hundred-inch-diameter mirror was mounted at the bottom of an open tube of riveted steel, eleven feet in diameter and more than forty feet long. The tube pivoted at its center in a heavy steel yoke; motors turning hand-machined gears rotated the tube on the pivots to direct the telescope to objects higher or lower in declination. The steel yoke was suspended at each end on huge floats in mercury bearings and precisely aligned with the axis of the earth, so that as the telescope turned synchronously with rotation of the earth, the heavens would seem to stand still. The massive yoke was designed by Francis Pease, an astronomer at the observatory, in the so-called English style, with the north end closed. The price of the great rigidity
was that the telescope could not be lowered enough to be aimed at objects around the north celestial pole. This telescope would never see Polaris.

The auxiliary mirrors, eyepieces, spectroscopes, and other instruments that would record the light of faint objects were mounted at the opposite end of the tube from the mirror, all in precise alignment with the primary mirror. A deviation of a fraction of a millimeter in the alignment would degrade the image. The tiniest wobble in the mounting would make the image too unsteady for photography or spectroscopy. Astronomical telescopes are unforgiving instruments.

The twenty men on the mountaintop that night included astronomers, machinists, electricians, and carpenters. Hale had also invited the poet Alfred Noyes, in the hope that he might capture and record the majesty of the occasion of first light. Hale deliberately did not invite the press. Hale had a scientist’s skepticism of journalistic oversimplification and sensationalism. Noyes captured Hale’s fears of the press:

As for the stars, if seeing them were all,

Three thousand million new-found points of light

Is our rough guess. But never speak of this.

You know our press. They’d miss the one result

To flash “three thousand millions” round the world.

Once the sun dropped below the horizon, the only illumination inside the dome was dim red night-lights. They too would be turned off when the actual observations began. Through the open shutters of the huge dome, the visitors could see the sky, punctuated with uncounted pinpoints of light. Even for the experienced astronomers, who had spent hundreds of nights on mountaintops with the big telescopes, it was an inspiring sight. Mountaintop observatories create the feel of a cathedral, with the heavens as their ceiling.

If it worked, the new telescope would almost triple the light-gathering ability of the sixty-inch telescope Shapley had used for much of his work. But in 1917 no one could say for sure whether a telescope as large as the new one-hundred-inch reflector would ever achieve its theoretical resolution of faint and distant objects. The effective resolution of a large telescope is limited by the turbulence of the earth’s atmosphere. Mixed air of varying density, which produces the twinkling of stars, leads to irregular refraction under magnification: Stars appear as blurred images instead of pinpoints of light. The larger the lens or mirror of a telescope, the more light rays from widely separated paths are united in a single image, and the more sensitive the instrument becomes to the tremors of the atmosphere. Even at a site like Mount Wilson, with its superb seeing, there were many who thought that the sixty-inch telescope was already pressing against the limits.

Although the new telescope was intended for use almost exclusively for photographic and spectrographic work, an eyepiece was mounted that evening so they could visually test its resolution and light-gathering ability. When the sky was dark enough, Walter Adams pressed buttons on the control panel to swing the great telescope around toward Jupiter. The others gathered around the base of the telescope as Hale was given the privilege of the first look through the eyepiece. He climbed the ladder to the eyepiece, high above the concrete floor, stared for a moment, then came down the ladder without saying a word.

Adams, an astronomer and experienced optician, went next. He couldn’t believe what he saw through the eyepiece. Instead of a single image of Jupiter, there were six or seven overlapping images in the eyepiece. “It appeared,” Adams later wrote, “as if the surface of the mirror had been distorted into a number of facets, each of which was contributing its own image.” If that was the best the telescope could do, it was worthless for astronomical work.

Hale and Adams looked at each other, wondering if the predictions of doom for the big telescope had come true. Had telescope building reached its limit? Had they labored for most of a decade—raising the funds and painstakingly building the giant machine—for nought?

Then someone recalled that the workmen on the mountain had left the dome open during the day. Maybe the sun shining on the mirror during the day had heated it enough to distort the images. The astronomers waited around. Every fifteen minutes one of them climbed the ladder to check the eyepiece, until someone suggested that a watched pot doesn’t boil.

Adams and Hale walked glumly from the new dome down to the Monastery, the multiple images of Jupiter fresh in their minds, Ritchey’s predictions of failure hung in the air like a curse. Already astronomy in the United States had divided into two camps: While the California astronomers worked on building bigger and better instruments, astronomers at some of the eastern universities, with limited access to good viewing sites, argued that astronomy didn’t need bigger or fancier instruments. What was needed, they said, was more and deeper analysis of the data that was already available, accumulated in thousands of painstakingly compiled ledgers at the observatories. Ritchey’s assessment of the new mirror added fuel to the fires. Outside the Mount Wilson offices and optical laboratories, there was no shortage of doubters, who had joined Ritchey in predicting failure for the machine.

Hale and Adams agreed to meet at the telescope at three in the morning for another look.

In his room at the Monastery, Hale didn’t even undress. He couldn’t sleep and couldn’t concentrate on the mystery he had brought
with him. He knew the new telescope wasn’t without problems. Some were the results of deliberate compromises. Francis Pease’s design for the mounting provided great rigidity, and the mercury flotation systems on the pedestal bearings provided smooth motions, but the support beam at the end of the closed cradle made it impossible to lower the telescope to point at the celestial pole. To insulate the telescope from changes in the air temperature outside, the dome had been fabricated of a double thickness of thin sheet steel, with an insulating air space between. Still, it didn’t take extensive calculations to determine that the immense plate-glass mirror would be slow to adjust to changes in the ambient temperature.

At two-thirty in the morning, earlier than they had planned to meet, Hale walked back to the dome. Walter Adams showed up too, confessing that he also couldn’t sleep. By then Jupiter was out of reach in the West. They chose a bright star for their second test. The night assistant didn’t identify the star in the logbook.
^*
After the earlier observations of Jupiter, they probably assumed that the logbook would be short-lived.

Again they slewed the telescope around, and again Hale climbed the ladder to take the first look through the eyepiece. This time he came away from the eyepiece with a broad smile on his face. For the first time in years, his impish eyes sparkled. “With his first glimpse,” Adams remembered, “Hale’s depression vanished.” Adams took a look for himself. The image of the star stood out in the eyepiece as a single, sharp point of light, dazzling in its brilliance. Within hours everyone on the mountain had come over to take a look through the eyepiece.

Spirits were high, but even with the most spectacular images anyone had ever seen in a telescope eyepiece, the results of the evening had been a mixed success. The long, cool hours of the night had been enough to let the mirror resume its normal figure, but further tests confirmed that it took twenty-four hours to cool the mirror of the telescope ten degrees Celsius. During the cooling period the telescope was useless for accurate observations, which meant that sudden changes in the weather on the mountain would severely limit its use. The addition of a cold-water pipe system behind the disk, an effort to maintain the temperature of the mirror, didn’t really help because the night temperatures on Mount Wilson were unpredictable. The only way the telescope could be used without the disasters of that first night was to keep the dome tightly closed all day, with the mirror housed in a cork-lined insulating chamber. And even when a complex routine was established
to limit the thermal instability of the mirror, it became clear during the later testing that the definition of the telescope fell off in certain inclinations. The one-hundred-inch was a temperamental machine.

Yet for all its teething problems, the telescope put to rest the doubts that had raged about whether the atmosphere, even at a site like Mount Wilson, was steady enough to permit a large telescope to reach its limits of resolution. Within months observers were using the telescope to reach out to distant objects too faint to resolve on the sixty-inch telescope. As bugs in the mirror supports and temperature stabilization procedures were gradually worked out, the telescope produced significant results. Exposures for images and spectrograms of distant objects that had required several nights on the sixty-inch could be completed in a single session on the one-hundred. On a good night, when the mirror settled down and behaved itself, the telescope could resolve faint objects well beyond the reach of the sixty-inch telescope. Astronomers queued up for time on the machine. The limits of the universe, the elusive edge that tantalizes astronomers, had been pushed back.

Mount Wilson now had two great telescopes in addition to the solar telescopes. It was unquestionably the center of astronomical research, attracting the best and brightest young astronomers, a must station on the tour of visiting scientists. Yet, whatever the successes of the great telescope, Hale could never forget that first night and the horrors of that first glance through the eyepiece. Even if the one-hundred had been a perfect instrument, with no teething problems, George Hale was never a contented man. He had always been impatient. In the opening paragraph of some autobiographical notes he compiled, he wrote, “I was impatient to make rapid progress: as my father used to say, I wanted ‘to do it yesterday.’”

Building telescopes was a Herculean task. For ten years the Hooker telescope had been George Hale’s obsession, one hundred tons of iron and steel and glass held together by his compulsive worrying. It had left Hale’s life swinging wildly between the moments of clarity and the quicksand of the whirligus.

Most men would have quit then.

6
Waiting

By the mid-1920s George Hale was spending much of his time in his private solar laboratory on Holladay Road in San Marino, not far from the Huntington Library, which he had helped establish. In 1921, the year of the great debate in Washington and three years after the one-hundred-inch telescope went into service, the visits of the tormenting demon and the incapacitating nervous breakdowns had become so frequent that he had had to give up the directorship of the Mount Wilson Observatory.

Set back from the road on a quiet side street, the solar lab is an attractive stucco building. The lintel over the mahogany doors, a stone bas-relief of the sun from a Theban tomb, bridges Hale’s interests in solar astronomy and Egypt. Another bas-relief, over the fireplace in the paneled library, shows the pharoah Akhenaton riding a chariot surrounded by the sun and planets. It’s only a few steps from the library to the research instrument, a spectroheliograph designed by Hale, with a movable coelostat mirror on a tower to follow the sun and reflect the light through a series of mirrors to the console. The electrical controls, including racks of hand-wound relays, were made by Jerry Dowd, the electrician from the Mount Wilson Observatory. The laboratory was equipped with a workshop, a spacious library, and a private study. With the blackout curtains drawn, Hale could be alone with his thoughts or with the demons. For a man in retirement, it was an ideal laboratory. He could pursue his studies of astronomy undisturbed by the trivia of administration.

But George Hale refused to retire, and try as he might, he could not drive away his demons. He tried a different sanatorium, Dr. Riggs’s, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where instead of wood chopping and hypnosis, the regime was weaving and walks. He tried more trips abroad, visiting Egypt in the midst of the Tutankhamen excavations. No one expected a miracle cure.

His secretary, Miss Gianetti, wrote frequent letters explaining that
Hale was temporarily unavailable for meetings or to reply to correspondence. He was still secretary of the National Academy of Sciences and active in the effort to get the academy its own building in Washington, so that annual meetings and symposia would not have to be held in borrowed quarters like the Smithsonian. He and his old MIT professor Arthur Noyes led a group that transformed the Throop School in Pasadena into a polytechnic institution. Recruiting first-class faculty, like Noyes himself to head a chemistry department, the ambitious effort to build a first-rank scientific and engineering school succeeded faster than anyone would have expected. By 1920 the small school had renamed itself the California Institute of Technology. When the new name was announced at a campus meeting, a student shouted “Hooray for Caltech!” The nickname stuck.

A year later Noyes and Hale succeeded in recruiting the famed physicist Robert Millikan to join the Caltech faculty. Although he never took the title of president, Millikan took over the executive direction of the school to such a degree that it was known to many as “Millikan’s school.” By 1923, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, Millikan had developed the fine art of convincing Southern Californians and foundations that it was a privilege to contribute endowment and grant frunds to Caltech. “Just imagine,” Wilhelm Rontgen said. “Millikan is said to have a hundred thousand dollars a
year
for his researches!”