The Perfect Machine (44 page)

From time to time the river misbehaved. When the spring runoff reached a peak, the Chemung sometimes overflowed its banks. If that weren’t enough, after a sustained period of rain the Monkey Run, which carried runoff from the hills into the river, would surge over its channel, and the flood waters would find their way into A Factory, extinguishing furnace fires in the cave level and leaving behind a layer of mud that would take weeks to clean up. The worst flood anyone could remember had been in 1918. There were still marks on the walls of the factory caves to show the height the waters had reached.

McCauley took some ribbing for his excessive caution, but when the controllers and transformers for the annealing oven for the two-hundred-inch disk were installed, he had made sure they were on a raised platform several inches above the high-water mark. The entire casting and annealing setup was designed so that the only equipment below the high-water mark were the bases of the four lifting screws, which were shielded with watertight steel cylinders, open at the top, and filled with oil to lubricate the screws and protect them against the inevitable dust from the factory cave. Even without the protective shields, the hoist screws would only be vulnerable to flooding in the lowered position, when the disk was being moved into or out of the annealing oven.

For most of June 1935, the carpenters and millwrights had worked
on a crate for the mirror. The shipment plans had been debated in Corning and Pasadena. Hale’s initial preference was shipment via the Panama Canal, but track clearances on tunnels and underpasses were too low to move the disk to a dock in New York, Baltimore, or Philadelphia, which left Albany as the only seaport they could reach from Corning. Even if they could get a direct cargo ship from Albany, via the Panama Canal to Los Angeles or San Diego, shipping by sea would involve the extra handling of the disk at Albany and a West Coast port, in addition to the initial loading onto a railcar at Corning and the final unloading in Pasadena.

The alternative was to ship the disk by rail from Corning to Pasadena. The 120-inch disk had been shipped successfully across the country by rail in a crate, shielded and supported by heavy timbers. A 10-foot-diameter mirror disk was a large cargo, but it required no special routing or handling. The two-hundred-inch disk was another matter. Even if it were suspended vertically in a well car, so that the bottom of the disk would be only inches above the tracks, the crated two-hundred-inch disk would require tunnels and overpasses with a height of eighteen feet. The normal east-west routes through Kansas City didn’t have the clearance. The New York Central Railway authorities thought it
might
be possible to find a route through Chicago or St. Louis that would accommodate the disk, though it would take months of planning by their schedulers and the schedulers of other rail lines.

The crate builders, told that their cargo was close to irreplaceable, that it had to fit under tight railroad bridges and tunnels, and that it had to be movable by crane, spent months engineering a crate. Here, too, the Caltech engineers got into the act, sketching a metal drum, constructed of half-inch and quarter-inch boilerplate, reinforced with heavy channel and angle sections. The American Bridge Company, in Elmira, was engaged to fabricate the larger sections from hot steel. Corning millwrights and carpenters fabricated the balance of the crate from sheet and angle steel, with felt, rubber, and cork cushioning designed to hold the disk rigidly. As each section of the complex crate was finished, it was test-fitted to the original two-hundred-inch disk in the temporary steel building on the riverbank.

Besides the crating work, the summer seemed quiet in Corning. There were still back orders for disks, but with the two annealing ovens occupied with the two-hundred-inch disk and an 86-inch mirror blank for Heber Curtis at the University of Michigan, McCauley directed all efforts at smaller mirrors that didn’t need the big ovens. In addition to some specialized mirrors for solar telescopes, the publicity around the pouring of the big disk had generated an unexpected flurry of orders for one-tenth-size replicas of the two-hundred-inch mirror. Caltech wanted one for a mockup of the telescope to test designs. The other orders were from individuals and institutions that apparently reasoned that what was good enough for a two-hundred-inch mirror was good enough for a
20-inch one. In fact the ribbed back, necessary for the bigger mirror, served no purpose on a smaller one, except to present a headache to the Corning engineers: The tiny mold cores were too small to enclose metal mold anchors. McCauley concluded that they would need a “sculptor” to carve the mold out of solid blocks of insulating brick.

The first week of July saw steady rain in Corning. The ground turned sodden, and the normally tame Monkey Run filled to its banks. Some puddling showed up here and there in the caves under A Factory, but it was no more than the usual sporadic flooding from spring runoff. McCauley was glad he had taken the precaution of building the annealing oven, where the precious two-hundred-inch disk was halfway through its annealing schedule, well above the highest high-water mark. Still, his family noticed his nervousness as the rains continued. It was only at the end of the week, when the rain tapered off, that he relaxed again.

Then, on Saturday, the rains returned to south-central New York State. The downpour was steady and heavy, from early afternoon through the night. On Sunday morning McCauley’s son Jim woke up in his cabin in the Finger Lakes to cries of “Help!” from a neighbor whose boathouse had floated away. The lake had risen six feet overnight. In Corning the Monkey Run became a raging torrent. With the ground of the hills above the glassworks saturated, the runoff coursed down to the river below, overflowing the banks of the Monkey Run. The Chemung overflowed the dikes along the bank in front of the factory and covered the roadbeds of all three bridges over the river. It was the worst flooding in forty years.

By Monday morning, when the early shift showed up for work, the factory yard on Walnut Street was a shallow lake. To get into the factory McCauley had to skip from one “island” to another. He ran down to the caves, where the controllers and thermostats for the annealing ovens were installed on their raised platform.

Water was rising on the floor of the caves, coming in from the overflow of the Monkey Run to the south. On the north end of the factory, closer to the river, the water was rising even faster. A quick inspection revealed that the river had risen over the drainage ports in the concrete dikes; the holes that normally drained the caves into the river were instead bringing the river into the caves. By midmorning the entire floor was covered with water, and the level was rising rapidly.

McCauley got the factory foreman to issue an all-hands call for men to build a restraining wall of sandbags, brick, and concrete to isolate the section of floor below the controllers and transformers for the annealer. With dozens of men working, the wall went up quickly. But as the double line of sandbags cut off the flow across the floor, the hydraulic pressure of the rising water in the rest of the factory forced jets of water up through cracks in the concrete floor under the annealer and controller.

An emergency call to the Corning Fire Department brought men and pumpers. When someone on the phone mentioned that the effort was needed to save the two-hundred-inch disk, the fire department sent every pumper it had, filling the passageway outside the west side of the factory with red fire engines and a maze of black hoses. Alas, there was no place to pump the water except back into the river. Even with every pumper the fire department could supply, they couldn’t get ahead of the steadily rising water. Down on the floor, electricians, masons, laborers, and scientists worked side by side, standing in water up to their knees as they wrestled with sandbags, bricks, and mortar. McCauley remembered the Pathé news cameramen a half year before, who had been so anxious for action shots.

All Corning’s men and equipment were no match for the floodwater. As the water level marched steadily toward the high-water mark left from the Great Flood of 1918, McCauley knew the battle was lost. The only hope was to cut off the electrical power to the transformers before they shorted out and somehow move them to dry ground and reconnect them in time to maintain the annealing schedule on the glass disk. The disk was down to 370°C. If the power were cut off, the insulation of the annealing oven would limit the rate of cooling for a short while. How long they could go without power without introducing strains into the glass—twelve hours, twenty-four, forty-eight—was anyone’s guess.

The laborers who had been building walls of sandbags were put on air hammers on the floor above the transformers. Other workmen cleared away the production equipment for molding nursing bottles in the factory area above the transformers while the hammers pounded at the heavy reinforced concrete floor. The call went out for more jackhammers, but rising water in the compressor room cut down the air supply, limiting the number of hammers they could keep in operation. The water in the cave began creeping up the sides of the transformer cases. If the water reached the lids, it would flood the interior of the transformers, displacing the oil and rendering them useless. Replacement transformers would take weeks, maybe months, to order. During that time the disk would cool uncontrollably.

McCauley had the laborers concentrate all the jackhammers on a single hole. A crane was rigged overhead, ready to lift the transformers to safety. In the cave below, electricians on the scaffolding disconnected the reactor units that controlled the flow of current to the oven. They got sixteen reactors out before the water was too high to work. Just over their heads, as many men as room permitted hammered at the concrete floor. As soon as a man tired on a jackhammer, another took his place. No one had to be reminded of the consequences of failure. Everyone there had seen the world rush to Corning to witness the casting of the great glass disk. This was the piece of glass that had made Corning famous.

In the midst of the chaos, McCauley did some rapid calculations and concluded that one transformer could supply enough current to complete the annealing schedule; there would be no margin for error and no backups, but it would just work.

The water was lapping the lower edge of the transformer lids when the hole in the floor was finally large enough to lift the first transformer to safety. The bottom edge of the lid was already wet. A few more minutes and the water would cover the top, saturating the transformer. A cheer went up as the crane hoisted the first transformer clear. Through the hole in the floor, men could see oil seeping out of the other two transformers as the water lapped over the lids and flooded the windings inside.

When the first transformer—the only one they had rescued in time—was lowered to the floor, McCauley saw that the oil gauge on the side had been broken off. A sample of oil drawn from the hole was contaminated with water. The other two transformers were already under water.

It was morning outside. McCauley and many of the workers had worked all night.

All day Tuesday reporters called Corning, eager for stories about the fate of the big disk. McCauley, too busy to take calls, told the publicity office that there had been no damage to the disk, that in fact the water had never been within five feet of the disk. That was all he said, and all they printed.

On the factory floor, laborers suspended the waterlogged reactors and controls outside a heated glass tank to dry. Even the one salvaged transformer couldn’t be used as it was. McCauley had a pump hooked up to pump the oil out of the bottom of the transformer case through a centrifugal separator that would separate off the water; the oil was then pumped back into the top of the transformer.

McCauley finally went home Tuesday evening. He had been working without a break for thirty-six hours. Too anxious about the disk to sleep, he worked with his little drafting board at the familiar round table. He guessed that it would take at least another twenty-four hours before the reactors, controls, and transformer were dry enough to use. It might be as much as another thirty-six. In seventy-two hours without power, the temperature of the disk would drop seventy degrees, to 300°C. Would the glass survive that interruption to the annealing schedule?

All day Wednesday, McCauley went back and forth from his calculations to the cleanup and salvage work. No one in his family had ever seen him so jittery. It took forty-eight hours to get the two flooded transformers out of their position. By then the water in the caves was receding, draining the transformers. Plant electricians estimated that they could be dried with current applied to the primaries, but it would be a long, slow operation.

The question of what to do with the annealing schedule was
McCauley’s to answer. There were no precedents for restoring an annealing schedule. At best it was a black art, as much guesswork as science. The only thing clear was the consequences. Too much heat or too little, heating too fast or too slow, could leave strains in the glass, destroying the usefulness of the disk. McCauley didn’t say much about his real worry: Could the disk survive the sudden drop in temperature intact? Or would they open the annealing oven, in November, to find the glass cracked?

Thursday, when the transformers and reactors were dry, and power was restored, McCauley raised the temperature of the disk to 370°C, where it had been before the power was interrupted. He had decided to hold it there for five days, then resume the original schedule. His new schedule was a guess. All McCauley knew for certain was that they had lost eight days from the annealing schedule, and that after six months of controlled cooling, dropping by a carefully measured 0.8°C per day, the temperature of the disk had dropped seventy degrees in three days.

For the next five months, every day when he checked the thermocouples on the oven, he thought about the flood and wondered about the disk hidden inside the annealing kiln.

In October the eighty-six-inch disk for Heber Curtis at the University of Michigan was cool enough to come out of the smaller annealing oven. The oven had gone through the same power outage and sudden cooling as the bigger oven with the two-hundred-inch disk. The disk emerged intact—it had not broken during the power outage—but it was so filled with glass faults that McCauley classified it R.R.R. (reject requiring replacement). Curtis wasn’t disturbed by the news. He suggested that they make the replacement a ninety-eight-inch disk.