By the 1890s, Harvard’s astronomy budget was second in the nation only to the U.S. Naval Observatory. This at a time when William and Margaret Huggins supported their research through personal savings and rents on a handful of properties. (Pickering referred to Harvard’s finances as a “kind of wealthy pauperism,” as its fourfold increase in endowment during the 1890s accompanied a fivefold increase in research expenses.)
Pickering’s growing empire was but one wave in a tide of change that was about to engulf astronomical practice in the United States, as resource-rich academic centers and mountaintop observatories displaced citizen-astronomers operating out of their backyards. Business moguls with no scientific bent increasingly fueled the work of university-trained specialists. In 1888, California land speculator James Lick abandoned his pyramid-building scheme and gave $700,000 toward construction of a mountaintop telescope to search for life on the Moon. The thirty-six-inch Lick refractor failed to spot lunar creatures, but did find a fifth moon of Jupiter and plenty of double stars. James Lick’s body was interred inside the telescope’s massive support pier, turning it into a working monument to the man and to the power of money.
Andrew Carnegie was impressed by Lick’s philanthropic largesse, even though self-aggrandizement had been its primary motivation. “If any millionaire be interested in the ennobling study of astronomy . . .” Carnegie advised fellow plutocrats in 1889, “here is an example which could well be followed, for the progress made in astronomical instruments and appliances is so great and continuous that every few years a new telescope might be judiciously given to one of the observatories upon this continent, the last being always the largest and best, and certain to carry further and further the knowledge of the universe and our relation to it here upon the earth.”
The thirty-six-inch refractor of Lick Observatory, as depicted in the December 1, 1888, issue of Knowledge magazine.
Among the benefactors in Carnegie’s model were Harvard-educated polymath Percival Lowell, scion of the venerable Boston family, who founded his eponymous research institution outside Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894; streetcar magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes, who donated $300,000 the following year toward a forty-inch refractor and observatory for the University of Chicago; and William Thaw, Jr., who underwrote construction of Allegheny Observatory’s thirty-inch photographic refractor in 1912. Andrew Carnegie followed his own advice in 1902 when he established a foundation to support astronomical facilities and research.
Europe provides a stark contrast to the ascension of astrophysics in America. Large-scale scientific philanthropy was relatively rare: Private donations brought a thirty-inch refractor to the Nice Observatory in France in 1886, and the Simeis astro-photographic station in the Crimea to Russia’s state-operated Pulkova Observatory in 1912. As in the United States, government support went to mature fields—astrometry and celestial mechanics—not to astrophysics. But in America, private donors chose overwhelmingly to support astrophysical projects, endowing the New Astronomy with the facilities and career opportunities it needed to flourish.
With few exceptions, observational astrophysics languished in Europe. Government ministries allocated resources overwhelmingly to astrometric projects, such as the ill-fated Carte du Ciel. Little was left for institutional initiatives in observational astrophysics. The result was the application of more refined apparatus to traditional areas of observation. Given the funding constraints and cultural predilections, European astrophysicists achieved their greatest successes in theoretical rather than observational studies. As the opportunity gap widened between the United States and Europe, would-be astrophysicists flocked to American observatories for advanced training. Many never went back.
Europe was further hobbled by its ruinous embrace of the Carte du Ciel sky-mapping initiative, which calcified development of astronomical apparatus and methods. “The great irony of the project,” historian John Lankford notes, “is that the international committee directing the Carte froze instrumentation and research design at the very time astronomical photography was developing exponentially. . . . In terms of individual careers and the direction of astronomical research, astrometry as represented by the Carte virtually defined European astronomy after 1890.”
The project’s international governing body ignored the implications of Edward Pickering’s announcement that Harvard’s Bruce telescope would survey the night sky in two thousand wide-field plates instead of the Carte’s eighty-eight thousand. At Oxford University, for example, it took five years to obtain the assigned plates, ten years for the five-person staff to measure the star positions, and another five years to publish the data in printed format. Other observatories dropped out, either strapped for cash or hungrily eyeing more exciting avenues of astrophysical research. No U.S. institution participated in the Carte project, leaving them free to pursue research directions closed to their European counterparts. In a 1943 review, longtime director of the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, Otto Struve, pronounced that large-scale astrometric observing projects were responsible for “virtually killing the ambitions and scientific aspirations of hundreds of the younger astronomers in Europe.”
Astrophysical observation, once the province of dedicated empiricists, had turned into a burgeoning, science-based enterprise. Time-exposure photography, for many decades the poor cousin of the human eye, had come to portray cosmic vistas only scarcely imagined by its inventors. The camera turned the familiar Milky Way into an expansive river of sky-borne starlight, phosphorescent clouds, and mysterious coves of darkness. The once-blurry Andromeda Nebula gleamed on the photographic plate in a majestic spiral, drawing gasps from even the most sober-minded astronomers. And dotting the heavens, as faint as the camera’s glassy eye could see, thousands of tiny Andromeda-like swirls, each begging for close-up inspection.
Spectroscopy had likewise advanced from its primitive visual embodiment into a sensitive, photography-fortified probe of cosmic chemistry and stellar movement. Nebulae that appeared featureless to the eye sorted themselves spectroscopically into gaseous or starry species. Straightforward in concept, yet arduous in practice, the rendering of spectral lines joined the workaday routines of observatories around the world.
The further potential of these high-technology tools hinged on improvements in the observatory’s core instrument. The telescope had undergone its own changes over the decades, having grown more mechanically and optically refined, and occasionally somewhat larger. Instruments once envisioned only in astronomers’ daydreams were now being fabricated by optical specialists in America and Europe. Even so, astronomers’ efforts to explore the farther reaches of space were frustrated by the dimness of the celestial objects there. The dribble of photons from these far-flung stars and nebulae was insufficient for a modest-sized telescope to enable the working of the camera or the spectrograph. Telescopes had to be wider, to funnel more light to the astrophysical instruments. Indeed, the mantra of the observational astronomer, then as now, is “more light.”
“Light is all-important,” James Keeler told the audience at the Yerkes Observatory dedication in 1897, “and while much can doubtless be accomplished with small telescopes, there is probably nothing that cannot be done better with large ones.” But as astronomers contemplated the telescopic behemoths of the future, Lord Rosse’s six-foot-wide, metal-mirror Leviathan lay fallow and rusting in the Irish countryside. Its abandoned carcass recalled the technological imperatives and social milieu of a bygone age, when local muscle, ropes, and pulleys worked such an instrument. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the accumulated astrophysical database had raised expectations for the succeeding stage of cosmic observation. To validate or refute rival astrophysical hypotheses—indeed, to generate such hypotheses in the first place—demanded photographs and spectra of much higher quality than the best of the day.
A twentieth-century Leviathan telescope would echo its predecessor only in terms of aperture and essential form. The new instrument would be free fro
m vibration and flexure, no matter its orientation. It would be mounted so as to access any part of the sky, from horizon to zenith. Driven by machine, not men, it would nevertheless be so finely balanced as to move under a finger’s pressure. It would track the diurnal movement of celestial objects doggedly from dusk to dawn, if need be. And it would be sited in the pellucid air of a mountain peak.
The path to the future of astrophysical observation had already been blazed by James Keeler’s unlikely resurrection of Andrew Common’s telescope atop Lick Observatory’s Mount Hamilton. If a clunky thirty-six-inch reflector can morph into a premier vehicle of cosmic discovery, what might a larger and more sophisticated instrument reveal about the universe?
Part III
MONEY, MIRRORS, AND MADNESS
The doors of the observatory are never closed, and at almost any hour of the day or night someone can be found busy in observation or investigation. Indeed the energy, enthusiasm and earnestness of purpose of the Director are reflected throughout the entire institution; and the spirit of investigation seems to saturate the rare air about the summit of the mountain.
—Clarence A. Chant, Lick Observatory, 1907
Chapter 23
MR. HALE OF CHICAGO
[George Ellery Hale was] slight in figure, agile in movement, of high-strung nervous temperament, over-flowing with formulae, technical facts and figures, theoretical speculations, almost ad infintum. His mind seems made of some stellar substance which radiates astronomical information as a stove sheds heat.
—Reporter at the dedication of the Yerkes Observatory, 1897
IN 1882, FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD GEORGE ELLERY HALE noticed a peculiar boxlike shed sitting in the backyard of a house at the corner of 36th Street and Vincennes Avenue, not far from his own home on South Drexel in the Chicago suburb of Kenwood. “A queer man lives nights in that cheese box,” a friend confided, “and tells fortunes by the stars.” Hale put aside such dunderheaded notions; he was already a seasoned amateur scientist and he knew an observatory when he saw one, even one as down-home as this. He introduced himself to mustachioed, cigar-chomping Sherburne Wesley Burnham, a court reporter by day and double-star observer by night. The taciturn Burnham, whose hair, one reporter claimed, “seemed bent on going where the wind listeth,” took a liking to his spirited guest and became his mentor in the art of telescopic observation.
Such was Sherburne Burnham’s reputation as an observer that he had been chosen by the Lick Trust a few years earlier to check the suitability of Mount Hamilton in California for their new thirty-six-inch refractor. Having lugged his own six-inch Alvan Clark refractor up the mountainside, Burnham assessed the atmospheric conditions for two months, discovering forty-two double stars in the process. Many of the closer pairs proved to be a challenge to separate even in bigger telescopes, demonstrating both the clarity of the sky and Burnham’s discriminating eye. Some were so close together so as to appear as a single star, their duplex nature revealed only in a subtle elongation of the luminous disk. Burnham’s avocation would culminate with the publication in 1906 of his two-volume General Catalogue of Double Stars, containing measurement data on 13,655 double and multiple systems.
Sherburne Wesley Burnham.
George Hale returned frequently to Burnham’s “cheese box” to learn the ins and outs of astronomical observing. Burnham accompanied him on regular visits to the nearby Dearborn Observatory, where his young charge could peek through its eighteen-and-a-half-inch Clark refractor and receive guidance from George W. Hough, another double-star expert. Hale admired both men’s persistence in tallying the particulars of double stars, but he harbored higher aspirations than repetitive measurement. The new science of astrophysics called to him. “I was born an experimentalist,” Hale recollected decades later, “and I was bound to find the way of combining physics and chemistry with astronomy.”
Hale’s scientific passions were amply indulged by his father, William, who had made a fortune selling elevators during Chicago’s postfire building boom. “George always wanted things yesterday,” William recalled of his son’s fierce impatience over the experiment of the moment. In contrast, George’s mother, Mary, a brooding semiinvalid, feared that her high-strung, illness-prone child would exhaust his creative fire in one adolescent blaze. (George characterized his mother as “nervously organized.”) William Hale tried to lure George into the elevator business, taking him to downtown building sites and enrolling him in a machine-shop course at the Chicago Manual Training School. But George’s scientific muse would not be fettered.
Mary Hale gave over her upstairs dressing room to serve as the family’s home laboratory. George and his younger siblings, Martha and Will, Jr., each had a work station with a Bunsen burner, batteries, galvanometers, and a host of self-made accessories. Soon arrived a microscope and camera, and eventually a lathe powered by a clamorous steam engine nicknamed “the demon.” Among the more attractive experiments were chemical reactions that evolved combustible hydrogen or oxygen: pouring hydrochloric acid on zinc, mixing potassium chlorate and manganese oxide, decomposing water by an electrical spark. “Our delights were enhanced by frightening but delicious explosions,” Hale remembered, “the sound of which sometimes pierced the carefully closed door and reached the floor below.”
Hale designed and built his first telescope: a single-lens refractor that suffered all the optical and mechanical ills of a neophyte’s creation. His astronomical mentor, Burnham, regarded the instrument with the contempt it deserved, and told him about a secondhand, four-inch refractor being offered by a local astronomer. The instrument, like Burnham’s own, was manufactured by Alvan Clark & Sons, the nation’s foremost telescope maker. George pleaded with his father for the money, citing the fact that a rare transit of Venus was less than a month away. William Hale took the matter under advisement. One evening, he arrived home with the Clark telescope in the carriage. On December 6, 1882, with Martha and Will shivering beside him, George Hale timed the passage of Venus across the Sun’s face.
Hale laid a foundation for the telescope on the roof of the house, and from there viewed the beginner’s roster of celestial objects. By way of experiment, he rigged a plate holder to the eyepiece-end of the instrument and managed an acceptable photograph of a partial solar eclipse. But Hale’s billowing interest at the time was spectroscopy. Having read of Fraunhofer, Bunsen, and Kirchhoff, his curiosity was drawn to the wondrous devices that had opened up the cosmos to chemical investigation. “Even now,” Hale would write in 1933, “I cannot think without excitement of my first faint perception of the possibilities of the spectroscope and my first glimpse of the pathway then suggested for me. No other research can surpass in interest and importance that of interpreting the mysteries concealed in these [spectral] lines.”
Following directions in Cassell’s Book of Sports and Pastimes, Hale assembled a pair of small spectroscopes for the upstairs laboratory. For one, he fashioned a prism out of a piece of glass “borrowed” from the household chandelier; for the other, he used a hollow prism filled with foul-smelling carbon disulphide. (“The odor of the disulphide abides with me after a lapse of fifty years.”) Using Norman Lockyer’s Studies in Spectrum Analysis as a guide, Hale studied a variety of flame and spark spectra in his laboratory. With a further monetary infusion from his father, he purchased a spectrometer for his rooftop refractor, swapping out the mediocre prism for a diffraction grating from Pittsburgh instrument maker John Brashear. The grating, Brashear informed Hale, was ruled by the noted physicist Henry A. Rowland of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Hale’s observing notebook for 1886 features lists of Fraunhofer lines he had detected in the solar spectrum. So thrilled was Hale with the performance of the grating that he hopped a train to Pittsburgh and appeared at Brashear’s workshop, introducing himself as “Mr. Hale of Chicago.” Brashear was taken aback at the sight of his customer, surely not yet twenty, standing in the doorway. From their correspondence, he had assumed that Hale was a m
iddle-aged man and a seasoned expert in astrophysics. A subsequent meeting with Henry Rowland, during which Hale hoped to discuss some fine points of diffraction gratings, elicited the huffy response that “any grating of mine should be good enough for an infant.”
In 1886, Hale headed off to college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (then called Boston Tech). Shouldering a full course load in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, he hopped a horse cart to Harvard College Observatory every Saturday to serve as a photographic assistant to Edward Pickering. Hale valued the classics—his mother’s influence—but referred them to science whenever possible: his English professor received not only the assigned compositions on Scott and Milton, but essays on celestial photography and diffraction gratings. Classmates remember Hale as an academic workhorse, genial but intense, ever en route to his next engagement. “To say that I have been busy is to put it mildly,” Hale confessed to a friend, “for I have done nothing but hustle around at the top of my speed from morning till night.”
Hale found the formalized, collegiate curriculum stifling and spent considerable time at the library reading books and journals of interest. He looked forward to summers when he could satisfy his experimental cravings. By the time he returned from his first year in Boston, Hale’s family had moved to a fashionable mansion on Drexel Boulevard. The attic was set aside for George’s new spectrograph, which he had purchased on a family trip to London, and its window-mounted heliostat (sun-tracking mirror). When this space proved inadequate, William Hale purchased the lot next door and erected a brick building to serve his son’s mushrooming research aspirations. In his first major publication, dated October 24, 1890, George Hale listed his institutional affiliation as “Kenwood Physical Observatory, Chicago.”
Starlight Detectives Page 30
