The Perfect Machine

by Ronald Florence

  While McDowell waited for the Ford proposal, Smith worked on his own ideas for a control system. He worked alone much of the time, and colleagues didn’t notice that he was often pale, easily tired, and sometimes in apparent pain. When the Ford proposal seemed stalled, McDowell wanted Smith to go east again to “consult” with Hannibal Ford. Smith was too ill to make the trip. By September he was in the hospital. Mark Serrurier and others on the project visited him. Serrurier arranged to give Smitty a blood transfusion. Smith didn’t talk about it, even with close friends, but a doctor had told him he had cancer. He worried that he might not see the drive system completed.

  By October 1937 Smith was out of the hospital, in remission. The Ford proposal and estimate finally arrived, and Smith had the job of studying the drawings and estimate. McDowell was eager to sign a contract with Hannibal Ford. Smith reported to the construction committee that the Ford proposal didn’t really meet the needs of the telescope. He estimated that a better drive system could be built locally for one-fourth of Ford’s estimate. The committee of Caltech engineers and astronomers, overruling McDowell, voted to have Smith develop his own plans and estimate. They gave him three months, until January 1, 1938.

  He met the schedule, and by mid-January, the committee voted to accept Smith’s plans. He pushed ahead on working drawings. As soon as he had a sketch finished, it would go to the draftsmen and off to the machine shop. He reported to the construction committee that the controls would be finished in two months. He was often short of breath and pale, but he pushed on, converting ideas to working drawings and control systems. He told no one that the doctors had given him only a few months to live.

  A young Caltech graduate in electrical engineering, Bruce Rule, was recruited to work with him, but the control system was so complex that only Smith understood its full workings. The heart of the system was a corrector unit that would make compensating adjustments in the alignment of the telescope. The “errors” that Smith had isolated were minuscule, far smaller than had ever been worried about on a telescope. He had designed corrections for atmospheric refraction, flexure of the mounting of the telescope, misalignment of the polar axis, and a sinusoidal (cyclical, like a sine wave) skewing of the yoke. He had isolated the remaining uncompensated errors—a nonsinusoidal element in the skew of the yoke, a potential eccentricity of the telescope bearings, and a slight rotation of the field of view when the telescope was pointed near the pole. The first of those, he concluded, could be corrected by the machining of the horseshoe.

  Smith was working frantically on the last remaining problems when he was again hospitalized. After two months in the hospital, Sinclair Smith died on May 18, 1938. He was thirty-nine years old. Max Mason got permission to pay six months’ salary to his widow. John Anderson took time off to write an article on Sinclair Smith for the astronomy journals.

  Smith’s death was a terrible loss. He was a bright young astronomer at the prime of his career. He had temporarily suspended his promising astrophysics research to work on the control system for the telescope. He had lost the race to finish and document his work by weeks.

  Three months before Smitty’s untimely death, at the beginning of February, Francis Pease was hospitalized for cancer surgery. It had seemed a routine operation, but surgery before antibiotics—sulfanilamide and penicillin were not yet generally available—was never routine. On February 11 Pease died from complications of peritonitis and septicemia. Like Smith, he had put astronomy research aside to work on the telescope. The project had begun with his drawings and models, and Pease had worked to the end to refine the design of the telescope. His work had increasingly been shunted aside by Sandy McDowell, who favored the work of engineers he had known from his navy days and personally disliked Pease. To Pease’s credit, he recognized when alternatives were better than his own designs. He had championed roller bearings, but when Rein Kroon showed that oil bearings would work for the telescope, it was Pease who moved for the adaptation of the radical new design.

  Francis Pease’s life had spanned two generations of big telescopes. He had designed the one-hundred-inch telescope almost alone. Others contributed details, but the design and the drawings were his. Twenty years later the new telescope belonged to an era of Big Science, of projects so complex that it was no longer possible for one man to understand all that was involved.

  George Hale, who had been confined to his dark room for months, hadn’t been able to attend Pease’s funeral. His nervous affliction had been compounded by a new symptom, attacks of violent vertigo coming without warning and severe enough to confine him to bed. With this, as with his other medical conditions, Hale was not candid, even with trusted friends. From his terse descriptions, the symptoms sound like Ménière’s syndrome, a disorder of the inner ear. It was not treatable, and the unpredictability of the attacks left Hale confined to his house, frequently unable even to go to his beloved solar laboratory.

  A few days after Pease’s funeral, Hale felt well enough to be wheeled outside. He looked up at the sky and said, “It is a beautiful day. The sun is shining and they are working on Palomar.” It was his last word on the telescope. He died a few days later, on February 21, 1938.

  More than any other man, George Hale’s name had been synonymous with big telescopes in the United States. He was known everywhere for his research in solar astronomy, for the Yerkes and Mount Wilson Observatories and telescopes, as a cofounder of the California Institute of Technology, a longtime supporter and officer of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, and the founder of journals of astrophysics. For years, as the public had read the continuing saga of the design and building of the great two-hundred-inch telescope, they were reminded that George Hale had conceived the idea and found the people, the funding, the companies, and the institutions that would contribute to the cooperative project. It was his web of academic, government, and business friends who constituted the old-boy network that had made science and technology on a national scale possible; his prestige that had persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to commit the largest grant ever made for a science project; his ideas that had pushed the technology beyond limits; and his leadership that had kept the project from foundering when the demands of the telescope grew too large.

  Even as his health deteriorated, in lucid periods Hale kept his fingers on thousands of details of the telescope. He would fire off memos on salaries for starting engineers and draftsmen, or budgeting five hundred dollars for improvements to the old road up the mountain. As late as the fall of 1935, when vertigo attacks had joined the demons to plague his days, Hale still planned trips east to inspect the machining work on the mirror cell at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Eddy-stone, Pennsylvania, to see Robert McMath’s recent work on telescope drives in Michigan, and to consult with Vladimir Zworykin at RCA on the latest work on photocells.

  In 1936 Harlow Shapley invited Hale to attend a symposium in his honor at Harvard. Hale was too ill to go. With typical modesty, he urged that the honor be conferred on someone else. “Old and battered fossils retain a certain antiquarian interest,” he wrote. “But in the midst of recent revolutionary advances, they are rapidly outclassed.” At the gathering, in the library of the Harvard College Observatory, Shapley announced that he had planned the symposium with two thoughts in mind: to recognize “Hale’s remarkable contributions to science and to the techniques and equipment of science” and to call the attention of younger astronomers “to the great debt we all owe to one man for the commendable position of astronomy in America at the present time.”

  In its obituary the New York Times urged that the two-hundred-inch telescope be dedicated to George Hale. The suggestion was echoed privately in the coming months. A few years later Millikan raised funds to commission a bust of Hale from a Danish sculptor named Jensen who just “happened along” in Pasadena. The bust, replaced many years later by a new bust by Marian Breckenridge, a friend of the Hale family, was installed in the entrance to the dome of t
he two-hundred-inch telescope.

  In an era of simpler science, the deaths of three men as central as Smith, Pease, and Hale might have ended the project. But the two-hundred-inch telescope had gathered a momentum of its own. By the spring of 1938 hundreds of men were working on the telescope, in factories in Philadelphia, glass foundries in Corning, labs and shops in Pasadena, offices in New York, and on a lonely mountaintop. The telescope had already touched the lives of thousands of men and women all across America—mechanics, engineers, supervisors, professors, workmen, and researchers. The great telescope, an achievement of American science and technology in the midst of the most terrible depression anyone could remember, had become a part of the American consciousness, a symbol of pride and achievement. Railroad engineers with thousands of miles of service would tell of the greatest honor of their railroad lives—the time they had driven the shortest train of their career, only two cars, at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour, carrying the “great eye.” Glassworkers who had worked an entire lifetime at Corning, who had watched hundreds of thousands of bottles, casseroles, and dishes leave the factory and seen their products become part of every American household, would remember most of all the role they played in casting the most famous piece of glass in the world. In 1938, while the first components of the telescope had just begun to arrive on Palomar Mountain, the perfect machine had become part of American folklore.

  The unveiling of the telescope tube, in the august presence of Professor Einstein, was Westinghouse’s last great publicity venture on the project. As the teams of arc-welders finished the other sections, assembly after assembly went through the boring mills and the annealing ovens. Some of the fabrications, especially the three sections of the great horseshoe, were larger than the tube, among the largest structures ever machined. But the Caltech engineers had refused to pay the costs of modifying the factory and test-assembling the sections, so the full majesty of Westinghouse work couldn’t be demonstrated to the reporters and public. Even without photographs, the numbers were impressive. The largest journal bearing ever constructed had a diameter of forty-six feet and a face width of fifty-four inches; it weighed 375,000 pounds. But to the press and public the horseshoe looked even less like a telescope than did the bare frame of the tube. A lucky photographer caught glimpses of the huge sections on railcars, on their way to the docks in Philadelphia. The gargantuan components of the horseshoe spanned two tracks on the siding where they waited.

  McDowell was eager to get the components to Palomar before winter weather set in. He used his navy pull to get access to the Philadelphia Naval Yard and to get local rail traffic rescheduled to make way for the huge sections of the telescope mounting. The only crane large enough for the job was commandeered from the yard to load the tube and the other parts of the telescope mounting as deck cargo on the American-Robin, the Pacific, and the Pennsylvanian. The assembled telescope tube was the largest single deck cargo ever shipped, but a journey through the Panama Canal could not generate the popular appeal of the slow train carrying the disk across the country.

  The ships began arriving in San Diego in mid-October. The mounting components were the first major cargo to go up the new road to the summit. Snow had begun to fall as the sections of the horseshoe went up on a massive trailer, pulled by two heavy tractors and pushed by a third. The trucks moved so slowly that men walked in front and alongside the cargo.

  In its press releases Westinghouse said of the telescope mounting, “On the site a fine job of rigging will be necessary to get the telescope parts into the dome and to erect it.” It was a gracious understatement. For Byron Hill and the workmen on the mountain, the arrival of each piece was like opening another box at Christmas. Mark Serrurier had written long memorandums explaining exactly how the pieces were to be assembled, but as so often happens with Christmas toys, the assembly didn’t go quite as easily as the instructions suggested.

  The landowners on the mountain welcomed the completion of the new road, their joy prompted less by the improved access than because the closing of the WPA camp meant an end to the Saturday-night rowdiness. For years Captain Bolin’s store had sold out of Don Leon wine each payday. The resulting hilarity from the WPA camp and from the “zombies” on the mountaintop had led to some hijinks that Byron Hill, and Colonel Brett before him, had to smooth over with apologies and reassurances.

  The closing of the WPA camp also meant that there was no longer a resident physician on the remote mountain. One workman had first-aid training and his wife was a nurse, and there was a well-equipped dispensary, but one man’s death from a heart attack during the earlier work and the potential danger of the work with the heavy telescope components prompted McDowell to appoint a resident physician. The work camp hired a cook who had worked at the Agua Caliente racetrack. The rude mountain was turning into a research facility.

  Cottages went up for the resident staff. Hale had specified that the residences should be simple, but Byron Hill, knowing that what was built on the mountain would have to be fixed on the mountain, added his personal touch to the designs. Hill liked concrete. It didn’t rot, woodpeckers didn’t eat it, and squirrels didn’t bury their winter cache in it. He provided each residence with a six-inch-thick concrete woodshed. The walls were steel lath with stucco, the floors concrete, the roofs copper foil. The mountain wasn’t a ski resort. The cottages would be there as long as the telescope.

  The question of power for the observatory had come up early in the planning. The telescope and its instrumentation would require steady, uninterrupted, regulated power. Variations in voltage that would cause no more than a dimming of lights in a home would be crippling for a telescope and its instruments. Mount Wilson had at one time generated four-hundred-volt DC on the mountain, then later purchased electrical power from a local utility. The purchased power suffered frequent outages that shut down telescopes and lab equipment. A generating plant on the mountain entailed the risk of vibrations that could be transmitted to the telescope, noise that would be distracting to astronomers and residents, and poorly regulated power from the smaller equipment available for a local generating facility. E. M. Irwin, a Caltech engineer assigned the task of researching the question, concluded that “the desirability of the two systems is about equal.”

  Enough astronomers had lost a night of observing to blackouts on Mount Wilson for the independence of a generating plant on the mountain to win out. Two diesel generators from the Enterprise Engine Company in San Francisco, a primary unit and a backup, were installed in a powerhouse, with tunable spring mounts to isolate the vibrations and heavy insulation to mask the noise. The units Irwin selected, and the installation on the mountain, were quiet enough to not disrupt work on the telescopes, although the rumble of the big diesels was hard to miss from the recreation room next door.

  With the dome finished, the footings in place, the powerhouse installed and running, and huge machined sections arriving by truck up the new road, Byron Hill and his men set about building a telescope.

  The Caltech design engineers who had produced thousands of detailed blueprints of the assembly of the telescope tube, yoke, and mounting, had designed an overhead crane for the observatory, a fifty-ton unit built into the dome, to unload the cargoes. The crane ran up and down a track from the edge to the top of the dome. With rotation of the dome, the crane could service any area inside. A second, five-ton crane supplemented the main crane. In addition to the blueprints and Mark Serrurier’s memos, Hill had Russell Porter’s drawings of finished assemblies. For machinists, who often understand a machine better by taking it apart and remembering how it goes together, the vivid three-dimensional images in the Porter drawings were sometimes more useful than the file cabinets of blueprints. Porter’s charcoal drawings, with beautiful cutaways, translated design sketches and engineering drawings into reality. The subtle shading of his drawings, much of it done with smears of a thumb to represent the grit of machinery, conveyed better than photographs or the most complete set of eng
ineering drawings the feel and scale of the telescope.

  The Caltech engineers had calculated the size of the hatch in the dome the way a mover can calculate whether a sofa or piano will fit through a doorway. The opening was mathematically large enough for the largest components—the sections of the horseshoe and the lower section of the yoke mounting, which held the two tubes that connected to the horseshoe. A draftsman with a slide rule could demonstrate that with the right twists and turns the hatch would accommodate everything that had been shipped.

  As each component arrived, Hill and his crew swung into action immediately, eager to get the cargo unloaded and into the observatory. Hill, an efficient man and proud of his record, would do anything, including working all night long, to avoid demurrage charges from the trucking companies.

  Most of the unloading went well. Hill would take the controls of the crane himself—a tricky operation because the motion involved rotating the dome and raising the crane on its tracks as well as the hoist itself—to lift the assemblies off the trailers and through the hatch. For one piece, the bottom section of the yoke, the engineers at Caltech had designed a special lifting harness to bring the assembly off the truck and up through the hatch. The harness didn’t arrive in time for the unloading, so Hill and his crew did it with lifting hooks and slings they put together on the spot. The unit had been trucked lying on its back and had to be tipped onto its side to fit through the hatch. Tipping a structure while it is hanging from rigging is a tricky operation, because the center of gravity of the item shifts as it turns. The fit was tight. The next day, when the yoke had been squeezed through the hatch and the exhausted crew had gone to bed, Hill said he finally understood what women went through at childbirth.