The Perfect Machine

Ronald Florence

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062105783
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Almost a half-century after is completion, the 200-inch Palomar telescope remains an unparalleled combination of vast scale and microscope detail. As huge as the Pantheon of Rome and as heavy as the Statue of Liberty, this magnificent instrument is so precisely built that its seventeen-foot mirror was hand-polished to a tolerance of 2/1, 000, 000 of an inch. The telescope's construction drove some to the brink of madness, made others fearful that mortals might glimpse heaven, and transfixed an entire nation. Ronald Florence weaves into his account of the creation of "the perfect machine" a stirring chronicle of the birth of Big Science and a poignant rendering of an America mired in the depression yet reaching for the stars.

1

April 1920

The two men met on the platform of the Southern Pacific depot in Los Angeles. In their wool suits and stiff collars, they might have been mistaken for commercial travelers starting out on a week’s run to peddle their wares—at least until they bought tickets straight through to Washington, D.C. Transcontinental travel was enough of a novelty to turn heads in 1920.

The area around the depot looked like the backgrounds of the Mack Sennett Keystone Kops comedies, which were filmed nearby. Elegant homes abutted vacant lots. Trolley cars ran down streets lined with palm and eucalyptus trees, past incongruously empty pastures. Signs of construction were everywhere. Civic boosters, buoyed by preliminary reports of the 1920 census, were already bragging that Los Angeles had passed San Francisco in population to become the fastest-growing city in the United States.

At the depot the men exchanged pleasantries and agreed to share a compartment, but neither said much to the other, letting the flurry of boarding passengers, conductors checking tickets, baggage handlers, and porters fill the silence until the train left. Outside the Pullman window they watched cart after cart being wheeled down the platform to the dining car, laden with food, linen, and menus. Prohibition had eliminated the wine list and the prospect of a bar car, but even in the infancy of transcontinental travel, the railroads knew that leisurely meals served by porters in starched white jackets were one way to fill the long hours of the journey.

The trolley cars had a nine-story terminal at Sixth and Main, but railroad passengers didn’t count for much in the City of the Angels. Eager to match the splendor of the great eastern stations, like the grand concourse of New York’s Penn Station, where departing passengers on the famed Limited trains were greeted by a stationmaster in tails, top hat, and white gloves, Los Angeles had long campaigned to get the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, and Atchison lines to build a grand Union Station as part of a grandiose civic center plan. But by the 1920s Southern California already seemed hell-bent on the automobile. The ambitious plans of the tire, gasoline, and auto companies were open secrets, and the railroads, unsure of the future of passenger traffic, resisted municipal entreaties. Eastbound passengers in Los Angeles had to settle for a cluttered platform in a dilapidated depot, where the train pulled away with no more ceremony than an everyday local, and the engineer had to ride his whistle to clear the way over a series of annoying grade crossings along busy Alameda Street. Automobiles had already wrought havoc in Los Angeles.

The train didn’t pick up speed until it emerged from the built-up downtown area. By then the travelers could see billboards advertising canary farms, artificial pools for fishing, stands selling fried rabbit, dogs at stud, grass-shack eating huts, psychic mediums, vacant-lot circuses, storefront evangelicals, bicycles for rent, and frogs for sale. California was like no other economy in the world. Real estate companies sprang up and disappeared overnight. Where most cities had restaurants, Los Angeles had cafeterias. Signs advertised the eternal glories of Forest Lawn and the Hollywood Pet Cemetery. There were stores that sold pet caskets, as well as dog beauty shops and dog restaurants. Los Angeles had more telephones and automobiles than any city of comparable size in the United States. Its divorce and suicide rates were double the national average.

Some attributed the madness to Hollywood, a boomtown even by California standards. The studios had started making movies in Los Angeles only a half-dozen years before and were already one of the biggest industries in the state. All over the country people eagerly followed the antics, orgies, fame, depravity, scandals, and successes of the stars. Thousands flocked to California every week in pursuit of fame, stardom, or quick money in the movie business. Street-corner vendors were already hawking maps with addresses of the stars.

Although they were interested in stars and, like the moviemakers, had been drawn to California by the weather and skies so clear that the nearby mountains seemed to reach up and touch the heavens, the two men who boarded the train at the Southern Pacific depot hadn’t come to California because of the movie industry. They were astronomers, from what were then the two most advanced observatories in the world: Heber Curtis, from the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, near San Jose; and Harlow Shapley, from the Mount Wilson Observatory, above Pasadena. For years they had been engaged in an exchange of articles in the professional journals, criticizing each other with the remarkable vehemence that scientific journals seem to encourage. To a layperson who tried to wade through the articles, the spirited exchange about “globular clusters” and “spiral nebulae” might have seemed a tempest in a teapot. But this tempest had ultimately gathered national attention, finding its way onto the pages of newspapers that normally favored murders, adultery, and political scandal to serious science. At the end of their journey across the country, the two men were scheduled to debate at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, in the presence of an august audience that—and this was one detail the newspapers never failed to mention—would include the famous professor Albert Einstein.

From the sprawling Los Angeles Basin, a refuge ringed by mountains, the train climbed through the San Bernardino Mountains toward the Cajon Pass. Beyond the pass the open desert stretched for hundreds of miles, its bleakness punctuated only by chaparral, cactus, and the occasional mountain that pierced the clear air. The desert mountains were strange geological formations, isolated from the dangers of earthquake, remote enough to be untainted by the urban light pollution that even then affected most astronomical observatories. Their peaks thrust up into air so still that stars were pinpoints against the black heavens.

The great California observatories, like Lick and Mount Wilson, were themselves isolated by traditional standards. Before they were built most astronomical observatories were located more for convenience—usually on the campuses of urban universities—than for optimum seeing, the term astronomers use to describe the stillness and transparency of the atmosphere. Yet, compared to the remoteness of the desert peaks that Shapley and Curtis saw from the train window, the Lick and Mount Wilson observatories were almost urban. In 1920 the desert peaks, like Palomar Mountain, were so isolated by the lack of regular roads that only the Indians really knew them. Some of the mountains were sacred to the Indians: Legend had it that they were the homes of the Spirits—the departure point for souls journeying to the heavens. Shapley and Curtis could only imagine what the night sky would be like from a desert mountaintop.

The National Academy of Sciences often had distinguished speakers at its annual meetings. In the interest of widespread appeal the topics were generally selected from some aspect of what today would be labeled “applied” science. Reports of scientific developments with immediate and direct practical applications were a sure way to attract the attention of the newspapers, and potentially of the wealthy benefactors on whom the academy was dependent.

Early in 1920 Charles G. Abbot, secretary of the academy, began organizing a program of speakers for that year’s annual meeting. George Hale, a distinguished solar astronomer and the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, as well as an officer of the academy, proposed that a Hale Lecture, named in honor of his father, might occupy one evening. The topic he suggested, relativity, was a new and quite fashionable subject in scientific circles, especially since the newly famous Professor Einstein was scheduled to make his first visit to the United States that spring.

Only a year before, a much-publicized research expedition to Principe Island, off Africa, led by the well-known British astronomer and cosmologist Sir Arthur S. Eddington, had measured the deflection of starlight during a solar eclipse. When the measurements confirmed the predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravitation, The Times (of London) called Einstein’s work a “revolution in science.” The sudden newspaper publicity transformed the shy former inspector at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne into a world celebrity.

Despite Einstein’s fame and the pages that had been devoted to his theories in the newspapers and magazines, Abbot responded that a talk on relativity would be incomprehensible to a majority of the members of the academy, who came from all branches of science and weren’t necessarily familiar with Einstein’s writings. As an alternative Hale suggested a topic that some of the California astronomers had been debating in the scientific journals. On the basis of new sky surveys, some astronomers were convinced that the Milky Way, our own galaxy, was only one of many “island universes” in the heavens—an assertion many other astronomers found incomprehensible, untenable, or unreasonable. The primary evidence for the debate had come from Lick Observatory and Hale’s own Mount Wilson Observatory in California, but well-known European astrophysicists like Eddington and James Jeans had also written about the island universes debate. To an astronomer like Hale it was a hot topic.

Abbot responded that he was afraid the members of the academy also wouldn’t be interested in island universes. He refrained from telling George Hale that the only astronomical topic of widespread interest was Percival Lowell’s search for canals on Mars, or that to much of the public astronomers were the butt of jokes: boring old men with long beards who spent hours at the eyepieces of their telescopes, scribbling inscrutable numbers and making sketches that meant little to anyone else. Not too long before, a traveler had noted that one reason Westerners considered “the Chinese such barbarians is on account of the support they give to their Astronomers—people regarded by our cultivated Western mortals as completely useless. Yet there they rank with Heads of Departments and Secretaries of State. What frightful barbarism!”

In lieu of astronomers Abbot suggested that they get a speaker on a topic like medical progress in treating wounded soldiers. With the war fresh in memory, it would be a good response to the publicity recently generated by the antivivisectionists. Hale dismissed the topic as too pedestrian. The two men corresponded until Abbot, realizing that they were running out of time before the meeting, acquiesced and fired off telegrams to invite young Harlow Shapley from the Mount Wilson Observatory and Heber Curtis of the Lick Observatory to speak on “The Scale of the Universe.” Abbot wasn’t the first to discover that George Hale, a mild-mannered, self-effacing man, who looked almost cherubic in his tiny wire-rimmed glasses, usually got his way.

Harlow Shapley accepted the invitation to speak immediately. A young man from Missouri who still wore his straight black hair slicked back in a rural “hick” style, Shapley was in a hurry, eager to make his mark. When, in his third year at the University of Missouri, he fell in love with a woman named Martha Betz, he told her, “Listen, I’m a busy man. If you want any more letters from me you will have to write my language.” Shapley’s language was the Gregg shorthand system, which they used to save time even after they married.

He had been a reporter on small-town newspapers before he went to the University of Missouri in the hope that a little more education would get him a position on a bigger newspaper. Shapley later claimed that he had chosen astronomy as an undergraduate major because there was no school of journalism and he couldn’t pronounce the first discipline he came across in the college catalog, archaeology. His professor at Missouri was Frederick Seares, who recommended him for a prestigious graduate fellowship at Princeton and later helped him obtain the plum of a first appointment at Mount Wilson after he received his doctorate. Shapley’s ready sense of humor and boisterous horselaugh took the edge off his unconcealed ambition, though some older astronomers thought him too eager to take credit.

At Mount Wilson, Shapley poured his energies into both his primary responsibilities, assisting other astronomers, and his own program of research, quickly building a reputation for what some called boldness and others saw as hasty conclusions. At the time bachelor astronomers at Mount Wilson were paid ninety-five dollars a month and were provided with a room at the “Monastery” on the mountain. Shapley, who had married just before he arrived at Mount Wilson, got a munificent $135 a month to cover rent in Pasadena and the cost of getting himself up and down the mountain. Hale, the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory and Shapley’s boss, offered him $250 for expenses on the trip to Washington, but Shapley would have gone even if he had had to pay for the trip from his meager salary. “We had already resigned ourselves to poverty,” he wrote.

For an ambitious young astronomer the debate in Washington, and the opportunity to address a wide audience, was the chance of a lifetime. George Hale had recently nominated Shapley for the prestigious position of director of the Harvard College Observatory, a remarkable coup for a man so young. A good showing in the debate could make or break his chances for the appointment.

Heber Curtis, the principal critic of Shapley’s new ideas, was skeptical of the proposed debate. Curtis was from an older, more restrained generation, gentlemen scientists wary of publicity, public forums, and young men with half-cocked ideas who put unseemly ambition ahead of methodical science. Taciturnity, an understated senior-common-room style, and an instinctive mistrust of faddish notions were badges of distinction for serious scientists. Curtis finally agreed to participate, but only after some negotiation, insisting on the topic proposed in Abbot’s original telegram, “The Scale of the Universe,” and objecting to any title that would exclude his own research interests in favor of Shapley’s. The evening at the academy was scheduled as a symposium rather than a formal debate, but once the newspapers heard that Einstein would be present, they began ballyhooing the forthcoming evening as the greatest scientific debate since the trial of Galileo.

Neither man knew what to expect. Both had written primarily for scientific journals and spoken mostly to audiences of professional astronomers, a small world in 1920. Tempting though it was to discuss their qualms and apprehensions, they agreed when they first boarded the train that it would be best if they did not talk about the upcoming debate. And so, day after day, they rode on, avoiding the subject on their minds in favor of small talk or the books and notebooks they had brought in their briefcases.

The transcontinental railroad tracks were still a novelty, a tenuous tie to the remote coasts. In an age before the telephone was widespread, when radios were not yet in every home, when only businessmen in a hurry and the War Department reporting casualties used the telegraph, and when the network of highways had just begun to reach out from the cities, that thin line of railroad tracks was the only thread tying the country together. Across many routes travelers could ride for most of a day without seeing any settlements except tiny hamlets, watering stations, and mail stops along the tracks.

The America they crossed was a land of small farms, producing not only the crops they sold but their own milk, eggs, meat, and vegetables. Rural folk made do. In the summers families enjoyed the bounty of the land. In the winters they drew from the larder or the root cellar. Except for store-bought dresses and suits for special occasions, or the rugged ready-made garments that were becoming available in the catalogs, they wore homemade clothing, buying fabric and notions from country stores, catalogs, or itinerant peddlers. News about technology came from the Sears catalog, ubiquitous reading material in outhouses across America. In 1920 it featured .22 caliber rifles for $4.25; an upholstered, curly-backed rocker for $5.95; women’s middy blouses for $0.98; and a treadle-powered sewing machine for $29.95.

Farmers worked the land with draft animals. Only in the cities had auto exhausts replaced manure as the hazard of the streets. Speed limits in most cities were still twenty miles per hour. A few who happened to live near the railroad tracks could watch the speedy trains bridging the land; to most the whistles of the trains were as remote as the contrails of jet planes to a later generation.

Nights were quiet time. The wireless wasn’t in many homes yet, although Westinghouse had broadcast early results of the elections in November. Victrolas were a luxury that plain folk considered showing off. It wasn’t unusual for a family to spend a summer evening outside, on the porch or in the yard, sitting on rockers or swing benches, staring at the stars. With no city lights, no highways with nightly columns of trucks and cars, and electric power unavailable beyond the fringes of the cities, families could enjoy the glories of dark skies that revealed the Milky Way not as an occasional lucky sight but as a regular evening spectacle.

The stars were a nightly wonder. Some accepted the canonical explanations of the Bible and thought of the heavens as one more impenetrable miracle of Creation. Others contented themselves with the thought that pretty soon scientists, using those big new telescopes out in California, would know what it was all about.

From the vast prairie land of the Midwest and the sharecropped farms of the Mississippi River Valley, the travelers rode on into the industrial belt of the eastern states, the largest single concentration of heavy industry in the world. The United States prided itself on superlatives—the most railcars of coal extracted from a mine in a day, the most tons of steel produced, the most feet of rail rolled. Corporations, armed with their new public relations departments, eagerly joined the chorus of hyperbole, issuing press releases to announce the largest electrical network ever built, the biggest turbine, the largest milling machine.

Some Europeans saw the American habit of superlatives as a sign of collective insecurity, but to Americans there was a comfort in the concrete symbols of achievement. From the lonely farmers on the boundless prairies, to the factory workers of the mill towns, to the men of untold wealth who were not ashamed to describe themselves as capitalists, Americans held up industrial might as a challenge and a response to the alleged sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and grandeur of Europe. The United States was on a roll. Business was booming. The smokestacks were going full-time. Although no one bragged about it, the United States could also claim the smokiest skies and dirtiest rivers in the world. What...