The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [10]
Over time Lick came to accept Davidson's compelling idea and in the fall of 1873 authorized the funds to construct a state-of-the-art observatory in the arid Sierra Nevada Mountain Range at an elevation of 10,000 feet. Caught up in the excitement of this novel venture, Lick pledged $1 million, a princely sum. No observatory had ever been established in such a remote and elevated locale. In that decisive shift, astronomy would soon change in a remarkable way, whisking the field away from its previous urban settings.
Over the next three years, Lick fiddled with the provisions of his trust, fired and hired assorted board trustees, reduced the price tag to a tightfisted $700,000, and changed his mind on the telescope's location. Once set for a spot near Lake Tahoe by the Nevada border, the site was eventually shifted to Mount Hamilton, a shorter peak (4,200 feet high) just to the east of San Jose, where Lick could look up and proudly view it from his property. Davidson, sorely disappointed by the lowered elevation and Lick's parsimonious ways, left the project and refused to speak to his former benefactor ever again.
Davidson's snub mattered little in the end, for Lick soon passed away. He died on October 1, 1876, at the age of eighty. Only then did construction of the mountaintop observatory, an arduous and unprecedented endeavor, truly get under way: Congress at last approved transfer of the public land, the local county built a road to the top, and the mountain peak was certified by an expert as exceptional for its atmospheric stability. Mount Hamilton's sharp, knife-edged profile causes minimal disturbance as air flows in from the west. Fulfilling Lick's decree, the largest refracting telescope in the world—one with lenses ten inches wider than the previous record holder at the U.S. Naval Observatory—was installed in a magnificent domed building, designed in the Italian Renaissance style and large enough to accommodate the scope's lengthy tube. Massive hydraulic cylinders allowed an astronomer to raise or lower the entire circular floor to keep him level with the telescopic eyepiece. The top thirty feet of the mountain had been blasted away to provide a level space for the rambling complex, which included housing, workshops, offices, and a library. The observatory operated as a small town, with families living on-site and supplies brought up daily by wagon from San Jose. A visitor dubbed it the “little Republic of Science.”
Lick became the new republic's patron saint, for his egotism never completely disappeared with his noble gift to astronomy, even after his death. In January 1887, as soon as the telescope base was complete, Lick's remains were brought up the mountain and reburied, his body resting directly under the grand instrument he funded, in the very base of the pier supporting the giant refractor. Tour groups still visit the tomb today. Davidson claimed credit (as did others) for the interment idea, first voiced when Lick was alive. He was surprised the old man agreed. At the time Davidson had suggested a cremation and burial of the ashes, to which the former carpenter quickly replied, “No sir! I intend to rot like a gentleman.”
The choice for director of the new Lick Observatory was Edward Holden, a graduate of West Point and an unaccomplished astronomer whose sole qualification seemed to be that his energy and initiative had once impressed Simon Newcomb, then America's most revered astronomer, while he was assisting Newcomb at the Naval Observatory. A proud and pompous man, Holden at least had a keen eye for talent. Aware of Keeler's outstanding work at Allegheny, Holden hired him in 1886 to get the new mountaintop observatory and its equipment up and running. Of all Holden's hires, James Keeler was by far the best trained. Bringing Keeler to the mountain was the best decision