The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [141]
Telescope designer George Willis Ritchey, who had supervised the optical work on the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, continued to bad-mouth the venture after Hale ordered its flawed disk polished and mounted. Once Hale nixed Ritchey's grandiose idea to replace the defective glass with a radically new type of mirror, the optician spread the word that the giant scope would fail. In an act of insubordination, Ritchey directly contacted Hooker, Hale's benefactor, to convince the businessman to take his side. Ritchey's gossip and unauthorized dealings—acts of disloyalty to Hale—ultimately led to his dismissal from Mount Wilson in 1919 at the age of fifty-four. Ritchey never got to use the Hooker telescope for his own astronomical investigations. He moved to his ranch east of Pasadena, growing lemons, oranges, and avocados and dreaming of designing ever-bigger telescopes, with mirrors up to 320 inches in width. In the 1920s he worked in France in an attempt to construct a telescope that would surpass the Hooker in size, until the French project was called off. In the early 1930s he had to settle for designing and constructing a 40-inch reflector for the U.S. Naval Observatory, then upgrading its equipment in Washington. He died in 1945, two months shy of eighty-one. He would never learn that his highly controversial design for the Naval Observatory scope, worked out earlier in collaboration with the French astronomer Henri Chrétien, would later be used in many giant telescopes built in the latter half of the twentieth century, including the Hubble Space Telescope.
Edwin Hubble's later work never quite equaled the amazing discoveries he made in the 1920s and early 1930s. His most productive days were behind him. His scientific life, in a way, came to a standstill as he awaited construction of a bigger telescope to advance his cosmic searches. During World War II, he was stationed at the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, Maryland. There he applied his student training in orbital mechanics to calculating artillery-shell trajectories. Over the years, his noted arrogance tempered a bit. Astronomer George Abell, who briefly worked for Hubble while a graduate student in the early 1950s, remembered him as a “very gracious, kindly person, a real gentleman… He always seemed to have time to talk to students and night assistants… He may have mellowed in his old age.” Hubble lived long enough to see the opening of the next great telescope after the 100-inch—the 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain. He was the first scheduled observer on the giant instrument in 1949 and got started by photographing the variable nebula NGC 2261, his good luck charm. The many snubs toward his colleagues over the years, though, ultimately kept him from his more cherished goal: becoming director of the newly combined Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories. Ira Bowen was appointed instead, a decision that simply stunned Hubble, who was certain the post was his for the taking. During the following summer, on a fishing trip near Grand Junction, Colorado, Hubble experienced a major heart attack and was hospitalized.
On September 28, 1953, the Hubbles were returning to their San Marino home by car, with Grace driving. Hubble was in the midst of preparations for going to Palomar for