The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [56]
Shapley would never have had this opportunity were it not for the astounding foresight and boundless fortitude of George Ellery Hale. A noted solar astronomer, Hale discovered that there were magnetic fields in sunspots, a sensational finding in its day, for it was the first magnetic field detected beyond Earth. He also cofounded the Astrophysical Journal (along with James Keeler) and helped transform the Throop College of Technology into the California Institute of Technology. But Hale made his most valuable contributions to astronomy as an administrator. It was largely through his focused efforts over several decades that America wrenched the baton from Europe in astronomical leadership. Hale nearly single-handedly orchestrated the construction of four great telescopes in the United States, each larger and more advanced than the one before. In carrying out this colossal endeavor, he allowed Shapley to revamp the Milky Way and the astronomers who followed to reveal the true vastness of the universe and the amazing diversity of its celestial inhabitants. Astronomer Allan Sandage of the Carnegie Observatories is convinced that astronomers “owe all to Hale and his dreams and positive actions to put those dreams into glass and steel. Where would world astronomy be today if Hale had not been an ‘empire builder’?”
Hale took unique advantage of the magnificent productivity of his era. It was once jokingly noted that American astronomy became preeminent at this time because of two discoveries: Pickering discovered women and Hale discovered money. American industrialists were amassing great fortunes, capital that was just waiting to be tapped for philanthropic undertakings in an era before the federal income tax was permanently established. Of all the sciences in the Gilded Age, astronomy was the most popular destiny for private support in the United States. One reason is that astronomy held out the promise of a shiny white dome on a mountain, for all to look up and admire. Hale, too, commented that the public regards “astronomical research with a feeling of awe which is not accorded to other branches of science [because of] its power of searching out mysterious phenomena in the infinite regions of space.”
Hale himself was the very personification of this union of money with science at the turn of the twentieth century. Hale's father, William, had secured sizable riches as the manufacturer of hydraulic elevators, produced for the many skyscrapers that began to dot the Chicago urban landscape after the Great Fire of 1871. His company also supplied them for Paris's Eiffel Tower. Some of the capital from these enterprising ventures offered Hale as a teenager sufficient funds to construct his own spectroscopic observatory in the attic of the family mansion in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where he avidly studied the Sun's spectrum, alongside his books, laboratory equipment, and fossil collection. He was a precocious boy with a formidable power of concentration—always curious and always devising new ways to study the natural world. He chose the Sun as his target of interest because, as the closest star, he hoped it might better reveal the secrets of stellar evolution. Shortly after his twentieth birthday in 1888, he confirmed that the element carbon resided in the Sun, a matter then in great debate. Before Hale even graduated from college, he developed a new instrument—the spectroheliograph—that enabled astronomers to photograph the surface of the Sun and its fiery prominences as never before. It imaged the Sun