The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [57]
Upon graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, class of 1890, Hale married his childhood sweetheart, Evelina Conklin, and took an extended honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls, Colorado, San Francisco, and Yosemite. But he was most excited, while out in California, to get a personal tour of Lick Observatory. There, he had the opportunity to work one night with James Keeler, as the Lick astronomer was observing planetary nebulae. Hale was mightily impressed and never forgot his first glimpse of the 36-inch refracting telescope, then the world's largest, its long tube “reaching up toward the heavens in the great dome,” he later recalled. Hale primarily studied the Sun, Keeler the stars and nebulae, but both were fervent advocates of spectroscopy. They became fast friends.
Within two years of his return to Chicago, Hale became an associate professor at the newly reorganized University of Chicago. With the university's promise of future funding for a larger telescope, he allowed the university to use his personal observatory, grandly christened the “Kenwood Physical Observatory.” The complex was built right next door to the Hale family mansion and housed both a 12-inch refractor, paid for by his father, and his revolutionary spectroheliograph. “I would not consider [joining the faculty] for a moment were it not for the prospect of some day getting the use of a big telescope to carry out some of my pet schemes,” he told an acquaintance.
That prospect arrived sooner rather than later, due solely to Hale's resourcefulness. After attending the latest meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Rochester, New York, in the summer of 1892, he went out to cool off on his hotel's veranda and overheard a conversation about two 40-inch telescope lenses that had unexpectedly become available. The glass disks had been made for a planned observatory in southern California that was aimed at surpassing Lick in telescopic power. A real estate boom had brought sudden wealth to the Los Angeles area, and for the sake of regional pride developers were eager to erect their own grand astronomical monument—until the promoters went broke when the land bubble burst. For Hale, so eager to acquire a large telescope for his solar investigations, ready access to such lenses was a stroke of luck. A lens forty inches wide had nearly 25 percent more surface area than the Lick's 36-inch lens and so would gather 25 percent more light, a huge and treasured gain for any astronomer. Given the brush-off by a bevy of Chicago's wealthiest businessmen to sponsor the purchase of the lenses, Hale at last convinced Chicago's streetcar magnate, Charles Tyson Yerkes, to fund construction of the giant instrument. Hale's work as an astronomer provided the scientific arguments for this bold step; his family's wealth and position gave him the self-confidence, even though he was only twenty-four years old, to win over Yerkes in financing such a grand scheme.
George Ellery Hale at his spectrograph
(Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology)
The university had been pursuing Yerkes for months to pledge a gift and offering to have his name attached to the world's largest telescope was powerful enticement (as it had been with James Lick years earlier). Hale was not shy in playing up that angle. “The donor could have no more enduring monument,” he wrote Yerkes. “It is certain that Mr. Lick's name would not have been nearly so widely known today were it not for the famous observatory established as a result of his munificence.” Yerkes snapped at the bait: “Build the observatory,