The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [59]
Hale had long had his eye on the West Coast to erect his 60-inch scope. “The possibility of having you for a neighbor in California is quite too delightful,” wrote his friend Keeler, upon hearing of Hale's interest. “It seems to me that somewhere in the coast range, perhaps farther south than we are, would be the best site.” Hale agreed. He knew the air was more arid, the weather more suitable, in the southern region of the state. And within a few years, he was able to check it out for himself.
At the end of 1903, Hale temporarily moved his family to Pasadena, then still a small town with many of its roads unpaved. His daughter, ill with asthma, required a warmer and drier climate than the one found by chilly Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. California's plentiful sunshine helped Hale, too, lifting him out of the depression he occasionally experienced. Once settled in, Hale became convinced that “Wilson's Peak,” which he could see from his bedroom window on Palmetto Street, was “the place” to continue his astronomical work. He had actually been thinking about the site for quite a while, ever since Harvard briefly considered setting up a permanent telescope there in the late 1880s.
Some thirty miles from the Pacific Ocean, Mount Wilson rises abruptly from the valley floor. It is one of many peaks of the San Gabriel Mountain Range, which runs west to east and forms a barrier between the Los Angeles metropolitan area and the Mojave Desert to the north. Upon his first venture to the top of the mile-high peak burgeoning with scrubby live oak and commanding spruce, Hale felt as if he had arrived at the edge of the world, with its stunning views of the town directly below and the dark blue sea in the distance. He had certainly reached the end of his pursuit for the perfect location to carry out his observations.
With the University of Chicago unwilling to fully finance Hale's dream for a California outpost, the young astronomer sought other funding sources. Fortuitously, Andrew Carnegie had just established the Carnegie Institution of Washington, generously endowed with $10,000,000 “to encourage investigation, research and discovery in the broadest and most liberal manner.” Carnegie, who had made his fortune in steel, made an even bigger name giving his money away. For Hale, an enterprise solely founded to support scientific investigation was nirvana and “seemed almost too good to be true,” for Carnegie's gift surpassed the funds then endowed for research at all American universities combined. Hale immediately lobbied for a grant, laying out his plans with great vigor, but not surprisingly Carnegie was inundated with requests from around the country and slow to respond.
That didn't hamper Hale one bit. Even before he had any promise of money for a full-fledged observatory, Hale used funds allotted for a “University of Chicago Expedition of Solar Research” to Mount Wilson to start work on the mountain in the summer of 1904. When that grant ran out, he dipped into his own pocket to pay his men, gambling that his investment would pay off. What came to be known as the “Monastery” was built at this time on the edge of the south ridge, to serve as guest housing for the male astronomers. By the time the quarters were finished at the end of the