The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [60]
The shop for assembling the 60-inch telescope was set up in town on Santa Barbara Street. The stately headquarters of the Carnegie Observatories remains there today. The street is now crowded with residential dwellings, but then Pasadena was sparsely settled, with only a few farmhouses and barns nearby. At the time of Hale's first reconnaissance of Mount Wilson, two trails went up the mountain: an old Indian path and a road built by the Mount Wilson Toll Road Company, although this “road” was just a few feet in width. Mules—with names such as Jasper, Pinto, Duck, and Maude—were on hand to either carry baggage or transport the weary. Strands of their hair, finer than human hair, were sometimes used as cross wires for the guiding telescopes, a smaller, parallel scope that helps astronomers keep their celestial objects on target during an observation.
Getting the 60-inch telescope set atop Mount Wilson was a herculean effort. All in all, hundreds of tons of material were hauled up by either mules or mule-assisted electric carts to construct the building and steel dome. To do this the nine-mile trail had to be first broadened and improved by pick and ax, foot by foot. The tensest moment was the transport of the mirror itself, which had been polished over a grueling four years to a smooth, parabolic shape so fine that no imperfection extended farther than two millionths of an inch. One misplaced wheel and the entire cargo could have suddenly plummeted to the canyon floor. To everyone's relief, the mirror arrived in the summer of 1908 without a scratch and within three months was finally cradled in its mount (which miraculously survived the great 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, where it was built). Once the telescope was in operation, astronomers could see stars up to one hundred million times fainter than the brightest stars in the sky.
Transporting the 60-inch telescope up Mount Wilson
(Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology)
Hale decided he would not follow the Lick Observatory model, which involved erecting a self-contained village to house staff members and their families. For Mount Wilson only essential personnel stayed full-time on the mountain to maintain the observatory and its equipment; the astronomers now traveled up from the observatory's headquarters in town whenever scheduled to observe. “Hale was never so happy,” noticed one onlooker, “as when, like a boy on a vacation, he could pack a knapsack and start on the eight-mile climb over the old trail to the summit.” Hale also gave staff members the freedom to work on their individual research interests. In the past, observatories were often set up as data factories, conducting long-term surveys and gathering extensive libraries of plates for others to consult in solving problems. But for Hale astronomy was now experimental physics; telescopes were to be used like the instruments in a laboratory, to answer carefully chosen questions and to develop theories from the gathering facts. A firm believer in the potential of American science, Hale wanted his country's scientists to evolve beyond mere fact gathering and produce more fundamental discoveries—as he put it, to see “the woods” instead of the trees. It was a radical departure from the way astronomy had been done over the centuries, which largely applied