The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [99]
The job was assuredly his, and Hubble couldn't have turned up at the Mount Wilson Observatory at a more perfect time. On September 11, 1919, just about a week after his arrival in Pasadena, the great 100-inch telescope came into full use for the staff. It was a moment that observatory director Hale had been anticipating since 1906.
On the Brink of a Big Discovery—
or Maybe a Big Paradox
George Ellery Hale could never rest on his laurels. He was a man of endless enthusiasms. British theorist James Jeans said he possessed “a driving power which was given no rest until it had brought his plans and schemes to fruition.” After being awarded nearly every major scientific honor before the age of forty—from election to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States to the gold medal of Great Britain's Royal Astronomical Society—Hale craved additional triumphs. “He has reached a place where scientific work and honors are not enough,” George Ritchey suggested darkly after a conflict with Hale. “He must have vast power also; power to dictate the welfare, the making or unmaking, the positions even, of scientific men both in the observatory and outside of it—as far as his influences can possibly reach.”
Even before Mount Wilson's 60-inch telescope went into operation in 1908, Hale was thinking ahead to a new adventure. In the summer of 1906 he spent a weekend at the home of John Hooker, a wealthy Los Angeles businessman and a founder of the Southern California Academy of Sciences, and excitedly discussed his latest dream. Again, it was to be an even bigger telescope. Like a compulsive climber, Hale was always looking ahead to the next challenging mountain. He captivated Hooker, an amateur astronomer, with his description of a mirror one hundred inches in width that would gather nearly three times more light—the very lifeblood of astronomy—than the 60-inch. Hale and Ritchey followed up with a letter to Hooker, outlining the usefulness of such a large mirror, including the tens of thousands of nebulae that would likely be revealed, unlocking the secret of their mysterious nature.
Hale's charismatic personality, coupled with Ritchey's technical expertise, worked their magic. Within weeks Hooker, who had made his fortune in hardware, pledged the money to construct the mirror, even though no one (neither Hale nor Ritchey) knew at the time whether such a disk—four and a half tons of pristine glass—could even be cast, polished, or mounted. No glass that large had ever been made before. Hale's younger brother, Will, once called George the greatest gambler in the world. Ordering up a 100-inch mirror was his biggest bet ever. And he almost lost.
In December 1908, the giant glass arrived from France, where it had been manufactured, but as soon as the crate was unpacked at the observatory's headquarters on Santa Barbara Street in Pasadena, everyone could see the blank was seriously flawed—bubbles were dispersed throughout the disk and the glass incompletely fused. From the side it looked like a three-layered cake. Such defects jeopardized the mirror's ability to expand and contract uniformly and so maintain stable images as temperatures in the telescope dome changed over the nighttime hours. “We don't pay for this!” declared Hale.
A new disk was ordered, but the best candidate broke as it was cooling. With his funds exhausted, Hale decided to have the first disk ground and polished, despite its imperfections. Both Hooker and Ritchey opposed this decision with intense vehemence. To compound Hale's trials, Hooker grew increasingly jealous