Free The Perfect Machine by Ronald Florence Page B

Works, were almost lost in the San Francisco earthquake and fire. To reduce the friction on the bearings, the fork that held the telescope tube was mounted on a ten-foot-diameter float in a tank of mercury. The drive gears, marked off with a finely graduated circle fixed to the polar axis, had been ground to a precise shape and polished with jeweler’s rouge. To keep the mirrors of the telescope at a steady temperature, the dome was fitted with a canvas screen on a skeleton framework, and the mounting of the telescope was encased in blankets during the day. The shutters of the dome, fitted so they were almost airtight, were kept closed until shortly before sunset each evening. These precautions were dismissed as extreme by astronomers at eastern universities, until tests demonstrated that the mirror retained its figure during the temperature changes from day to night so well that it was optically as perfect at midnight at the site as when it had been tested in the temperature-controlled shop.
    First light with the new telescope was in December 1908. To their delight the astronomers were able to obtain “perfectly round” star images of 1.03 seconds of arc—phenomenal resolution by comparison to other large telescopes. These images required exposures of eleven hours, during which the guiding mechanism of the telescope had to be corrected by hand. By 1910, with improved photographic emulsions, exposures of only four hours yielded images of stars of magnitude twenty—an improvement of several magnitudes over all previous telescopes.
    As the work on Mount Wilson progressed, Hale resigned fromYerkes and was appointed director of the new Mount Wilson Observatories, a division of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The new laboratories and offices on Santa Barbara Street in Pasadena were the most modern in the world. With the lure of the solar telescopes on the mountain and the new sixty-inch reflector, Hale assembled a talented cast of astronomers at Mount Wilson. But even the sixty-inch reflector on Mount Wilson—the biggest telescope in the world and the first to be built with a mounting and guidance system of the precision and temperature stability that long photographic and spectrographic exposures of distant, faint objects would require—wasn’t enough to satisfy George Hale.

4

The Whirligus
    The competition for bigger and better machines was the spirit of the times. The years when Hale was guiding the construction of the forty-inch refractor at Yerkes, then the sixty-inch reflector at Mount Wilson, were the years of the great dreadnaught-building contest between Great Britain and Germany, an arms race as frightening to contemporaries as the nuclear arms race would be to a later generation. One country would launch a great battleship, then the other would counter with an even bigger battleship, extending the technology of armor, ballistics, and explosives until they provoked yet another generation of ships with larger displacements and more guns. Cartoonists and editorial writers goaded the competition, as the huge ships became symbols of national pride.
    A parallel competition took place in architecture and technology. In France, Gustave Eiffel’s tower temporarily won the race for greater heights, but architects and developers in the United States were already dreaming of taller buildings. In Britain and the United States, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and John Roebling raced to build longer and taller bridges than the world had ever known. The Panama Canal, thought an impossible engineering feat after Ferdinand de Lessepss catastrophic failure, was nearing completion by American engineers, as important as a symbol of the triumph of American engineering as for military strategy and commerce of a nation with coastlines on two oceans. New York was building subways and massive aqueducts; the railroads were conquering mountain passes; aircraft engineers were building bigger and better flying machines.
    George Hale had