- Woodbury, David O.
The Glass Giant of Palomar.
New York: Dodd, Mead, [1939, 1948] 1953.
LCCN 53000393.
-
I originally read this book when I was in junior high school—it
was one of the few astronomy titles in the school's library. It's
one of the grains of sand dropping on the pile which eventually
provoked the avalanche that persuaded me I was living in
the
golden age of engineering
and that I'd best spend my life
making the most of it.
Seventy years after it was originally published
(the 1948 and 1953 updates added only minor information on the
final commissioning of the telescope and a collection of photos
taken through it), this book still inspires respect for those who
created the 200 inch
Hale Telescope
on Mount Palomar, and the engineering challenges they faced and
overcame in achieving that milestone in astronomical instrumentation.
The book is as much a biography of
George
Ellery Hale as it is a story of the giant telescope he brought
into being. Hale was a world class scientist: he invented the
spectroheliograph, discovered the magnetic fields of sunspots,
founded the Astrophysical Journal and to a large
extent the field of astrophysics itself, but he also excelled
as a promoter and fund-raiser for grand-scale scientific instrumentation.
The
Yerkes,
Mount Wilson,
and
Palomar
observatories would, in all likelihood, not have existed were it not
for Hale's indefatigable salesmanship. And this was an age when
persuasiveness was all. With the exception of the road to the top
of Palomar, all of the observatories and their equipment promoted
by Hale were funded without a single penny of taxpayer money. For
the Palomar 200 inch, he raised US$6 million in gold-backed 1930
dollars, which in present-day paper funny-money amounts to
US$78 million.
It was a very different America which built the Palomar telescope.
Not only was it never even thought of that money coercively taken from
taxpayers would be diverted to pure science, anybody who wanted to
contribute to the project, regardless of their academic credentials,
was judged solely on their merits and given a position based upon
their achievements. The chief optician who ground, polished, and figured
the main mirror of the Palomar telescope (so perfectly that its
potential would not be realised until recently thanks to
adaptive optics)
had a sixth grade education and was first employed at Mount Wilson as a
truck driver. You can make of yourself what you have within yourself
in America, so they say—so it was for
Marcus Brown
(p. 279).
Milton Humason
who, with
Edwin Hubble,
discovered the expansion of the universe, dropped out of school at the
age of 14 and began his astronomical career driving supplies up Mount
Wilson on mule trains. You can make of yourself what you have within
yourself in America, or at least you could then. Now we go elsewhere.
Is there anything
Russell W. Porter
didn't do? Arctic explorer, founder of the hobby of amateur telescope
making, engineer, architect…his footprints and brushstrokes are
all over technological creativity in the first half of the twentieth
century. And he is much in evidence here: recruited in 1927, he did the
conceptual design for most of the buildings of the observatory, and his
cutaway drawings of the mechanisms of the telescope demonstrate to those endowed
with contemporary computer graphics tools that the eye of the artist is
far more important than the technology of the moment.
This book has been out of print for decades, but used copies
(often, sadly, de-accessioned by public libraries) are generally
available at prices (unless you're worried about cosmetics
and collectability) comparable to present-day hardbacks. It's as
good a read today as it was in 1962.
October 2009 