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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday October 14, 2002 Volume IV Number 41 |
FOCUS - Pyrex Mirror
The dome can be seen for miles. It has become something of a landmark for me. Coming home from Orange County south on the inland Interstate, I can see the white dot on a mountain top, and it tells me I’m nearly home.
In 1930, George Ellery Hale led a high powered committee in search of the perfect location for an observatory that would dwarf every previous telescopic project in the world. His first creation, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, at the time the largest in the world, was completed in 1908. Perched a mile high above the city of Los Angeles atop Mount Wilson, the Hooker Telescope (designed and built by Hale) boasted a sixty inch reflector mirror, and from behind the protection of a massive dome with a slender opening down and around a single vertical line following the arch, peered deep into the far reaches of space. The observatory expanded the world’s understanding of the cosmos in fundamental ways. But Hale wanted more. With another grant from Carnegie, he built a one hundred inch mirror on the same site, completing it just after the Great War, 1917.
Eleven years later, 1928, armed with stunning photographs and nearly two decades of research from Mount Wilson, Hale convinced the International Education Board, a research institution funded by the wealthy industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller through the foundation that bears his name, to commit six million dollars to double the size of his giant Mount Wilson telescope. The project would fund the design and construction of a two hundred inch mirror. Hale believed it would more than double the world’s understanding of the cosmos.
The year following the funding, the stock market crashed (1929). It took twenty years to complete the massive project.
The one hundred inch at Mt. Wilson was plagued by problems. It would expand and contract in the heat and cold, images would fade out of focus. The surface required constant maintenance and re-polishing. Skeptics predicted the two hundred inch mirror would go down in history as one of the monumental follies of all time. But Hale remained undaunted, and engaged the services of an engineering firm in New York to experiment with different substances to create the perfect mirror. After several failed attempts using fused quartz, Hale turned to the Corning Glass Works upstate. The Corning people developed a new material – a glass blend called Pyrex. A million dollars later (a million dollars during the Great Depression) a second mirror met with Hale’s tough specifications, and the key element for the world’s largest telescope was complete.
At the same time, Hale and his crew searched the world for the perfect site to construct the new state of the art observatory. Los Angeles was ruled out early because of the “light pollution” of the expanding city. Already, even in the 1930s, Mt. Wilson’s view of the night sky was dimmed as a result of urban sprawl. Square miles of bright lights twinkling across town in every direction, the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley, lit by an endless supply of electricity generated by the new and powerful hydroelectric generators at Hoover Dam, diminished the images reflected in the giant mirror. Futurists predicted that the problem would only get worse. They were quite right.
So Hale, armed with a firm commitment from Rockefeller, searched for an alternate site. Proposals came from Texas and Arizona and Hawaii. But the favorite was a flat knoll, high enough to rise above the coastal moisture, where the nights were dark, far away from the urban night glow. Palomar Mountain. Well north of San Diego. Too far south of Los Angeles to be impacted by the burgeoning growth of fastest growing city in the new West.
So Hale purchased one hundred and sixty acres from some local ranchers and the US Forest Service.
The year: 1934.
* * * * * * * *
This week is bittersweet.
It’s a week that mixes the lingering pain of loss with the exhilarating hope of gain.
During the summer just a few months ago, our daughter Kristyn, with a measure of timidity, shared the news. The tests proved positive and the doctor confirmed it. She’s due to deliver a child on February 7 of next year.
People ask, “Is this your first grandchild?” Sometimes, I just smile and nod. I don’t have time to explain, or maybe I’m just not in the mood. Sometimes, particularly when I’m with a good friend, or someone who knows, or someone I sense will really care, I’ll tell them. “Nope, not our first,” I’ll say.
Kris and her husband Ben are filled with anticipation. But this time it’s an understandably cautious anticipation. Kristyn, this week, is right where she was in her first pregnancy when she lost her little boy. Twenty five weeks. Last time, just before she went into the hospital for a difficult seven days, she learned from the ultrasound that the active little baby moving around inside would be a boy. While she lay on that hospital bed, she and Ben gave him a name. Isaac. Isaac Nathan Duncan.
Isaac would be our first. We’ve determined not to forget him. Our grandson, Isaac. Sometimes, I add up the months calculating about how old he would be. We don’t dwell on his memory, but healing comes in the remembering, and the cherishing.
This week, there will be another ultra-sound, and we’ll get a prediction. I’ve been around long enough to be just a bit suspect of the results of these tests. Boy or girl? It doesn’t matter to me. But we will celebrate. And the welcome this child will get come February, well… is it possible to love a child too much?
I don’t think so.
* * * * * * *
When the Pyrex Mirror
was built, it was shipped via rail to
Pasadena in 1937. The transfer drew so much attention from the press that
crowds would line the tracks to catch a glimpse of the magical mirror that
would serve as the key element to the world’s largest telescope. The train
would travel no more than twenty five miles per hour for the entire
transcontinental journey for fear of damage to the giant precision cargo. The
nation was pulling together, building dams and waterworks and bridges and
interstate highways, pulling out of a terrible depression, led by a President
who promised a “New Deal.”
It just seemed right that the nation bent on building a strong economy that would deliver the promise of the “New World” and become a land of milk and honey and prosperity and freedom ought to have the biggest telescope in the world.
As the mirror traveled, the great base of the dome was under construction, too. The base imbedded in the granite mountain, a seven foot concrete footing at the base, would carry a one thousand ton dome which, coincidentally, is about the same size as the Dome at the Pantheon in Rome. There were two clear differences: the Dome in Rome was completed in 128 AD and to this day remains stationary. The Dome at Palomar was built over eighteen hundred years later, and rotates three hundred sixty degrees around the base on steel railroad sized wheels on a steel track.
The road snaking up to the top of the mountain today is the favorite of Café Racers, daring motorcyclists dressed in leather boots, leather pants and jackets, leather gloves and wrap around helmets, all color coordinated with a motorcycle that looks like it’s traveling over a hundred miles an hour when it’s parked in front of the country road café. These precision high powered machines also require hardened knee pads, as riders gear down, raise the RPMs downshifting into the hairpin curves, leaning over close enough to the pavement to scrape the knee, and then accelerating out in a power whine headlong into the next turn; and then over to the opposite side.
But that’s today.
In 1947, the
Palomar Mountain Road
still unpaved, was the path for all the building materials to construct the
observatory… including the massive mirror. It took ten years to prepare the
mirror (with a five year delay because of the World War). To push the forty
tons of Pyrex up the mountain required three diesel truck tractors, the first
pulling the wide trailer, the second pushing from behind, a third pushing the
second. This unlikely train on the treacherous switchback road had George Hale
biting his nails. Thirty two hours after the Two Hundred Inch Mirror left the
polishing barn in Pasadena, through a driving rain, through Pauma
Valley, up the winding, muddy road up
the mountain, the thick disk of highly polished Pyrex arrived at the site of
the dome. By this time, the superstructure of the giant telescope was
complete, and with great ceremony, the mirror carefully put into place.
And for the past fifty years, Palomar informed astronomical science around the world, and expanded our understanding of the universe.
Driven primarily by our insatiable curiosity.
Our need to know.
* * * * * * *
Today, the Palomar Observatory is a working museum piece. Encroaching light from Temecula and San Diego County diminish the effectiveness of the huge instrument. There is now competition, too. In 1993, a new mirror was installed on Maui nearly twice as large as Palomar, at a higher elevation with less ground light. But even more, the Hubble Telescope, put into orbit from the Space Shuttle in 1998, has extended our reach into the depths of space multiplying our vision way beyond anything George Hale could have imagined.
Carolyn and I walked the mountain trail up to the Observatory over the weekend. The great Dome was dedicated to public service the year I was born. It’s as old as me. The number of visitors has slowed, and the engineers who still live there are approaching retirement.
It came from a wide-eyed era when scientists enjoyed the position of society’s High Priests. They believed they could usher in a new age, an age of convenience and understanding and prosperity.
Today, with the turn of the millennium, our perspective has changed. We aren’t so confident in science. We’re more content, it seems, to live with mystery.
But we still would like to know.
What is out there?
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
Imagine the day George Hale went home to tell his wife that he landed a six million dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The year was 1928. I’m guessing he felt, well, somewhat invincible.
I wonder if he understood the challenge that lay ahead – for more than twenty years.
I’m contemplating another kind of mystery this week. I’m trying to imagine the day we welcome a new grandchild. How it will impact our daughter and our son-in-law. What it will be like to hold him/her in our arms. To watch the growth, the stages, to hear the giggling, toss a ball, slobber over ice cream.
Someday, I’ll take my grandchild to Palomar. I think we’ll hike the trail. We’ll take our time. I’ll explain that the giant white dome is as old as Grandpa. And then we’ll talk about the stars and the galaxies and the Milky Way and Andromeda, those faint reflections in the Pyrex Mirror.
And the God who made them all.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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