Read The Perfect Machine Online
Authors: Ronald Florence
Curtis, who would get a bigger disk, might be sanguine. McCauley wasn’t. The eighty-six-inch mirror was made from the same batch of glass, in the same 3A tank, that had been used to cast the two-hundred-inch disk. The glass had looked fine when they poured the first two-hundred-inch disk, but in August, when the tank was cooled off after the last of the big mirrors had been poured, the cullet that was broken out of the tank contained streaks of devitrification. The streaks seemed to mark the outlines of the ladle skins—suggesting that the glass that had been returned to the tank during the ladling, to keep the glass level up so the subsequent ladling efforts could reach the molten glass, had been contaminated with some impurity. What if the impurities also affected the two-hundred-inch disk?
By mid-October, the natural cooling rate of the insulated annealing oven finally matched the rate that had been maintained by the electric controllers. The disk was cooling itself without help. The day-and-night guardians of the controls were moved to other jobs, and the
power was turned off. On October 17, McCauley lowered the screw hoist carrying the disk one and a half inches, increasing the rate of cooling. The day of unveiling was rapidly approaching.
After the disasters of the early publicity, McCauley knew he had to explore the unknown alone. On October 25, a Friday, he waited until all office and laboratory personnel in A Factory had gone home for their dinners, then went down into the factory cave alone. With the heaters in the annealing oven turned off, the cave area was dark, so he carried a flashlight. At the disk he stood motionless, listening to make sure he was alone in the cave, before he pushed the hoist’s down button. When the disk had lowered just enough for his slim 150 pounds to fit, he stopped the hoist and crawled up onto the still uncomfortably warm glass, keeping his thumb off the flashlight button until he was entirely inside the oven.
When he switched on the beam, he saw a strip of clear, solid glass. The disk hadn’t broken.
Then, as he moved the beam of the flashlight, the light came back in scattered reflections, as if from broken glass. “No!” he thought. “Not this one, too!”
McCauley crawled toward the reflections. The surface of the disk looked as if some Paul Bunyan had embedded a huge crowbar several inches into the glass while it was still soft, then waited ten months to pry it loose. His mind raced, wondering what could cause scars like that. Could it have been the power failure during the floods? Was the disk ruined?
He scanned the disk with his flashlight, looking for more wounds, then crawled over the surface toward each broken reflection, supporting himself on his knees and left hand, while he traced over the glass with the flashlight in his right. He found a second, a third, a fourth—nine in total. He sat down at the ninth scar, exhausted. Years of planning, two pours, almost a year of annealing, and it came to this. He felt as if his life had come to an end with nothing accomplished.
As he sat on the disk, his eyes roved upward. The cover of the kiln had been fabricated to hold a layer of insulating brick over the surface of the disk, matching the insulating qualities of the mold underneath. Above the scar in the surface of the glass, he could make out a welded junction of beams in the cover. Could this have been Paul Bunyan’s crowbar?
The physicist began calculating. When the molten glass disk was raised into the oven, the heat of the glass would make the side of the cover closest to it expand. The layer of insulating brick would shield the upper layer of the cover from the heat, and the uneven expansion would make the cover bend downward toward the glass, perhaps far enough for the steel beams to touch the surface. The explanation
almost
fit. But there were only three welded areas on the lid. How would they account for nine scars on the disk?
The physics was easy. Common sense took longer. McCauley finally realized that in his anxious search for scars he had crawled around the disk three times. He had “found” the scars on each lap, magnifying the problem by three. Small consolation; even three scars, in what was supposed to be a perfect disk, were three too many.
As he maneuvered around to climb out of the kiln, he saw the head and shoulders of Ralph Newman peer under the oven cover. Newman, who had worked on the mirrors from the beginning and had every right to be in the kiln area, was surprised at the vehemence of McCauley’s order to maintain “absolute silence” about what he had seen.
With the kiln closed, that night McCauley thought through the options. It was clear that the Observatory Council should not be expected to pay for another casting. The telescope project was already behind budget and schedule, and as much as the Corning Glass Works had reveled in the attention of the world when they cast the disk, McCauley wasn’t eager to preside over the announcement of a Corning Glass Works failure. A second option was to reheat the disk to level its surface, then reanneal it. But the experience with the first disk, which had been reheated to smooth the rough surface left by the floating cores, hadn’t been encouraging. The reheating had introduced fractures to the ribbed supports. And reannealing meant another year in the oven, with the risks that entailed.
There was one other option. The disk had deliberately been cast deeper than required. What if the surface were ground down far enough to remove the surface scars? McCauley calculated that the resulting disk would be thinner than the original plans had specified. Would it be too thin? The only evidence on the rigidity of mirrors with ribbed backs was based on much-smaller mirrors. The test results from Pasadena had all been good. The mirrors held their shape better than the designs had anticipated. The two-hundred-inch mirror would have active mirror supports in the pockets in the back, helping it hold its shape against gravity. If the mirror supports worked, the thinner disk might even be better, because it would react faster to temperature changes. As he calculated and considered the alternatives, McCauley was convinced that grinding the mirror down was the only choice.
McCauley wasn’t the only one thinking about the mirror. After the orgy of publicity at the pouring of the first disk, the telescope, and astronomy, had become a regular topic for newspapers, radio broadcasters, and the weekly and monthly magazines that supplied news and entertainment to Americans. Reporters, prompted by their tickler files, called constantly for progress reports. “In December, you said the annealing would be finished in October. How soon can we see the disc?” Every potential disaster, like the flood, brought another round of calls from reporters who hoped for a fresh angle on the mirror.
In the depths of the depression, the telescope had become a staple of the news, a symbol of scientific and technological progress. When Edwin Hubble’s search for larger red shifts led to the idea of an expanding universe, journalists seized on both the connections to the famed Albert Einstein and the loose ends in Hubble’s evidence. Few reports on Hubble failed to assure their readers that the great two-hundred-inch telescope, still under construction, would solve the dilemmas. The humorists, too, had made the telescope project grist for their columns in magazines like
The American.
After the “minor problems” with the first casting were announced, Robert Benchley sarcastically explained to his readers that what had gone wrong was that “40,000 pounds of glass is too much glass.” The telescope disk became a theme for Benchley, who picked up on each announcement of another mirror being cast at Corning: “If you ask me, they have got started making gigantic glass lenses up at Corning and can’t stop. And California is being made the sucker.”
All summer and fall McCauley, usually an easygoing man, had seemed tense to his colleagues and family. He took his wife and children down to see the disk but didn’t seem enthused. He had never been a man to discuss what troubled him, and his wife and children assumed he was anxious about the disk, or bruised by the barbs of Benchley and others who took the disk to task.
In fact McCauley enjoyed Benchley’s barbs. He would buy each issue of
The American
and read the tidbits out loud to his family and friends. Though he did not relish the thought of Benchley, or of the other journalists who circled Corning like vultures, seizing on the news of the flaws in the surface of the disk, what really worried him was closer to home.
McCauley had never been greedy for fame. He was a quiet, churchgoing man with a strong sense of justice. Ever since the world had descended on Corning to witness the pouring of the first disk, J. C. Hostetter, the director of development and research at Corning, had been taking personal credit for the successful disk. Hostetter was not a scientist. His own role was more that of a product manager; his style and background, as a New York-club sort of fellow, suited him well to the job. Hostetter invited reporters to interview him, directed the Corning publicity office to route queries to him, and held court during the two castings as if they were
his
operations. In public statements, and in stories passed along by his assistant George Maltby, Hostetter did all he could to leave the impression that
he,
more than anyone else, was responsible for the achievement of casting the disk.
By late summer the bitterness between them was strong enough that McCauley began avoiding Hostetter. The friendship between their families evaporated. In a small city like Corning, where people share the same church and social activities, the situation became uncomfortable.
In October, when McCauley reported the scars on the disk at a secret meeting with Amory Houghton, Houghton asked McCauley to show Hostetter the disk before a final decision was made. Hostetter had been sending periodic reports on the disk to George Hale, and Houghton was planning a round of discussions, like the initial talks at the University Club that had begun the Corning work on the telescope. The important element, all three men agreed, was that the Observatory Council and the Rockefeller Foundation should be informed quietly, before newspaper reporters sensationalized the story.
The University Club meetings were not to be. Early Friday morning, November 1, an earthquake rumbled through the Finger Lakes area of New York State. It was close enough to be felt in Corning, and by midmorning reporters were telephoning and telegraphing the press office at the Corning Glass Works for news on whether the disk had been harmed. Leon Quigley assured them that the disk was fine and had not been affected by the tremor. When persistent reporters began asking, “How do you
know
the disc is all right?” it was clear that the world, beginning with the Observatory Council and the Rockefeller Foundation, had to be told the state of the disk.
Although Hostetter had been eager to have all earlier reports about the disk come from him, this time he deferred. On Monday morning Amory Houghton, the president of Corning, told George McCauley he was going on a business trip. He was to buy a ticket only as far as Chicago. No one in Corning, not even his family, was to know the final destination.
Marcus Brown grew up on his father’s chicken farm in the California foothills. Like most farmers he was a good mechanic, and he eventually got a job driving and repairing a delivery truck for the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he made a good salary for the 1920s—one hundred dollars a month. Much of his job was picking up instruments and optical devices at the Optical Labs on Santa Barbara Street and driving them up the tricky mountain roads to the observatory, so he spent a lot of time in the lab, watching the opticians and workmen as they patiently labored over the glass-grinding machines. Brown—friends called him Brownie—had little formal education, but he was patient and careful with tools. As he watched the men work on the glass machines, he decided that polishing glass was exactly the right work for him.
John Anderson interviewed him. A job in the optical shop would mean a big cut in pay, Anderson explained, and Brown would have to start as an apprentice, taking orders and doing the lowest work in the shop. Undeterred, Brown took the job. His first tasks were routine and boring. He would clean up around the machines, or stand over a disk for a full shift, slowly pouring a slurry of carborundum and water onto the edge of a glass disk while the grinding machine turned under the direction of a more senior worker.
Whatever the task, Brown was enthusiastic. Many men, lured by the appeal of steady indoor work, took jobs at the Optical Lab only to discover that they couldn’t stand the routine, the confinement in a windowless room, the painfully slow process of grinding glass. Brownie seemed to thrive on it. He had unlimited reserves of the essential temperament for an optician—
patience.
Hour after hour he seemed not to notice the droning noise of the machines, the occasional screech of abrasives against glass, the progress that often couldn’t be measured after even days of work. Where most men were too eager to move from one step to the next, rushing the switch to
finer grits of carborundum or beginning the final polishing stages before the last residual scratches had been ground off the surface, Brownie was the consummate craftsman, never rushing the glass.
Anderson was a good judge of men. Before long he assigned Brown responsibilities of his own, including the grinding and polishing of a twelve-inch mirror. Brown did a good job. He couldn’t get enough of the optics lab. At night he studied optics on his own. On his days off he built a grinding machine from water pipe and the insides of an old thresher from his father’s farm. He was one of those men who had found his calling. Brown made no secret of his ambition: He wanted to grind the mirror for the two-hundred-inch telescope.
In the optics lab as at the observatory, there was a distinct gap between the men who worked on the machines, and the trained opticians—often astronomers—who designed and tested the mirrors and lenses. But Anderson took notice of the curly-haired man with glasses. After Brown had worked in the optics lab on Santa Barbara Street for three years, Anderson asked him if he would move over to the new optical laboratory on California Street.