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The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope
Almost a half-century after is completion, the 200-inch Palomar telescope remains an unparalleled combination of vast scale and microscope detail. As huge as the Pantheon of Rome and as heavy as the Statue of Liberty, this magnificent instrument is so precisely built that its seventeen-foot mirror was hand-polished to a tolerance of 2/1,000,000 of an inch. The telescope's construction drove some to the brink of madness, made others fearful that mortals might glimpse heaven, and transfixed an entire nation. Ronald Florence weaves into his account of the creation of "the perfect machine" a stirring chronicle of the birth of Big Science and a poignant rendering of an America mired in the depression yet reaching for the stars.
451 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
72 people are currently reading
202 people want to read
About the author
Ronald Florence
15 books5 followersRonald Florence is a novelist and historian, author of twelve books. Educated at Berkeley and Harvard, he taught at colleges and universities, ran a foundation, raced sailboats, and raised Cotswold sheep before turning to full-time writing. He lives in Providence, RI and travels in Europe and the Middle East to research his books.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
September 16, 2018
One of the best books I've read. As an engineer and amateur astronomer, the subject has been known to me for years, but I've never read the story of how it came to be, especially cast against the background of the political (the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, the rise of fascism, WWII) and scientific (relativity, quantum mechanics, the discovery of other galaxies) revolutions of the time. Extraordinarily well researched, this story was very well told and made me appreciate what I will call the attitude of scientific entrepreneurship of the day. I gained a deep appreciation for what George Hale and all of the others accomplished with what we regard as truly rudimentary tools. Highly recommended. An excellent birthday present from my daughter!
March 24, 2008
The story of one of the great mechanical projects of the early twentieth century. I have a family interest in this one. My grandfather was a good friend of Russell Porter, one of the architects of the telescope, and an incredible genius.
March 1, 2022
Building the Palomar Telescope” I started reading this book about 3 months ago after a talk about the Hale Telescope at an Astronomy Club meeting. I had read it before, probably in the late 90’s and had it in my library. The book was published in 1994.
Being an amateur astronomer and a machinist, I was able to understand most of what was described in this book. The time I spent working for an optical company and the time spent in the roughing and polishing shops also helped me appreciate the difficult job it was to fabricate a piece of glass, 200 inches in diameter and to shape it and polish it to a fraction of a wavelength.
The book explained how the gears had to be polished also to avoid any type of imperfection which might cause a hitch in the tracking, the machinists spent months working on them. The pieces of the base and bearings were so massive that few shops could handle the job. Some portions were manufactured in the Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh! Pieces were machined to tolerances unknown before.
They had difficulty in finding the proper type of glass to use and then how to properly melt it and pour it into a mold, a mold larger than ever attempted before. The glass needed to be without any imperfections. Almost everything was larger than ever made before. Towards the end of the polishing process, the total time spent on a polishing run could be as short as 5-10 minutes, using only their thumb to polish a small section. Then it would be cleaned and retested once again. The mirror was in the polishing shop for over a decade!
The parts of the book dealing with the leadership of the project, the searches for funding and the squabbles between the various organizations didn’t really enthuse me as much as the actual descriptions of the designing and building did.
People wanted to know how this “Perfect Machine” was coming along. Little did they know that it would be decades in the making! The people of the country rallied around it, coming out in droves to watch as the mirror crept through their towns on a slow-moving train and to watch as the base and tube started to be assembled on the mountain top. The manufacturing endured wars and the Depression and near bankruptcy threatened it but eventually it saw first light!
In the end, the telescope delivered much more than what was expected. Over the preceding decades, with the advances in computers and optics it has given astronomers more than they ever dreamed about.
One thing stuck with me, a section describing how astronomers observed at the prime focus. This is a small cage suspended above the mirror. The observer could look over the edge of the cage and look directly into the mirror. “Stars, millions of stars, seem to float above the disc. It seems as if there is nothing between the observer and the heavens. The great mirror has reached out and grabbed a chunk of the universe.”
Even though it took me 3 months to read this, putting it aside to read other books, I always looked forward to returning to it once again!
Being an amateur astronomer and a machinist, I was able to understand most of what was described in this book. The time I spent working for an optical company and the time spent in the roughing and polishing shops also helped me appreciate the difficult job it was to fabricate a piece of glass, 200 inches in diameter and to shape it and polish it to a fraction of a wavelength.
The book explained how the gears had to be polished also to avoid any type of imperfection which might cause a hitch in the tracking, the machinists spent months working on them. The pieces of the base and bearings were so massive that few shops could handle the job. Some portions were manufactured in the Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh! Pieces were machined to tolerances unknown before.
They had difficulty in finding the proper type of glass to use and then how to properly melt it and pour it into a mold, a mold larger than ever attempted before. The glass needed to be without any imperfections. Almost everything was larger than ever made before. Towards the end of the polishing process, the total time spent on a polishing run could be as short as 5-10 minutes, using only their thumb to polish a small section. Then it would be cleaned and retested once again. The mirror was in the polishing shop for over a decade!
The parts of the book dealing with the leadership of the project, the searches for funding and the squabbles between the various organizations didn’t really enthuse me as much as the actual descriptions of the designing and building did.
People wanted to know how this “Perfect Machine” was coming along. Little did they know that it would be decades in the making! The people of the country rallied around it, coming out in droves to watch as the mirror crept through their towns on a slow-moving train and to watch as the base and tube started to be assembled on the mountain top. The manufacturing endured wars and the Depression and near bankruptcy threatened it but eventually it saw first light!
In the end, the telescope delivered much more than what was expected. Over the preceding decades, with the advances in computers and optics it has given astronomers more than they ever dreamed about.
One thing stuck with me, a section describing how astronomers observed at the prime focus. This is a small cage suspended above the mirror. The observer could look over the edge of the cage and look directly into the mirror. “Stars, millions of stars, seem to float above the disc. It seems as if there is nothing between the observer and the heavens. The great mirror has reached out and grabbed a chunk of the universe.”
Even though it took me 3 months to read this, putting it aside to read other books, I always looked forward to returning to it once again!
January 26, 2014
When constructed in 1948, the Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California was the largest-aperture telescope in the world, at 200 inches twice as wide as the biggest telescope up to then, and remained such until the Soviet BTA, with a mirror 19% wider, was built in 1976. It was financed by a $6 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in the midst of the Great Depression, and went only 9% over budget. It took about 20 years from conception to completion; World War II interrupted the work, as technicians, engineers and scientists switched to war production; after the war, work on the telescope resumed.
Building the telescope was a great engineering challenge. A reflecting telescope is built around a mirror, a paraboloid layer of aluminum less than a micron thick. The paraboloid has to be ground out of something. Metal could not be ground to a high enough precision, so it had to be some sort of glass. General Electric spent $600,000 and still couldn't make a 60-inch mirror out of fused quartz. It was dropped as a supplier, and Corning was chosen instead. It decided to make the mirror out of Pyrex, a borosilicate glass with a low coefficient of thermal expansion. When the first 200-inch disk was cast, bricks from the form broke loose and floated to the top of the glass, contaminating the bulk; it was rejected; the makers learned their lessons, and the second disk was better. It took 10 months for the disk to anneal; meanwhile, spring floods almost flooded the four transformers supplying power to the heaters that heated it; one transformer had to be jackhammered out to be lifted by a crane to a dry place. When the disk was finally made, it was transported from New York State to California in a special train; the clearance under the container with the disk was 6 inches. Other than the disk, there were more challenges. The telescope used the largest high-precision gears ever made, 14 feet in diameter, each of the 720 teeth machined to a tolerance of 1/10,000 of an inch. The engineers who made the pressure bearings claimed that "a milk bottle resting on one side of the telescope yoke will turn it." Aluminum was deposited on the disk in vacuum; all the pumps were leaky, until an unused one from the Manhattan Project was brought in, and produced the desired vacuum. An analog mechanical computer was built to compensate the telescope position for atmospheric refraction, mechanical flexure and other variables; nowadays, it is done with software.
Built to last a century, the 200-inch telescope is still in use 65 years later. By 1952, it was used to determine that the Universe is twice as big as it was thought to be. In 1962, the telescope imaged the first quasar ever identified. In 2010, it imaged exoplanets near a star 120 light-years away. One legacy of the project is a set of telescope drawings by an artist turned telescope designer. They are so wonderfully dieselpunk!
Building the telescope was a great engineering challenge. A reflecting telescope is built around a mirror, a paraboloid layer of aluminum less than a micron thick. The paraboloid has to be ground out of something. Metal could not be ground to a high enough precision, so it had to be some sort of glass. General Electric spent $600,000 and still couldn't make a 60-inch mirror out of fused quartz. It was dropped as a supplier, and Corning was chosen instead. It decided to make the mirror out of Pyrex, a borosilicate glass with a low coefficient of thermal expansion. When the first 200-inch disk was cast, bricks from the form broke loose and floated to the top of the glass, contaminating the bulk; it was rejected; the makers learned their lessons, and the second disk was better. It took 10 months for the disk to anneal; meanwhile, spring floods almost flooded the four transformers supplying power to the heaters that heated it; one transformer had to be jackhammered out to be lifted by a crane to a dry place. When the disk was finally made, it was transported from New York State to California in a special train; the clearance under the container with the disk was 6 inches. Other than the disk, there were more challenges. The telescope used the largest high-precision gears ever made, 14 feet in diameter, each of the 720 teeth machined to a tolerance of 1/10,000 of an inch. The engineers who made the pressure bearings claimed that "a milk bottle resting on one side of the telescope yoke will turn it." Aluminum was deposited on the disk in vacuum; all the pumps were leaky, until an unused one from the Manhattan Project was brought in, and produced the desired vacuum. An analog mechanical computer was built to compensate the telescope position for atmospheric refraction, mechanical flexure and other variables; nowadays, it is done with software.
Built to last a century, the 200-inch telescope is still in use 65 years later. By 1952, it was used to determine that the Universe is twice as big as it was thought to be. In 1962, the telescope imaged the first quasar ever identified. In 2010, it imaged exoplanets near a star 120 light-years away. One legacy of the project is a set of telescope drawings by an artist turned telescope designer. They are so wonderfully dieselpunk!
February 24, 2018
This 1995 Harper Collins paperback edition was plucked out of a little free library, that junk cabinet of romance novels, magazines, homilies, and discards once the promise of an alt-democratic society. Not eager to start the book as the first of my 2018 reading list, and as a technical person who grimaces at shoddy workmanship, I thumbed through it right to the index. With no obvious warning signs of margin notes and a few smoothed dog ears, I dug in.
Many years ago, I read Richard Preston’s First Light, a journalist’s literal backseat passenger account of the astronomers Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker’s work at the Mount Palomar observatory. That book was so utterly amazing, I cannot help but calibrate all subsequent books on a subject so enormous – the making of the 200-inch Hale telescope – that only a delicate telling could match. Author Ronald Florence is an unknown to me, but match Preston he did.
The 200-inch atop one of California’s unique mountains was the most expensive and massive scientific undertaking of its kind at the time, beginning in the 1920s and not completely finished until the late 1940s. And since it is a consumate tale of American industry and perseverance, it is as patriotic as the Apollo missions to the moon. But Florence’s laborious emphasis on the design and manufacture lets American grit relate its own story, from the transportation of people and machinery across country overland by train, to spotty radio communications between the constructors on Mount Palomar and the engineers in Pasadena. The characters are superbly drawn, as intricate as some of the charcoal cutaway elevations of the telescope designers’ making. Their appearance on and off the stage aren’t told in emotional Grecian allegory, but the sum theatre makes you feel the mortality of humans taking their parts on the giant scale of work in glass, metal, concrete, and wires. But they more than add salt and pepper to a mirror disk dish. Because of the decade’s-long struggle to raise funds, pour and polish the mirror, and erect the structure of the observatory dome, we feel for these people as we do ourselves, their lives so utterly connected to their labor they don’t know what to do with themselves when it is complete. Author Florence uses footnotes sparingly, not wanting, I suspect, to distract us from the eyepiece with its anticipated splay of stars. It’s hard to get that into words, but Florence manages to do a superb job in quite an unobtrusive way, different than the imagery Preston or other science writers depend on to construct as sweeping a story. The panoply of people is sometimes lost to history, hidden in a desk organizational chart, but the main crew of names – even those despised and urged to move on to new jobs – carries readers forward in expectation. Here we find an astronomer like Fritz Zwicky, who came up with the term “dark matter”, an odd fellow whose mind seems to fly in the exact opposite direction of everyone else’s. At the opposite spectrum’s end, George McCauley in Corning, NY, spends innumerable nights in quiet fretting over the enormous pucks of Pyrex glass being melted in the ovens of the town’s eponymous employer. Florence also inserts the antics of squirrels, woodpeckers, and a black widow spider’s web as bit players in the drama. The Hale telescope was meant to stand a century, like a modern cathedral, and since we’re not even approaching that mark yet, it seems strange to speak of its history. It is still in operation, a life outliving many giants of the 1900s, from dams to the space shuttle. Florence uses the words majestic sparingly, but that can be said of his historical rendering. Like the Palomar dome and the telescope inside it, there are certainly few of its kind.
Many years ago, I read Richard Preston’s First Light, a journalist’s literal backseat passenger account of the astronomers Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker’s work at the Mount Palomar observatory. That book was so utterly amazing, I cannot help but calibrate all subsequent books on a subject so enormous – the making of the 200-inch Hale telescope – that only a delicate telling could match. Author Ronald Florence is an unknown to me, but match Preston he did.
The 200-inch atop one of California’s unique mountains was the most expensive and massive scientific undertaking of its kind at the time, beginning in the 1920s and not completely finished until the late 1940s. And since it is a consumate tale of American industry and perseverance, it is as patriotic as the Apollo missions to the moon. But Florence’s laborious emphasis on the design and manufacture lets American grit relate its own story, from the transportation of people and machinery across country overland by train, to spotty radio communications between the constructors on Mount Palomar and the engineers in Pasadena. The characters are superbly drawn, as intricate as some of the charcoal cutaway elevations of the telescope designers’ making. Their appearance on and off the stage aren’t told in emotional Grecian allegory, but the sum theatre makes you feel the mortality of humans taking their parts on the giant scale of work in glass, metal, concrete, and wires. But they more than add salt and pepper to a mirror disk dish. Because of the decade’s-long struggle to raise funds, pour and polish the mirror, and erect the structure of the observatory dome, we feel for these people as we do ourselves, their lives so utterly connected to their labor they don’t know what to do with themselves when it is complete. Author Florence uses footnotes sparingly, not wanting, I suspect, to distract us from the eyepiece with its anticipated splay of stars. It’s hard to get that into words, but Florence manages to do a superb job in quite an unobtrusive way, different than the imagery Preston or other science writers depend on to construct as sweeping a story. The panoply of people is sometimes lost to history, hidden in a desk organizational chart, but the main crew of names – even those despised and urged to move on to new jobs – carries readers forward in expectation. Here we find an astronomer like Fritz Zwicky, who came up with the term “dark matter”, an odd fellow whose mind seems to fly in the exact opposite direction of everyone else’s. At the opposite spectrum’s end, George McCauley in Corning, NY, spends innumerable nights in quiet fretting over the enormous pucks of Pyrex glass being melted in the ovens of the town’s eponymous employer. Florence also inserts the antics of squirrels, woodpeckers, and a black widow spider’s web as bit players in the drama. The Hale telescope was meant to stand a century, like a modern cathedral, and since we’re not even approaching that mark yet, it seems strange to speak of its history. It is still in operation, a life outliving many giants of the 1900s, from dams to the space shuttle. Florence uses the words majestic sparingly, but that can be said of his historical rendering. Like the Palomar dome and the telescope inside it, there are certainly few of its kind.
March 10, 2023
I cannot recommend this superb book more highly. By way of credentials, here's an anecdote.
Being in the business myself (computer control of large telescopes) I read the book avidly when it first came out. It led to a most fruitful correspondence with the author on the subject of the fabled analog computer that corrected the pointing and tracking for (among other things) atmospheric refraction. He put me in touch with a retired Palomar engineer (in fact the guy who won $1000 bet from a somewhat displeased Richard Feynman by building an electric motor inside a 1/64 inch cube) who was able to supply blueprints and relevant correspondence from the 1920-30s. Amazing.
Despite the soundness of the basic idea of the device, I suspected that it never been built, even though mentioned in the literature!
This ultimately led to a visit to Palomar and a Howard-Carter-esque opening of the metal cubicle in which the famous Russell Porter drawing shows the shadowy outlines of the device in question, with its 3D cams etc. The space was empty! All written up here - see Footnote 7 and related text: https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/1...
Being in the business myself (computer control of large telescopes) I read the book avidly when it first came out. It led to a most fruitful correspondence with the author on the subject of the fabled analog computer that corrected the pointing and tracking for (among other things) atmospheric refraction. He put me in touch with a retired Palomar engineer (in fact the guy who won $1000 bet from a somewhat displeased Richard Feynman by building an electric motor inside a 1/64 inch cube) who was able to supply blueprints and relevant correspondence from the 1920-30s. Amazing.
Despite the soundness of the basic idea of the device, I suspected that it never been built, even though mentioned in the literature!
This ultimately led to a visit to Palomar and a Howard-Carter-esque opening of the metal cubicle in which the famous Russell Porter drawing shows the shadowy outlines of the device in question, with its 3D cams etc. The space was empty! All written up here - see Footnote 7 and related text: https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/1...
July 2, 2018
A wonderful story on determined engineering
I grew up knowing about the 200-inch telescope, but knew little about the details of us design or construction. This is a delightful tale of driven scientists, engineers, and technicians who spend decades building the “Perfect Machine.”
I’d like to give 4.5 stars, but that’s not an option. Two complaints keep this review from awarding five stars:
1) On the Kindle version, the footnotes are out of sync. Clicking on a footnote asterisk takes to to the wrong note, and you have to scroll dozens of pages away to find the right one.
2) I know it would have added to the production cost and complexity, but this book just cries out for a good section of photographs, sketches, maps, etc. The author’s best efforts at describing the telescope’s mechanisms are not as effective as ten minutes browsing images on the Web.
I grew up knowing about the 200-inch telescope, but knew little about the details of us design or construction. This is a delightful tale of driven scientists, engineers, and technicians who spend decades building the “Perfect Machine.”
I’d like to give 4.5 stars, but that’s not an option. Two complaints keep this review from awarding five stars:
1) On the Kindle version, the footnotes are out of sync. Clicking on a footnote asterisk takes to to the wrong note, and you have to scroll dozens of pages away to find the right one.
2) I know it would have added to the production cost and complexity, but this book just cries out for a good section of photographs, sketches, maps, etc. The author’s best efforts at describing the telescope’s mechanisms are not as effective as ten minutes browsing images on the Web.
October 1, 2023
Easily one of the most inspiring tales of applied science. Vision (in all its forms) drove people for decades to create this masterpiece of technology and design. I am forever grateful to my parents, who in the mid 1960s, took us on roadtrips from Ohio to see both the original imperfect 200 inch mirror at Corning in New York and to drive us up the magnificent Mount Palomar to visit the Perfect Machine. They shared tales of motorcycling up Palomar in 1940 to see the in-progress dome and then to coast down the many miles of the mountain without ever firing up their Harleys and Indians. The place, the machine, the name Palomar are rich with dreams and romance. Thank you, Ronald Florence.
September 1, 2019
I grew up in Valley Center, CA, and on a clear day could see the white dome of the Palomar Observatory from my bedroom window. I visited the observatory site several times on school field trips and always had an interest. When I stumbled upon this book, I jumped at the opportunity to read it. I enjoyed the meticulously researched account, although felt it got bogged down in some of the details. Overall, a good history, but a little long for the payout.
September 29, 2017
Superbly written, and sometimes suspenseful, story of the first "big science" project.
The parts about casting and polishing a huge telescope mirror and the time spent waiting for it to come out of the furnace before knowing how it turned out really capture the feelings I have had growing huge sapphire pieces as well.
The parts about casting and polishing a huge telescope mirror and the time spent waiting for it to come out of the furnace before knowing how it turned out really capture the feelings I have had growing huge sapphire pieces as well.
June 12, 2018
Must read book
This is a marvelous book. The people who contrubuted lifes, money and talent into the machine are still shown as real people not as the monuments. Most importantly the book presents lifeswhere people were driven by eagerness for perfection and no money can measure their achievement.
This is a marvelous book. The people who contrubuted lifes, money and talent into the machine are still shown as real people not as the monuments. Most importantly the book presents lifeswhere people were driven by eagerness for perfection and no money can measure their achievement.
October 23, 2019
This book really got me interested in astronomy as a kid. I'm often a bit turned off by books about brilliant people doing great things as they can turn into hagiography of a few individuals too easily. This on the other hand communicates the huge effort and unrelenting grind on the part of so many different people to push a giant project to completion.
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February 22, 2021A Detailed Exploration of the First "Big Science" Project.
I really enjoyed thjs book. As a Big fan of the history of science, this book gave a njce insight to the behind the scenes development of the great Hale telescope and the Palomar observatory that is its home. A good read for the student of astronomy or the history of science, I highly recommend this book.
I really enjoyed thjs book. As a Big fan of the history of science, this book gave a njce insight to the behind the scenes development of the great Hale telescope and the Palomar observatory that is its home. A good read for the student of astronomy or the history of science, I highly recommend this book.
August 11, 2021
Absolutely one of the best books I have ever read. Incredibly detailed and beautifully written. From the agonies that Hale suffered to the unbelievable treck up the mountain. The design/ building of this masterpiece, still operating today, hands down a must read if you love how things work, astronomy or big building projects.
I loved reading it.
I loved reading it.
January 11, 2018
A very well-written history of one of the greatest technological achievements of the past century. The book can be appealing to two interests of readers: astronomy and engineering. Both are combined here in a very engrossing story of a telescope still operating at the highest levels today.
May 17, 2018
Telescope Story
This book is both fascinating and enlightening. It has been 50 years since I was in college, and I am amazed at my ignorance of Palomar. The author teaches the story of the building of Palomar as well as the mechanics of the telescope. It is an interesting tale.
This book is both fascinating and enlightening. It has been 50 years since I was in college, and I am amazed at my ignorance of Palomar. The author teaches the story of the building of Palomar as well as the mechanics of the telescope. It is an interesting tale.
September 21, 2018
Interesting Read
Could be a little shorter leaving out some items of background. Otherwise I was really interested in the subject matter and had no idea how much effort was put into building the large telescopes
Could be a little shorter leaving out some items of background. Otherwise I was really interested in the subject matter and had no idea how much effort was put into building the large telescopes
August 4, 2018
The best case study of innovation I have read (of course the author didn’t exploit that). It is also a very good record of the move from privately financed science to “government funded science “
January 31, 2019
Simply Ronald Florence's purpose on Earth. Luminous.
June 30, 2019
Long-ish, a little but not a lot techy but interesting.
September 11, 2024
A fantastic story about a monumental project, and written such that every detail was interesting. I found it amazing how the author could deliver the most mundane tasks in a way that made every chapter, every scene, hold my interest, all the way through. The story of the giant telescope starts long before anybody tried to make it, and the author uses that time to describe the buildup, the way telescopes were getting larger and larger, the science of astronomy more refined. He explains how the field evolved, such that the needs for large telescopes grew as astronomy did. His explanations of Hubble’s observations, Zwicky’s discoveries, and so much more, made this a history of not just the telescope, but also the explosive growth of science. The building of the mirror spans a large chunk of the book, from attempts by GE to the two castings at Corning. The author doesn’t shy away from details that make people look good or bad –he uses them all. The most well-developed scene is probably the giant cross-country delivery of the giant mirror. It’s described in a way that made the book emotional. The trip up the mountain was similarly awe-inspiring. There are points where the author uses the same or similar terms to describe somebody or something. This may be intentional, to remind the reader of what happened many years (and chapters) before, and was somewhat distracting when it happened too often. On the other hand, the reminder was often welcome, too. When I first read this book, I had barely graduated from engineering at university. I now recognize the challenges of a budget, manpower, keeping interest, and the force of getting a product made and delivered, and can greatly appreciate Hale’s abilities. Truly a great book, with a happy ending. The world has changed so much since then, and this story shows how much.
October 10, 2019
I have a couple of takeaways from reading this book. The first--have determination to finish a goal once started. In the case of the Hale telescope obstacles were seemly insurmountable from start to finish. Before reading this book, I really had no idea of the difficulties and hardships the planners and designers had in undertaking the building of the largest telescope at that time. Many of the obstacles the builders faced, they had no control over, such as the Great Depression and WWII which limited resources and funds to complete the construction of the telescope. However, the scientists, engineers, workers and financial backers never through in the towel. It took over 20 years from planning the telescope to its completion. Many who started the project did not live long enough to see the telescope's completion.
The second takeaway is the fact the Hale telescope had many problems—even defects--from its original faulty glass to the complicated machinery used in turning the telescope and observatory dome. The difficulties and hardships in completing the Hale telescope in many ways paralleled the complications that were faced decades later when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched when it too, had many issues which the engineers also had to correct before it could be used effectively.
This is one of the most researched books read in a very long time. The author's detailed research was able to validate all the unique conversational antidotes among the renowned individuals, especially in astronomy and physics from the 1930s-1950s, who played a part in the development of the Hale's telescope.
The second takeaway is the fact the Hale telescope had many problems—even defects--from its original faulty glass to the complicated machinery used in turning the telescope and observatory dome. The difficulties and hardships in completing the Hale telescope in many ways paralleled the complications that were faced decades later when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched when it too, had many issues which the engineers also had to correct before it could be used effectively.
This is one of the most researched books read in a very long time. The author's detailed research was able to validate all the unique conversational antidotes among the renowned individuals, especially in astronomy and physics from the 1930s-1950s, who played a part in the development of the Hale's telescope.
December 31, 2013
This was a very readable account of one of the most productive and enduring scientific tools built in the 20th century - the Palomar Observatory near Escondido, CA. Many of the scientific and engineering challenges required very innovative solutions, and the complexity of grinding and polishing the 200-inch primary mirror is overwhelming. It is impressive to think that optical technicians would work for years on the primary mirror alone, first with GE's attempt at using fused quartz, then Corning's use of Pyrex. This observatory has given us scientific data and discoveries for decades, and stands on Mount Palomar as a statement to what men can perform when the best minds are put to single purpose. Although often overwhelmed by similar scientific work at the time on things like the Manhattan Project and the Hoover Dam, this was a well-written history of a great project that is still in use today. I look forward to visiting the observatory the next time I am in the area.
June 17, 2009
I like this sort of thing. Big, complex projects that have happy endings. The technology is cool, and the way the project ebbed and flowed was interesting to follow. It's an easy book to read, and can be set down for a while without losing momentum. Probably a guy book, though.
December 4, 2014
Don't let the topic put you off. It's a very readable account of the reasons for building the Palomar reflector, the challenges (both economic and engineering) they faced, and the solutions. Fascinating from start to finish.
August 14, 2016
Wonderful technical history. I wish I knew where my copy was.
May 16, 2014
Pretty good account of the construction of the Hale telescope. Dry in reading in places, but overall pretty entertaining and enlightening.
February 13, 2010
a great read. covers the politics, science, and engineering of the 200 inch telescope.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews