On a clear day there it is. Five or six miles East-North-East of Pasadena and a tempting climb if you were raised around mountains. Mt Wilson's summit is a bit over 5,700 feet and the view is remarkable in more ways than one. A trail out of Chantry Flat is fine, but tends to be crowded. It's more strenuous but I'm partial to the Mt Wilson trail. You can also drive up .. assuming your car can handle the nest of television, radio and microwave antennas at the summit.
Around 1903 George Hale, a young astrophysics professor from the University of Chicago, took the hike to see if it was the place for his dream telescope. Up until around the Civil War astronomy had become a nearly dead subject. Its main purpose had drifted from science to commercial and military celestial navigation. But something radical had taken place mostly in America. Physicists attached prisms to telescopes and began to analyze the spectra of light from the stars. Photographic film had advanced and was better than the human eye at recording dim images. It was possible to learn much more about the stars and discoveries grew exponentially.
Astrophysics was probably the first scientific field that America took the lead in. Gathering the most light possible was essential and big light buckets were expensive. Hale came from a well-heeled family and had been able to connect with and inspire wealthy industrialists to fund the emerging field. At Chicago he was able to talk a streetcar magnate into funding the largest refracting telescope - the 40 inch Yerkes Observatory. Important work was done, but it soon became clear better observing sites than semi-rural Wisconsin were necessary.
It was recognized Mt Wilson had potential in the late 1890s. Harvard tried to operate a small observatory, but it failed for a number of reasons. Hale wanted to build a much larger telescope of a radically different design.. a 60 inch reflecting telescope with a novel mount. The trip to Mt Wilson in the pre-light and automobile pollution days. He loved it .. the view to the ocean was fine, but the view to the stars convinced him this was the place. He went to Andrew Carnegie and described the potential of the best instrument in the world.
Building and getting a 60 inch telescope up the mountain was an effort, but it was a brilliant instrument exceeding all expectations. Harlow Shapley was able to use it to discover the Sun was not the center of the Milky Way and a few other discoveries followed. It also became clear that an even larger telescope would be useful and Hale managed to persuade John Hooker and Andrew Carnegie into funding a 100 inch instrument - the Hooker telescope.
It has been argued the Hooker was the most successful telescope in history. Edwin Hubble discovered not only that there were galaxies beyond the Milky Way, but that the universe was expanding. Shapley was able to measure the size of our galaxy and Fritz Zwicky found the first evidence for dark matter -- back in the early 1930s! Our perception of our place in the Universe and evidence its fundamental nature radically changed.
Hale still had yet another telescope in him. Mt Wilson was becoming victim to light and atmospheric pollution. The 200 inch Hale telescope was installed on Mt Palomar, seeing first light in 1948. Its observations made it clear how elements were made in stars and indirect observations of black holes were made. People had been thinking about cosmology from the beginning of recorded history and with observations made with this telescope it finally had become a real science.
If you make it to the summit both of the old telescopes are still there along with a solar telescope. The location doesn't allow serious research, but amateur astronomers can rent time on them and there are small public observation nights on the 60 inch using an eyepiece. I did it once on a very un-pristine night, OMG!
It turns out Hale did much more. When he moved out to Pasadena he became a trustee of a very small and sleepy technical school - the Throop College of Technology. It could produce engineers to help build the telescopes, but Hale saw had larger ambitions. He brought in two very well known scientists - Arthur Noyes and Robert Millikan. The three of them conspired to build an institution that would be small - tiny even - but would hire the best and focus on work that would have a long term impact. Probably several institutions had mission statements like that, but these people pulled it off. They created an interesting culture of curious play, depth, rigor and collaboration.
Hale befriended Henry Huntington - a railroad and real estate tycoon. Huntington is fascinating in his own right - the sprawl of Los Angeles and much of it's culture has roots in his projects. He helped with the funding of this emerging technical school and brought in cultural amenities. By now it had been renamed the California Institute of Technology.
That may well have been Hale's greatest contribution to humanity. For decades Caltech's taste in problem spaces, their cross-disciplinary nature and remarkable students have changed the world. They came a bit too late to participate in the electrification of America, but the type of fundamental and applied science that came from the place changed everything.
Hale would have been 150 last week. He would have been thrilled that he created something special. Caltech is still at the leading edge of astrophysics and cosmology .. and so much more he couldn't have dreamed.
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1 Without a doubt it was one of the watershed instruments - that list might include the Galileo telescope, the Hooker, Karl Jansky's radio telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope and LIGO.
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