those disks into the objective lens for a large refractor? Clark gave him a rough estimate, and they discussed details of mounting, housing, and siting a telescope that large. From that day Hale was a man possessed. He had always dreamed of bigger and better instruments. Now he would build the biggest and best telescope in the world. He would site it in a fully equipped observatory, with laboratories right on the premises, with instruments like no others that had ever been built. All he needed, he calculated, was three hundred thousand dollars.
In the 1890s it was a considerable but not impossible sum. George Hale had grown up with wealth, and he knew there were many men in Chicago who could afford it. The Hale name gave him a ready introduction, and he wasn’t embarrassed to make his pitch for a telescope. For months he made the rounds of offices and homes of Chicago society, proposing his venture to anyone who would listen, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm as he described his proposed observatory and what it could accomplish for science. Astronomy, he told anyone willing to listen, was ready for a revolution.
Hale did his best to explain that the old astronomy, men looking through telescopes to sketch what they saw, was exhausted. His proposal was something entirely different, an observatory equipped with the most modern laboratories and facilities, darkrooms, and spectroscopes. But no matter how enthusiastic his pitch, he found no takers. Times had changed, potential donors told him. Money was tough, the climate was wrong, this wasn’t the moment. For George Hale it was a good lesson in the vagaries of fund-raising.
Finally, on a tip from a mutual friend, Hale approached the streetcar magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes. Friends called him “Yerkes the Boodler.” The Boodler liked the idea of a telescope with his name onit. When Hale promised that the telescope would be the largest in the world, bigger than the one at the famed Lick Observatory, Yerkes liked the idea enough to call in the press. “Here’s a million dollars,” he was quoted as saying in the Chicago Tribune. “If you want more, say so. You shall have all you need if you’ll only lick the Lick.”
Yerkes’ farsightedness and vision—always good terms for the donor of a telescope—dimmed considerably as the time came around to make good on his commitments. When he realized that the observatory would be at a remote site, and that much of the funding would go to laboratories and other facilities that were far less flashy and less likely to attract favorable publicity than the big telescope, Yerkes balked. Hale, relentless, cajoled Yerkes to follow through on his pledges, pressured contractors to get the work done, negotiated with local and university officials, and mediated between the perfectionists who would fiddle with the lenses and machines forever and the astronomers eager to use their new facility. The strain of the project, especially the battles with Yerkes, took their toll. Hale began suffering recurrent headaches, sometimes bad enough to keep him home in bed.
Friends, noticing his nervousness and anxiety, urged him to go easy. The optician John Brashear, who knew Hale from years of dealings on optical equipment, wrote, “You have a big responsibility on your hands … the only thing I beg you to look out for, don’t overwork yourself. … delegate all the work you can. Save yourself for that—which you can do better than anyone can do for you.”
George Hale was twenty-four years old.
Despite the headaches Hale got the telescope and the observatory built. Yerkes, at what was then a remote site on the shores of Lake Geneva, eighty miles north of Chicago, emerged the most complete observatory in the world. The great forty-inch refractor, with its Clark lenses and Warner & Swasey mounting, was considered a sufficient engineering marvel to be exhibited at the 1892 World Exposition in Chicago.
In spite of routine winter temperatures at the
In the 1890s it was a considerable but not impossible sum. George Hale had grown up with wealth, and he knew there were many men in Chicago who could afford it. The Hale name gave him a ready introduction, and he wasn’t embarrassed to make his pitch for a telescope. For months he made the rounds of offices and homes of Chicago society, proposing his venture to anyone who would listen, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm as he described his proposed observatory and what it could accomplish for science. Astronomy, he told anyone willing to listen, was ready for a revolution.
Hale did his best to explain that the old astronomy, men looking through telescopes to sketch what they saw, was exhausted. His proposal was something entirely different, an observatory equipped with the most modern laboratories and facilities, darkrooms, and spectroscopes. But no matter how enthusiastic his pitch, he found no takers. Times had changed, potential donors told him. Money was tough, the climate was wrong, this wasn’t the moment. For George Hale it was a good lesson in the vagaries of fund-raising.
Finally, on a tip from a mutual friend, Hale approached the streetcar magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes. Friends called him “Yerkes the Boodler.” The Boodler liked the idea of a telescope with his name onit. When Hale promised that the telescope would be the largest in the world, bigger than the one at the famed Lick Observatory, Yerkes liked the idea enough to call in the press. “Here’s a million dollars,” he was quoted as saying in the Chicago Tribune. “If you want more, say so. You shall have all you need if you’ll only lick the Lick.”
Yerkes’ farsightedness and vision—always good terms for the donor of a telescope—dimmed considerably as the time came around to make good on his commitments. When he realized that the observatory would be at a remote site, and that much of the funding would go to laboratories and other facilities that were far less flashy and less likely to attract favorable publicity than the big telescope, Yerkes balked. Hale, relentless, cajoled Yerkes to follow through on his pledges, pressured contractors to get the work done, negotiated with local and university officials, and mediated between the perfectionists who would fiddle with the lenses and machines forever and the astronomers eager to use their new facility. The strain of the project, especially the battles with Yerkes, took their toll. Hale began suffering recurrent headaches, sometimes bad enough to keep him home in bed.
Friends, noticing his nervousness and anxiety, urged him to go easy. The optician John Brashear, who knew Hale from years of dealings on optical equipment, wrote, “You have a big responsibility on your hands … the only thing I beg you to look out for, don’t overwork yourself. … delegate all the work you can. Save yourself for that—which you can do better than anyone can do for you.”
George Hale was twenty-four years old.
Despite the headaches Hale got the telescope and the observatory built. Yerkes, at what was then a remote site on the shores of Lake Geneva, eighty miles north of Chicago, emerged the most complete observatory in the world. The great forty-inch refractor, with its Clark lenses and Warner & Swasey mounting, was considered a sufficient engineering marvel to be exhibited at the 1892 World Exposition in Chicago.
In spite of routine winter temperatures at the
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