Strange Angel (10 page)

The Germans had managed to launch a rocket 640 meters into the air back in 1931 and shared their designs with the AIS. The AIS used them to craft the society's first success. Parsons and Forman had read with envy of the construction of the AIS's experimental rocket No. 2. Fashioned out of a cocktail shaker, discarded aluminium coffee pots, valves liberated from an old cooking range, and fins of balsa wood, it stood an imposing seven feet tall, with two thin aluminium tanks containing the fuel (gasoline) and the oxidizer (liquid oxygen) flanking the rocket motor. The gasoline and oxygen were to flow continuously from these tanks into the rocket motor and there be ignited, thrusting the rocket into the sky. On the beach at Marine Park, Staten Island, on May 14, 1933, the rocket had been launched—but not without some drama. The “Bulletin” explained that the rocket's ignition system had failed to spark. One of the AIS members leapt over the protective sandbags and lit the rocket by hand with a gasoline torch. Before he could get back to safety, the rocket ignited, enveloping him in flame, then shooting some seventy-six meters into the air before its oxygen tank burst. To Parsons and Forman this sounded both terribly exciting and the logical next step.

In their report on the launch, the AIS had stated their belief that the future of rocketry lay in liquid propellants. The reason for this was simple: If you wanted to stop a liquid-fuel rocket motor from firing, all you had to do was stop the pumps that sent the fuel in. To control a liquid-fuel rocket's speed, you just had to adjust the rate at which the fuel and the oxidizer flowed into the motor. Solid-fuel rockets, by contrast, could not be stopped once started, nor their speed controlled once fired. Liquid fuels were also more powerful than solid fuels. But where were Parsons and Forman to get their hands on liquid oxygen, fuel injectors and, more importantly, the mathematical means that could help them calculate the forces being activated within the rocket motor? These could not be stolen from the powder companies. It seemed that they could not take the next step on their own. Fortunately, Pasadena, in its natural abundance, could provide just the help they needed.

A little learning is a dangerous thing.

 

—A
LEXANDER
P
OPE,
An Essay on Criticism

 

In the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein's 1941 story “Universe,” he describes a spaceship, big enough to hold and provide for whole families, that has gone astray. Generations have passed since the spacecraft's launch and the benighted descendants of the original crew have come to believe that the ship is the universe and that any notions of a voyage are to be understood in a purely religious sense. Those called “scientists” are, in fact, priests. When the open-minded hero of the story discovers the ship's main control room and sees the stars outside, he is filled with a quasi-religious ecstasy. Spiritual and technological revelation become one and, in the manner of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, the hero undergoes a glorious rapture.

Heinlein's story is symptomatic of the years in which it was written; science never held such a grip on the world's imagination as it did in the first half of the twentieth century. This was largely due to the work of one man: Albert Einstein. Einstein became the world's most celebrated scientist after his General Theory of Relativity, which predicted that light rays are bent by the gravitational field of large masses, was substantiated by the British astronomer Arthur Eddington's observations of solar eclipses in 1919.
EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS
read the
Times
of London;
SPACE CAUGHT BENDING
cheered the
New York Times;
and Einstein was thrust into the world spotlight as the harbinger and foremost proponent of the new scientific age.

It was an age in which a new universe was being illuminated. The German and Austrian physicists Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger had, in 1926, laid the theoretical foundations of the new quantum mechanics; though their ideas violated the classical notion of causality—the belief that one object cannot influence another one without involving intermediate agents joining the two objects in space—they successfully predicted the behavior of atomic particles. In medicine the British chemist Alexander Fleming had recently created the first antibiotic when he discovered that penicillin could kill bacteria. Americans in particular were at the forefront of scientific discovery. In the famed “Great Debate” of 1920, the astronomer Harlow Shapley convinced his colleagues that the galaxy was at least ten times larger than had previously been believed. The physicist Karl Jansky discovered radio waves emanating from the Milky Way, thus opening the door for radio astronomy—the study of the universe through radio waves—while the electrical engineer Vannevar Bush and two MIT associates created in the “differential analyzer” the first modern analog computer.

In Pasadena, at the California Institute of Technology, the reverence for the scientist seemed particularly strong. White terracotta classrooms and subterranean laboratories seemed to hold the promise of technological revelation, and the Institute's arcaded lawns and Romanesque revival cloisters emanated “a near-religious dedication to science and to the priesthood of scientists.”

A strange mix of geniuses percolated through the institute in the 1930s. Edwin Hubble, the six-foot-five-inch former boxer turned astronomer, was looking farther into space than anyone before him with his hundred-inch telescope atop Mount Wilson. When not peering through a telescope, he mixed with the Hollywood set, dining with the actor Charlie Chaplin, the writer Aldous Huxley, or the composer Igor Stravinsky. The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and stringent atheist Thomas Hunt Morgan was developing the chromosome theory of heredity by examining his swarm of mutated
Drosophila
(fruit flies) through a jeweler's loupe. His office, known as the “fly room,” was filthy, largely because Morgan had a habit of squashing flies on his desk once he had finished studying them. On the top floor of the aeronautics building, the only location on campus where there was adequate electricity to power his magnetic cloud chamber, Caltech's homegrown Nobel winner Carl Anderson was discovering the existence of the positron—the first empirical evidence of antimatter. Eminent theoretician and president of the Mathematical Association of America, Eric Temple Bell headed the mathematics department. In his youth he had been a ranch hand and mule skinner and although he specialized in number theory during the day, his evenings were spent writing science fiction and detective stories under the pseudonym John Taine.

A younger generation of scientists also held positions at Caltech. Linus Pauling, full professor at only thirty, was shaking up the chemistry department with his revolutionary papers on the quantum mechanics of the chemical bond—the way atoms link up to form molecules—while the shy Charles Richter was working on the earthquake scale that would forever be linked to his name. The bohemian physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, a master of Sanskrit, medieval French poetry, and a hundred other disparate topics, hurried between Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley, cultivating his mythical image as the poet of protons. Then there were the visiting professors. Niels Bohr, Max Born, and Werner Heisenberg, the holy trinity of quantum mechanics, all came to lecture.

Caltech students were the beneficiaries of this brain glut. But the students were as famed for their practical jokes as for their intelligence. A Model T Ford materialized on the roof of Caltech's administration building one night and then, as the authorities were trying to work out how to remove it, mysteriously disappeared a week later. Doorways to classrooms could be found bricked up and dorm rooms were routinely emptied of all furniture and reassembled in the courtyards outside. When one of Caltech's professors tried to impose on the students a strict coat and tie dress code for evening meals, the students turned up en masse in coats and ties but without pants. Walking around campus, clutching slide rules in their hands, the all-male student body had a cocksure manner about them, “clearly convinced that Caltech was the greatest and most demanding college in the world and that they, its graduates, must be the smartest students.”

Caltech had become a scientific Athens among the orange groves. Most remarkable was the speed with which it had gained this status. A local man like Parsons would have watched the institute transform itself from a small-town technical college into a world-renowned institution. Caltech had been formed by the missionary zeal of George Ellery Hale, a professor of astrophysics and an indefatigable fund-raiser, who in 1903 had a life-changing experience on Mount Wilson, overlooking the city of Pasadena. Hale had grown up in a wealthy Chicago family, haunting the local observatory and keenly reading the classics, which he would later state “helped greatly to arouse [his] imagination and prepare [him] for scientific research.” Hale believed that astronomy was a discipline akin to theology and philosophy. A mechanics genius, he was an enthusiastic builder of telescopes and had already invented the spectroheliograph—an instrument for the photographing of phenomena in the solar atmosphere—before he arrived in Pasadena at the age of thirty-five. While lying on the peak of Mount Wilson, Hale became convinced that this would be the perfect location for a new observatory, one which would forever change man's perception of the universe. Like other newcomers to California, Hale was intent on translating his dreams into reality. By 1908 he had conjured up the funding and built a sixty-inch reflector telescope on the exact spot on which he had lain. In a reflector telescope a large concave mirror serves in place of a lens, gathering and focusing the light of the galaxy onto its silver-coated surface. The larger the mirror, the more the viewer can see. The mirror of Hale's telescope was eight inches thick and weighed just under a ton, making it the largest in the world. Along with the 150 tons of steel that made up its intricate mounting, it had been hauled to the mountaintop by man and mule, a task which took over a year to complete. Just below the telescope Hale had built lodging for astronomers hardy enough to make the nine-mile hike along a winding dusty footpath to the mile-high peak. Known as “The Monastery,” the building was embellished with mystic Egyptian symbols. On the opening night of the facility, Hale and his astronomical colleagues dedicated the building with pseudo-monastic rituals. Women were not allowed entry.

These ceremonies and rules all spoke of Hale's interest in the mythical aspects of astronomy. The oldest of the sciences, astronomy provided Hale with a link back through history to the ancient schools of Mesopotamia, Babylon, and Greece. Indeed, Hale often described himself as a “sun-worshipper” and his quasi-religious mission to further his science was well known. The
New York Times
called him “Priest of the Sun” and “the Zoroaster of our time.” Just as Parsons' quest for the stars in many ways symbolized a deeper longing for some kind of spiritual enlightenment, so Hale was endlessly fascinated by astronomy's links to an ancient world in which the Sun was revered as a god.

Even as the sixty-inch telescope was being completed, Hale had already begun thinking of bigger and better telescopes. On the very day the sixty-inch mirror was set in place on Mount Wilson, a hundred-inch glass disk arrived in Pasadena for grinding and polishing, a process that would take some nine years. When it was eventually finished in 1917, this new telescope became the most powerful in the world, gathering 160,000 times as much light as the eye and increasing the size of the observable universe by a factor of 300 percent. Its power was such that it could detect the light of a candle burning 5,000 miles away.

Yet Hale was not content with just building telescopes. Since he had arrived in Pasadena in 1903, he had been planning a grand scheme: He wished to combine the unparalleled research facilities of his observatory with a nationally ranked school of science and technology. There was no such school in Pasadena, of course, so with characteristic verve he decided to make one from scratch. “Under such conditions, and with the advantages afforded by climate, by the immediate neighborhood of mountains where water-power can be developed and experimental transmission lines installed, who can deny there is a place for a technical school of the highest class?” It was to be an MIT of the West, and it was to be based around the little-known Throop Polytechnic Institute.

Throop was a small engineering school, founded in 1891, that lacked scholarly credentials and had only a handful of students. For Hale it was a blank canvas. He was fortunate to find that one of the school's trustees was Arthur Fleming, the Canadian-born lumber tycoon who had taken the ailing Throop under his philanthropic wing, covering the school's annual deficit out of his own pocket on more than one occasion. In 1915 Hale persuaded Fleming that Throop should be completely overhauled, beginning with the purchase of a site for the new school campus. Fleming immediately bought twenty-two acres of land for $50,000. Hale then began his efforts to attract the brightest and the best to this nascent college. Through letters and over dinners, through proxies or in person, Hale cajoled and flattered the great scientists of the day. When his social astuteness failed him, he simply bribed them with equipment and the unparalleled research facilities provided by Fleming. He was unflagging in his enthusiasm and persistence until he had exhausted his targets into capitulation. “He is the most
restless
flea on the American continent,” confided one target to his wife; “more things are
eating him
than I could tell you about in an hour.”

The work took its toll on Hale. He suffered a number of nervous breakdowns as he rushed across the country courting support. However, given the gentle climate of Pasadena, the superlative observatory on Mount Wilson, the promise of a break from the stuffiness of the East Coast Ivy League universities, and the seemingly bottomless pockets of Fleming, it was not long before the scientists came. First and foremost among those he recruited were Arthur Noyes, the preeminent chemist in the United States, and Robert Millikan, nationally renowned for his work on cosmic rays and a 1923 Nobel laureate. Once these two also began searching for suitably brilliant staff, Caltech, as Throop was renamed in 1920, welcomed more and more greats into its secluded white buildings.