George Ellery Hale

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 burned down a city that had to be rebuilt taller, and William Hale made a fortune manufacturing and installing the passenger elevators that made height practical. His son George got the benefit of it: a microscope, then a small shop in the house that grew into a laboratory, then a telescope he built himself at 14, which his father replaced with a second-hand Clark refractor mounted on the roof of their Kenwood house. At MIT, still an undergraduate, he designed the spectroheliograph, an instrument that photographs the sun in the light of a single wavelength and so shows what the glare otherwise hides.

He built the largest telescope in the world four times, and each time the method was the same: choose the aperture, then find the man who would pay. Charles Yerkes funded the 40-inch refractor dedicated in 1897. His father bought the glass for the 60-inch at Mount Wilson, and Carnegie money finished it in 1908. John D. Hooker paid for the 100-inch mirror, which Edwin Hubble used to show the universe runs far past the Milky Way and is expanding. The Rockefeller Foundation gave 6 million dollars for the 200-inch at Palomar, dedicated in 1948, ten years after Hale died.

The record is unusually explicit about what this cost him. For decades Hale suffered severe headaches, insomnia and depression, and he broke down badly enough, more than once, to spend months at a sanatorium in Maine. He wrote of a little demon that stood at his side and prodded him, a phrase later biographers hardened into an elf who visited him as an adviser. Historians of astronomy have since traced that version back to a misreading. What is not in doubt is the pattern. Walter Adams ran Mount Wilson as acting director through much of Hale's tenure, and in 1923 Hale resigned the directorship on health grounds. He did not stop working. He built the Hale Solar Laboratory in Pasadena and kept at the sun from there.

On June 25, 1908, using the 60-foot solar tower and a spectroheliograph modified to catch the Zeeman effect, Hale found that sunspots are magnetic. It was the first magnetic field ever detected anywhere but Earth, and it still carries his name in Hale's law, which describes how sunspot polarity flips from one cycle to the next. He founded the Astrophysical Journal in 1895 and edited it, helped create the National Research Council in 1916, and with Robert Millikan and Arthur Amos Noyes turned a small Pasadena trade school into the California Institute of Technology. He died on February 21, 1938, at Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena.

George Ellery Hale's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The spectroheliograph other
  Designed at MIT to photograph the sun in a single wavelength 1890
• The Astrophysical Journal other
  Founded and edited — still the central journal of the field 1895
• Yerkes Observatory 40-inch refractor building
  No larger refracting telescope has been built since 1897
• Magnetic fields in sunspots discovery
  The first magnetic field detected anywhere beyond Earth 1908
• 100-inch Hooker Telescope, Mount Wilson building
  The instrument Hubble used to find the universe outside the Milky Way 1917
• 200-inch Hale Telescope, Palomar building
  Funded in 1928 and dedicated ten years after his death 1948

• June 29, 1868 aged 0 Born in Chicago into an elevator fortune His father sold the passenger elevators that let the rebuilt city go up instead of out.
• 1882 aged ~14 Builds his first telescope at 14 His father replaced it with a second-hand Clark refractor mounted on the roof of their Kenwood house.
• 1890 aged ~22 Leaves MIT having designed the spectroheliograph It photographs the sun in the light of one wavelength, and he used it for the rest of his working life.
• 1895 aged ~27 Founds the Astrophysical Journal and begins editing it
• October 21, 1897 aged 29 Yerkes Observatory is dedicated with the 40-inch refractor Charles Yerkes, the Chicago streetcar magnate, paid for it.
• June 25, 1908 aged 39 Records Zeeman splitting in a sunspot from the 60-foot solar tower The first evidence of a magnetic field anywhere but Earth.
• November 2, 1917 aged 49 First light for the 100-inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson It stayed the largest telescope in the world until 1949.
• 1923 aged ~55 Resigns as director of Mount Wilson on health grounds Walter Adams, who had run the place as acting director for years, took over.
• February 21, 1938 aged 69 Dies at Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena The 200-inch he had funded in 1928 was dedicated in 1948 and saw first light in 1949.

• Edwin Hubble 1889–1953
  Astronomer whose discovery of expanding galaxies provided the foundation for the Big Bang theory. built the telescope he used
• Robert Millikan 1868–1953
  Measuring the charge of the electron built Caltech with
• Albert A. Michelson 1852–1931
  The Michelson-Morley experiment and the measurement of the speed of light hosted at Mount Wilson
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. funded by
• John D. Rockefeller 1839–1937
  Established the Rockefeller Foundation and funded medical research, education, and public health initiatives. funded by his foundation
• Daniel Burnham 1846–1912
  Architect and planner whose City Beautiful vision shaped downtowns, civic centers, and urban planning. mentor