Safe Arrival

With all the care of bundling up an old rich uncle and inching him into an automobile for a long, careful drive, officials of Corning Glass Works at Corning, N. Y. last month bolted a steel wrapping around a 20-ton disk of glass, placed it on a freight car, dispatched it on a 16-day journey across the continent (TIME, March 23). Last week that enormous glass disk, which is to become the mirror of a new 200-inch telescope with which man may look three times farther into space than ever before, reached Pasadena. To get there without jostling the unique cargo the freight train traveled at 25 m.p.h., detoured around freight yards which contained bumpy switches. Between Kansas City and Pasadena there was scarcely a bump, as proved by an "impactograph" fastened to the disk's freight car. The impactograph record, an eight-foot sheet of ink-marked paper, goes to Dr. George Ellery Hale, venerable Mount Wilson astronomer, chairman of the council which will supervise the grinding of the mirror and install the new telescope on Palomar Mountain.

Dr. Hale was too ill to attend the momentous arrival of the disk at Pasadena last week. But Dr. Walter Sydney Adams, director of the Mount WTilson Observatory, was there, with many another famed astronomer.

Two riggers who placed the huge, coast-guarding guns at Fort Mac Arthur 25 miles from Los Angeles supervised the unloading of the telescope mirror at Pasadena. The Santa Fe lent a crane built to lift wrecked locomotives out of trouble. The crane picked the steel-encased glass up from the freight car millimetre by millimetre. To make the transfer from car to truck-trailer took six hours.

At the rate of 1 m.p.h. the truck proceeded to the Caltech campus, where a big stucco barn serves as optical laboratory. There the disk will spend three or four years acquiring a perfect paraboloid concavity in its face.

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