Caltech's Telescope

General Electric's revered Elihu Thomson was succeeding so well in making small quartz mirrors for telescopes that last week he reaffirmed his promise of delivering a 200-inch mirror to California Institute of Technology (Pasadena) in two or three years. It will be twice as wide and six or eight times as heavy as the Mount Wilson glass mirror (world's largest) of the Carnegie Institution. It will reflect four times as much light and probe eight times as far into space. Consequently, with it astronomers will be able to infer many new things about the structure of the universe, the composition of stars, whether or not life exists on Mars.

In such vast mirrors glass shrinks or expands with every little change in temperature. Such distortion has bothered the Mount Wilson observers. With quartz, however, great temperature changes are necessary to cause distortion. Dr. Thomson developed the method of fusing clean sand in the electric furnace, at 3,000DEG F.

California Tech's telescope, which will probably be set up somewhere within 100 miles of Pasadena, will cost $6.000,000.

Rockefeller's international education board has given the money.

Great have been donations to Caltech: The Rockefellers' general education board $3,000,000; the Carnegie groups $250,000 and more; Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics $350,000. Southern California Edison Co. gave a laboratory. General Electric is giving the great quartz mirror at cost. Within reason Caltech can get what it needs from U. S. eleemosinary and industrial institutions and its enthusiastic personal backers. Its preeminence as a research and teaching school, the high-grade of its staff and the prestige of its trustees makes this possible. Twenty years ago there was a Throop College of Technology, a secondary polytechnic school, at Pasadena. Arthur Henry Fleming, wealthy Canadian-born Los Angeles lumberman, was president of its trustees. He talked Throop up among his rich Los Angeles friends. Let us make a great institution out here in Southern California, he argued in effect. Let us get the best men in the world as teachers. Let us let them prosecute research in pure science.

As a purse opener he gave $5,000,000 in memory of his wife. Friends of course chipped in handsomely. Now on the board of trustees with him are personages like Henry Mauris Robinson (banks, Dawes Plan, Hoover crony); Harry Chandler (Los Angeles Times, real estate developer) ; William Lincoln Honnold (mining engineer, Hoover friend); Henry William O'Melveny (lawyer, banker); Allan Christopher Balch (utilities); Louis Davidson Ricketts (copper miner, brother of President Palmer Chamberlaine Ricketts of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).

To head departments of so fine an enterprise, they got:

Robert Andrews Millikan, Ph. D. (three times), LL. D. (two times), Sc. D. (ten times), Nobel laureate, from the University of Chicago, to be chairman of Caltech executive council and director of its Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics.

Thomas Hunt Morgan, Ph. D. (one time), LL. D. (three times), Sc. D. (two times), from Columbia University, to be chairman of the division of biology in the William G. Kerckhoff Laboratories of the biological sciences.

Arthur Amos Noyes, Ph. D. (one time), LL. D. (three times), Sc. D. (two times), from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to be director of the Gates Chemical Laboratory.

William Bennett Munro, Ph. D., LL. D., Borrowed End from Harvard, to guide Caltech's division of the humanities, which seeks to make the students generally cultured and prevent them from graduating into ditch-digging, draughting, or plumbing. Useful to Professor Munro's students is the Henry E. Huntington. Library & Art Gallery at nearby San Marino, an-other world-important California institution founded by another rich Californian and directed by another leading U. S. educator, Max Farrand.

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