1956
In 1956 Ben O. Morgan had made some preliminary overtures to Lowell and Mr. Putnam about donating his 24-inch reflector to Lowell but wanted to use it til after the 1958 opposition of Mars, which meant a wait of at least two years.”
1959
With the 1958 opposition of Mars over, the 24-inch Morgan reflector, a gift from Ben O. Morgan of Odessa, Texas, became available. The Image Tube project was expanding and they needed more telescope time to test the tubes so the timing was just perfect. They needed a telescope and were willing to foot the bill for moving and housing it for exclusive use for a few years. One of the requirements for building the dome to house the telescopes was that it be very inexpensive.
To comply with this requirement it was about this time that the old original lumber mill in the southwest part of town (Ayer Lumber Company 1881, Arizona Lumber and Timber Company 1890 to 1930, Saginaw Manastee Lumber Company 1930 to 1959) was sold to Southwest Lumber Company mainly for the timber rights. The mill itself was not as modern as the one Southwest owned and operated in the southeast part of town (now Stone Industries) so they decided to scrap the old mill. I knew the manager, Bob Blazer, and as they maintained a large machine shop, there was a lot of steel shafting, gears, flats and structural steel that was all going to be sold for scrap iron at 6 cents a pound. I asked Bob if the Observatory could buy selected material we wanted for this price to use in building a dome, and he agreed. Don Shanks and I went over with the Observatory truck to pick up several truck loads of steel, gears, etc. to use for building the 24-inch reflector clam opening dome.
Bill Baum, a member of the Image Tube committee from Mt. Wilson Observatories, and I designed the dome, a small connecting shop and sleeping quarters to the north. The gears were used to open the clam shell roof. Ed Hood, a local contractor, did the block work and living quarters. The Observatory shop built the dome roof. The only sad thing about the whole operation was that I injured my back loading some of the heavier pieces of scrap metal in the truck which has plagued me the rest of my life. The building was finished in August.
Don Shanks from our shop, and Art Hoag from the Flagstaff Station of the Naval Observatory went to Odessa, Texas early in September where they met Kent Ford and Ted Houck of the Carnegie Institute and dismantled the telescope that was in Mr. Morgan’s backyard and carried it across his front lawn and loaded it on a truck. John Hall was on the Image Tube committee so he asked, or maybe Art Hoag just volunteered, to go with Don to Odessa. The telescope arrived at Flagstaff on September 29, 1959. It was installed in the famous “clam shell” dome on October 6, and Lowell acquired another 24-inch telescope.
1963
By 1961 Ben O. Morgan, the man who had donated his 24-inch reflector to Lowell in 1959 that was being used by the Image Tube committee, had commissioned Tinsley Laboratories of Berkeley, California to build him a 20-inch Apochromatic refractor. It was a three element lens that was supposed to be the latest design for a flat color free field over a reasonable range of wave lengths. In fact, Tinsley Laboratories had built a 5-inch prototype for Mr. Morgan prior to ordering the larger aperture lens that worked very well. The completed telescope was erected in a 32-foot diameter dome at J.B. Thomas Lake located between Snyder and Big Spring, Texas. Mr. Morgan had a summer home there on the lake. To make a long story short, the 20-inch lens did not perform as well as its prototype or to the specifications Mr. Morgan had asked for. Even though the lens was shipped back to Tinsley Laboratories several times for corrections, Mr. Morgan was never too happy with it. John Hall had been in touch with Mr. Morgan about the performance of the lens since March of 1961. Early in January 1963 Mr. Morgan sent a set of Hartmann test plates and I measured them. The Hartmann T value I got came out 0.38 even with mediocre seeing which was very good. (Hartmann classed an objective good if the T factor was between 1.5 and 0.5.) After the years of disagreement and threatened lawsuits between Tinsely Laboratories and Mr. Morgan, he was ready to get rid of it.
Even though USGS was building a 31-inch reflector out on Anderson Mesa to use for putting the geology on the moon maps, they could not spare extra observing time in support of the Lowell mapping program. We needed to do something to relieve the observing time shortage, and Mr. Morgan’s refractor was considered a solution. To that end, John Hall and Bill Cannell went to J.B. Thomas Lake to test the 20-inch early this year and found that by “diaphragming” it down to 18-inches aperture it gave very good visual images.
Negotiations were initiated immediately to move the telescope to Flagstaff after the idea of establishing an observing station in Texas was rejected. The move, however, was contingent on a firm commitment from ACIC in St. Louis and the Cambridge Air Force Research Center in Rome, N.Y. for rental of the telescope after it was moved to Flagstaff. Mr. Morgan agreed to sell the telescope to Lowell Observatory for $100,000 even though he had much more invested in it. Lowell sent a good faith payment of $10,000 to Mr. Morgan. Then it was agreed that Lowell would keep the first $30,000 of rent paid by the Map Service to offset moving costs, but all subsequent payments would be forwarded to Mr. Morgan until the $90,000 balance was paid. All of this was agreed upon verbally and implementation went ahead even though final contracts were not executed until November 15 of this year (1963). The agreement with ACIC called for a six month rental contract with a payment of $22,500 upon acceptance of the telescope for work, then $3,750 per month.
On August 6th, Robert Blecha, one of the instrument makers from our shop, and I went to J.B. Thomas Lake to measure the dome, and look into the feasibility of shipping it to Flagstaff. Ben Morgan put us in touch with Vyron E. Davis, the owner of Metal Specialties in Odessa, who had many years experience with moving heavy equipment used in oil well drilling and production. Moving an aluminum 33-foot dome 1500 miles was no big deal to him; just cut it in half, load it on trucks, hang a few “Wide Load” signs on them and take off. We were delighted with his simplified solution, as we felt the dome had to be cut in four sections at least which would make it much harder to re-erect round. It did not end up being so simple. First there would be two truck loads 18 feet wide and 11 feet over height. It required four escort cars and drivers for 1520 miles and two oversize permits in three states, Texas New Mexico and Arizona. One of our jobs on the way home from the reconnaissance visit was to measure all the bridges and under- or over- passes on the selected route. The tightest clearance problem turned out to be the steel truss bridge over the Little Colorado River at Holbrook on the road from Springerville to Holbrook. The measured clearance was 3 inches on each side of the load. The J.H. Rose Truck Line, with headquarters in Houston did the job for a charge of $3,518.90 including all the special permits and escort cars. You probably thought that big swath of missing trees between the long garages by the ACIC building and the dome of the 20-inch was cut for a fire break; they were cut to get the wide load up to the site.
I might as well finish the 20-inch story. When we got back to Flagstaff with the measurements made on the first trip there, I designed the dome and rising floor for the 20-inch on three sheets of letter paper. This was before all the red tape required permissions from the City. These were all the “plans” that were ever used to build it. As an aside, I think I used my three years of engineering training I had before going into astronomy over the years here at Lowell as much as astronomy. On September 25th, Malcolm Mackey with his back-hoe began digging the foundation and pier trenches for the dome. Kenneth Earl, Jay Cook’s son in law, Arnold Lopez and J.P. Mitchell were put on the payroll to do the building.
The moon mappers wanted a rising floor so that more than one person could work at the eyepiece rather than work off the steel observing chair. (The chair now in the 24-inch Clark was originally at J.B. Thomas Lake.) With the help of Meyer Wilson of Air-Draulics in Phoenix we designed the rising floor. Three 12-inch pistons rising 12 feet. The requirement was that the three pistons had to rise synchronously – otherwise the floor would cock and push the walls of the dome out. I found some mercury switches that were sensitive to a tilt of one arc-minute, and at a radius of 15 feet, three of them each controlling a piston would keep the floor coming up level with half an inch.
By October 13th, the stationary part of the dome was far enough along for Stuart Jones, Bob Blecha and I to go back to J.B. Thomas Lake to disassemble the 20-inch for shipment and make the final arrangements. On our first trip there, Blecha and I stayed in Snyder, Texas; but Snyder was a dry county – Texas has a local option law, so every county is different. We all agreed that after a hard day’s work we needed some sort of diversion, so we moved our headquarters to the Settles Hotel in Big Spring. Although it was a daily drive of 15 miles more, the amenities of the business club in the hotel where you could buy a drink was well worth it. Besides, there were all kinds of entertainment available at the hotel. We spend eight days there disassembling and packing for shipment. We brought back the objective, the 5-inch finder, the base plate for the polar axis and the small parts like eyepieces, cameras, and etc.
By the middle of November we had poured the top beam of the dome wall and set the track bolts. On November 22nd we were all shocked and saddened by the assassination of President Kennedy. A week later, on November 29th, the two trucks with a half dome on each arrived. It was quite a feat getting the dome through town where the telephone company assisted the truck drivers to get under the low lines; and when you think of all the other towns they passed through on the way, you have to admire what they must have gone through to get the dome here.
On December 4th, the dome was raised up on the 25-foot high walls, and from the accurate fiduciary marks put on in Texas before it was cut, Don Shanks and Bob Blecha welded it back together. It turned all the way around easily with pull ropes from the ground the first time!
By the end of the year, we had poured the last 12 feet of pier, and after bringing an accurate meridian determination up, set the base plate. As you can guess, it was not easy to bring an accurate meridian up in a 25 foot cylinder 30 feet in diameter where you could not check with a sight on Polaris, so when the Polar axis casting was put on the base plate, I made a couple of alignment plugs to go into the ends of the polar axis casting. I remember standing on a tall ladder at the south end of the axis waiting for it to get dark enough. Finally it did and the pole star was in the correct quadrant and at the right distance from the cross wires.
It was not till the middle of March of 1964 that the 20-inch was all completed and ACIC personnel began using it regularly. April 15, 1964 was a great day at Lowell Observatory when people from NASA, ACIC and Roger Putnam were all here to first dedicate the 20-inch Morgan refractor, then the dignitaries turned the first shovel full of dirt for Beginning the building of the Planetary Research Center.
If you are interested in the details, there is a great account of the activities of this day in the Daily Sun. There are copies in the archives. John Hall really carried the load on getting the research part of the planetary center going; first by writing the directors of many observatories all over the world requesting an inventory of the planetary material they had, then had our own plates inventoried to inform NASA we had over 30,000 photographs of planets in our own files.
H. Giclas
Les Blalock
Odessa, Texas