200-inch, 20-ton lens for the future Hale Telescope, after its arrival in Pasadena, CA. Circa April 10, 1936.

Item Overview

Title

200-inch, 20-ton lens for the future Hale Telescope, after its arrival in Pasadena, CA. Circa April 10, 1936.

Date Created

[circa April 10, 1936]

Date

1936-04-10

Publisher

Los Angeles Daily News

Language

No linguistic content

Collection

Los Angeles Daily News Negatives

Notes

Description

The 20-ton, 200-inch lens for what would be the Hale Telescope after its arrival in Pasadena, CA, following a cross-country rail trip from Corning, NY. The giant waffle-patterned lens was made from Pyrex, then a new material, by the Corning Glass Works company. Astronomer George Ellery Hale, one of the founders of the California Institute of Technology, secured a $6 million grant from the Rockefeller Institute to build both an observatory and a telescope with a 200-inch primary mirror, to be administered through Cal Tech. Hale built his observatory on Mt. Palomar in San Diego County, 90 miles southeast from the Mt. Wilson observatory in Pasadena, which Hale had also founded in 1904. Construction of the Hale telescope was delayed by World War II, and the telescope did not see its first light until January 26, 1949. George Hale died in 1938, and thus did not see the telescope that bears his name completed.

Caption

Text from original nitrate sleeve: Mt. Palomar lens.
Handwritten annotation from nitrate negative: 200" lens at Cal Tech

Physical Description

Extent

1 photograph

Medium

b&w nitrate negative

Keywords

Genre

news photographs
cellulose nitrate film

Location

Pasadena (Calif.)

Resource type

still image

Subjects

Telescopes--California
Science