Crowds gather as the 20-ton, 200-inch lens for what would be the Hale Telescope arrives in Pasadena, CA, after a cross-country rail trip from Corning, NY. The giant 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.
