To get a 60-inch reflecting telescope up to Mount Wilson, the famous astronomer Dr. George Ellery Hale required the road widened and a special truck constructed. The story of the truck proved to be an interesting chapter in the history of Mount Wilson.
Hale was a great dreamer. In 1905, he constructed the solar telescope on Mount Wilson. The then-new trail from the mouth of Eaton Canyon was adequate to transport the solar telescope parts to the summit of Mount Wilson. But then he wanted a 60-inch telescope for stellar observations.
After Hale convinced Andrew Carnegie of the need for such an instrument, Carnegie financed the road widening, the transportation of the materials, and the construction of the mirror’s housing.
The mirror, owned by Hale, took four years to polish. This work was done by Willis Ritchey, laboring hour after hour. In one of the annual reports, it states that Ritchey was “eternally grinding the mirror to its final perfect parabolic form … with no error in form exceeding two-millionth of an inch.”
In a letter to the president of the Mount Wilson Railroad company dated Jan. 20, 1906, Hale reported the progress of building the 60-inch telescope housing.
“This work will require so much cement that we could not afford to take it up on pack animals but propose to send it over the trail in lots of four or five tons, in the automobile-truck which we are about to have constructed,” Hale wrote.
The 1906 Annual Reports of the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory stated that “the electric truck, on which the parts of the mounting are to be carried over the Mount Wilson Road, is nearing completion at the shops of the Couple-Gear Freight Wheel Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan.”
The truck was being built specifically to get the 60-inch telescope and all the heavy materials up the steep grade to the Mount Wilson. The truck was designed to be steered at both ends and work something like a trolley car. It had one very heavy gasoline engine which was connected to an equally heavy dynamo, and there were independent electric motors in each of the truck’s four wheels.
Besides this special transportation to carry the telescope and materials, the 9 1/8 miles of road had to be widened to at least 10 feet to accommodate the truck. The road — known as the Toll Road — began in Eaton Canyon and wound up through the steep slopes 9 1/8 miles up to the elevation of Mount Wilson’s 5,715 feet.
Godfrey Sykes, who supervised the road construction, reported that the trail was “9 miles of steep grade of loose and crumbly soil, not at all suited for road building.”
The truck was finally delivered to Pasadena in November 1906, later than what had been agreed upon, according to the 1907 Observatory reports. Tests were performed to make sure that the truck could actually endure the trip all the way to Mount Wilson. The truck hauled 5-ton loads in Pasadena for short distances, with a few grades as high as 17%.
In the following spring, more tests were done on the road, and it was determined that the truck’s power was inadequate and the motors had to be reconstructed. Rather than the long delay of sending the truck back to Michigan, the work was done at the Mount Wilson shop located on Santa Barbara Street in Pasadena. Jerry Dowd, an electrician who had worked with Edison on trolley cars in New Jersey, became the chief engineer for the work.
The 1907 Annual Report stated, “The four motors are mounted in the four wheels of the truck, and the small clearance permitted but a few changes to be made. Nevertheless, the reconstruction was so successful that the power of each motor was nearly doubled.”
The 25 HP Continental engine and the 12 KW generator on the truck were replaced with a 45 HP Brennan engine and a 17 KW generator. The truck was then able to carry 3-ton loads to the summit of Mount Wilson, but with much difficulty because of the great weight of the truck and load and the soft road in many areas. A full round trip to Mount Wilson and back was 30 miles, and it took 10 days! Sometimes, Dowd would sit on the truck all night.
Dowd wrote in 1907 that because the soil was so soft in areas, he had to bring along a man who did nothing but dig when they got stalled in a rut. The digger was always exhausted, and eventually Dowd requested a team of mules that would be hitched to the front of the truck, to pull only when they heard the engine grind.
The Annual Report of 1907 revealed that “As the expense of operating the truck is necessarily large, it has proved to be cheaper to haul the materials for the steel dome and building — aggregating about 150 tons — to the summit by mule teams. The limiting load that can now be taken up in this way is about 2 tons, but a four-mule team driven by a good teamster accomplishes relatively more than the truck run by three skilled men. The use of the truck will therefore be confined to the transportation of the 5-ton pieces of the 60-inch mounting and other large pieces.”
After additional road widening in 1908, the truck carried the heaviest loads of over 5 tons up to the summit, with the addition of four mules pulling when needed. The piece that gave the most trouble was the steel telescope tube, which was 18 feet long and 6.5 feet in diameter.
Reporters of the day called this delicate job of transporting the heavy mirror “which the touch of a baby’s hand would mar” up nine miles of a hazardous hillside “one of the most exhausting and nerve-wracking jobs ever undertaken.”
In 1908, Dowd wrote, “We made 10 round trips, 5 tons to the trip, and ‘caved off” the edge at least once every trip. But we got the 60-inch up there, lock, stock, and barrel, mirror included. I never lost a piece.”
In September 1908, the work on the dome and building was finished and the erection of the telescope was nearing completion. On Dec. 17, 1908, the 60-inch mirror was finally placed into the telescope as the last sigh of relief was heaved. For the next 10 years, it was the largest telescope in active use.
It wasn’t until 1932 that the Angeles Crest Highway was built, providing a much easier access to Mount Wilson.
So what was the eventual fate of the one-of-a-kind great electric truck? According to Jerry Dowd, the truck’s chief engineer, “When it was all over, they sold the truck for junk, and I got a job as a janitor down at the laboratory. I was glad to take it easy for a while.”
Christopher Nyerges is the author of “Enter the Forest: A Guidebook to the Angeles National Forest” and many other books. For more information, go to www.schoolofself-reliance.com.
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