George Ellery Hale

George Ellery Hale 1868-1938, American astronomer, b. Chicago, grad. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1890. He founded and directed three great observatories (Yerkes, Mt. Wilson, and Palomar), each in its time the greatest in the world, and was active in organizing interdisciplinary scientific societies nationally and internationally. In 1895 he founded the Astrophysical Journal, which remains the leading publication in its field. He had a unique talent for raising funds from private sources in the days before massive governmental support of scientific research. The 200-in. (508-cm) reflector at Palomar Mt. is named the Hale telescope in his honor, and the Mt. Wilson and Palomar observatories were renamed (1969-86) the Hale Observatories. In his own work he pioneered the experimental study of the physical nature of the sun and stars. His observatories were also laboratories employing the latest in photographic and spectrographic techniques. In 1890 he invented the spectroheliograph , which led to the discovery of magnetic fields and vortices in sunspots. Although he studied in Germany with Helmholtz and Planck, served as the first professor of astrophysics at the Univ. of Chicago, and received many prizes and medals from scientific academies around the world, he never completed the requirements for his Ph.D. Besides technical monographs, he wrote popular books, including Depths of the Universe (1924), Beyond the Milky Way (1926), and Signals from the Stars (1931).

Hale, George Ellery (1868–1938), astronomer and creator of scientific organizations and institutions.Born into a wealthy Chicago family, George Ellery Hale became interested in science at an early age. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1890 and in 1892 he joined the faculty of the new University of Chicago, to which he contributed the observatory his father had built for him beside the family home. With the financial help of the Chicago financier Charles T. Yerkes, Hale built and directed the university's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, which opened in 1897. Using funds from the newly created Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., Hale in 1904 constructed the institution's Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California, which he also directed. In 1928, now retired, Hale persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to build the Palomar Observatory, on Mount Palomar north of San Diego, for the California Institute of Technology. In each of these last three observatories, Hale succeeded in installing the world's largest telescope. Hale also gained prominence as an astronomer with his invention of the spectroheliograph and the discovery of magnetic fields in sunspots.

A key figure in the development of scientific institutions and organizations, Hale in 1895 founded the Astrophysical Journal, in 1904 created the International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research (later the International Astronomical Union), and in 1907 began the process of turning a Pasadena technical high school into the California Institute of Technology. During World War I he helped to create the National Research Council, which he subsequently headed until 1918.
See also Physical Sciences; Science: Revolutionary War to World War I.

Bibliography

Helen Wright , Explorer of the Universe: A Biography of George Ellery Hale, 1966, reprint 1994.
H. Wright, J.N. Warnow, and C. Weiner, eds., The Legacy of George Ellery Hale: Evolution of Astronomy and Scientific Institutions in Pictures and Documents, 1972.

Ronald Brashear