Word: palomar
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...Tech was taking no chances with the world's most precious piece of glass. As it dared the perils of Southern California highways last week, the 200-inch mirror for the giant Mt. Palomar telescope, 160 miles away, was insured with Lloyd's for $600,000 and was escorted by 15 cops...
...mirror spent the night in the little ranch town of Escondido, which was all agog at the honor. At 5 a.m. it began the last lap, up the twisting road to mile-high Mt. Palomar. The pace slowed to a crawl as two trucks pushed the trailer...
Good news, long delayed, came from the California Institute of Technology last week. The 200-inch mirror for the mighty telescope at Mt. Palomar was finally pronounced finished. Grinding and polishing began in 1938, was stopped in wartime, and resumed at the end of 1945. Now the big glass disc, yellowish blue and slightly murky like an old Pyrex dish, is a paraboloid perfect within two millionths of an inch...
...about a month, the disc will go by truck to Mt. Palomar, 130 miles away. There the glass will be covered with a thin film of shiny aluminum and set in the telescope. Some night in the spring or summer of 1948 it will stare up at the sky as man's farthest-seeing...
Humming at their work, astronomers and technicians were busy again at Mt. Palomar Observatory, Calif. The great 200-inch mirror, neglected during the war, was still far from completion. But soon the grinders and polishers would be working at its delicate surface. Meanwhile, a concrete disc of the same diameter and weight (18 tons) was doubling for the mirror in the almost finished largest-telescope-in-the-world, while final tests were made on its intricate controls. In another year, or perhaps two, Mt. Palomar would be open for business...