The Perfect Machine by Ronald Florence

Author:Ronald Florence
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1994-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

20

Swept Away

The old A Factory at the Corning Glass Works sat close by the bank of the Chemung River, hemmed in by the tracks of the New York Central Railroad. It was a beautiful site. The river was wide enough to afford a perspective across to the hills in the distance and swift enough to keep itself clean. From the riverbank, a visitor could see the hillsides above the factory where so many of the Corning employees lived, and the Monkey Run that ran down off the slope into the Chemung. The river was part of life in Corning. Its changes signaled the seasons, from the low water of late summer to the wild flow of spring runoff. Old-timers could read the river the way an experienced sailor can read the sea.

From time to time the river misbehaved. When the spring runoff reached a peak, the Chemung sometimes overflowed its banks. If that weren’t enough, after a sustained period of rain the Monkey Run, which carried runoff from the hills into the river, would surge over its channel, and the flood waters would find their way into A Factory, extinguishing furnace fires in the cave level and leaving behind a layer of mud that would take weeks to clean up. The worst flood anyone could remember had been in 1918. There were still marks on the walls of the factory caves to show the height the waters had reached.

McCauley took some ribbing for his excessive caution, but when the controllers and transformers for the annealing oven for the two-hundred-inch disk were installed, he had made sure they were on a raised platform several inches above the high-water mark. The entire casting and annealing setup was designed so that the only equipment below the high-water mark were the bases of the four lifting screws, which were shielded with watertight steel cylinders, open at the top, and filled with oil to lubricate the screws and protect them against the inevitable dust from the factory cave. Even without the protective shields, the hoist screws would only be vulnerable to flooding in the lowered position, when the disk was being moved into or out of the annealing oven.

For most of June 1935, the carpenters and millwrights had worked on a crate for the mirror. The shipment plans had been debated in Corning and Pasadena. Hale’s initial preference was shipment via the Panama Canal, but track clearances on tunnels and underpasses were too low to move the disk to a dock in New York, Baltimore, or Philadelphia, which left Albany as the only seaport they could reach from Corning. Even if they could get a direct cargo ship from Albany, via the Panama Canal to Los Angeles or San Diego, shipping by sea would involve the extra handling of the disk at Albany and a West Coast port, in addition to the initial loading onto a railcar at Corning and the final unloading in Pasadena.

The alternative was to ship the disk by rail from Corning to Pasadena.

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