Introduction

Until 1945, astronomy meant optical astronomy. The commissioning of the Palomar 200-inch telescope in 1949 highlighted the dominance of the USA in observational astrophysics in the period immediately after the Second World War. The need for greater light-gathering power to detect faint galaxies for cosmological studies led to George Ellery Hale's concept of the 200-inch telescope (Hale, 1928). Hale symbolised the entrepreneurial approach of US astronomers to the sponsorship of private US observatories, such as the Lick, Harvard, Yerkes and Mount Wilson Observatories, which began in the late nineteenth century. James Lick (1796–1876), for example, was a successful maker and seller of pianos and an enthusiast for astronomy who, on his death in 1876, left a bequest of $700 000 to build ‘a powerful telescope, superior to and more powerful than any telescope ever yet made … and also a suitable observatory connected therewith’. The observatory was constructed on Mount Hamilton and officially opened in 1888 with the completion of the 36-inch telescope, under which James Lick was buried, according to the terms of his bequest.

Hale's record of observatory and telescope construction is remarkable by any measure. He persuaded Charles T. Yerkes (1837–1905), the entrepreneur who built and electrified the Chicago street-train system and who was regularly on the verge of legal embarrassment, to provide the funds to build and equip the Yerkes Observatory as part of the University of Chicago.