Dr. George V. McCauley graduated from Perryville High School in 1902. He is one of the men most closely identified with one of the glass industry’s most dramatic products: the 200-inch glass disk for the Hale Telescope at Mt. Palomar Observatory in California. Supervising the massive job of melting, forming and annealing the huge 20-ton mirror blank was a highpoint in Dr. McCauley’s 30-year career in glass technology and research at Corning Glass Works. He retired from the firm in 1948, the year that the 200-inch telescope began to search the heavens.
Dr. McCauley was born in 1882 at Perryville, Missouri, the son of Pius and Ellen McCauley. After attending elementary and secondary schools at Perryville and Evanston, Illinois, he entered Northwestern University. He received a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern in 1908 and then entered the University of Wisconsin where he was awarded a master’s degree in 1909 and a doctorate in 1911.
In 1912, Dr. McCauley returned to Northwestern to serve as a instructor and professor of physics for five years and was employed by the Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. during World War I. In June 1918, he began his 29-year term of active employment at Corning Glass Works. It was as a research physicist for the company and he supervised the casting of the famous 200-inch disk for the Hale Observatory at Mount Palomar in 1934.
The first casting of the 200-inch mirror blank, then the largest piece of glass ever made, occurred on March 25, 1934, and attracted considerable interest. Thousands of spectators viewed the event, described by Lowell Thomas as the “greatest item of interest in the civilized world in 25 years, not excluding the World War.”
The casting was unsuccessful, however; intense heat from the furnace melted pieces of the mold containing 80 to 90 tons of molten glass.
A second, successful casting in December 1934 almost proved to be another failure when the rain-swollen Chemung River overran its banks in the spring of 1935 and poured water into the factory where the glass giant was in the midst of an 11-month cooling period. Although the electrical apparatus which controlled the cooling process had to be shut down as a result, a 72-hour rescue mission supervised by Dr. McCauley prevented flood waters from reaching the disk.
In March 1936 the 20-ton mirror blank began a cross-country journey by train to Pasadena, California, where workmen, taking several years, used 62,000 pounds of abrasives to grind away more than five tons of glass and turn the disk into a finished telescopic mirror.
Dr. McCauley, whose design for the 200-inch disk had earned the praise of fellow scientists and technicians, was among the 800 scientists and guests present at the telescope’s inauguration ceremony on June 3, 1948, at the Mount Palomar Observatory.
His efforts were hailed in the Los Angeles press as part of the “biggest event in science—more significant than the development of the atomic bomb.”
The Palomar disk was just one of several large-sized mirror blanks cast by Corning Glass under Dr. McCauley’s direction. The next largest ones are housed in telescopes at the Lick Observatory at Mount Hamilton, California (120 inches) and the Hale Observatory at Mount Wilson, California (100 inches)
Dr. McCauley also supervised the production of mirrors for telescopes at the David Dunlap Observatory in Toronto (76 inches), McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas in Fort Davis (82 inch) and Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts (61 inches). A 98-inch mirror designed for the observatory at the University of Michigan was later given to the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Herstmonceux, England.
Dr. McCauley was chosen as one of two men out of 25 candidates for the annual honor roll “The Nation for 1934” in recognition of “the skill and patience that were largely responsible for the successful casting of the 200-inch mirror.” He also published a number of scientific papers and was awarded several patents for developments in molds, furnaces and annealing.
He retired from Corning Glass in 1947 but was called back by the company in 1959 to supervise the production of an 84-inch disk for an observatory at Kitt Peak near Tucson, Arizona.
He was a member of the American Physical Society, the American Ceramics Society and Christ Episcopal Church where he had served as senior warden. Dr. McCauley was also a Scoutmaster for a local Boy Scout Troop.
He was married to Hulda Hawkinson and they had three children, George G. McCauley, James E. McCauley and Shirley Anne (McCauley) Price.
Dr. McCauley died in 1976 at the age of 93.
