MIT's Solar Pioneer

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In 1904, Hale also established the Mt. Wilson Solar Observatory near Pasadena, CA, where he oversaw construction of a 100-inch reflecting telescope, the largest of the time. It would be used by Edwin Hubble and other influential astronomers. And toward the end of his life, Hale created the spectro­helioscope, which made it possible to observe the sun directly instead of photographically. He described the experience in a 1926 letter to his nephew:

"Beyond the air stands the sun, with wild and fantastic beasts roaming over its surface. They are of enormous size, sometimes reaching up to heights of four hundred thousand miles. And they are fearfully hot, made of hydrogen, helium, and calcium, in the form of gas so thin that it is only about a thousandth part as dense as the air you are breathing. Naturally, when you look at the brilliant surface of the sun with a telescope you do not see these beasts, because they are so thin that they don't cut out any appreciable fraction of the light. But if you had a window through which you could see nothing but things made of hot hydrogen, they would suddenly come into view. I have made such a window, and have been looking through it at these marvelous beasts."

Hale's commitment to advancing scientific knowledge went beyond his inventions. He founded the Astrophysical Journal, worked to create the National Research Council, and organized what would later become the International Astronomical Union. He also wrote six books and hundreds of articles and transformed the Throop Polytechnic Institute into the California Institute of Technology, intending to make it an institution comparable to MIT, though broader in scope. In a 1907 Technology Review essay titled "A Plea for the Imaginative Element in Technical Education," he wrote, "The greatest advances, whether in engineering ... or in any other field, arise as mental pictures, at first uncertain as to details, but subsequently clear and distinct, requiring only an application of text-book methods to give them tangible form. It is in the conception of the picture, and not simply in the execution of the project it embodies, that the truly great engineer must excel." He added, "It would thus seem to be evident that a technological school can by no means afford to underestimate the need of broadening the view and cultivating the imagination of its students."