George E Hale Biography

Born on June 29th, 1868, George Ellery Hale began his life in the then budding city of Chicago, the son of a wealthy businessman. His parents frequently doted on their son, tending to his sicknesses in fear he would end up as his siblings did: dead during infancy. Hale survived these plights, and soon after entered the world of astronomy. He asked for a telescope at 14 to watch Venus pass between the Sun and the Earth; from then on his interest of the heavens expanded just as the universe does.

His education is flavoured with a few of the most reputed universites--MIT, Observatory of Harvard College, along with abroad studies in Berlin--which is where his interests centred on the sun. While still at MIT, Hale invented the spectrohelioscope, subsequently discovering solar vortices. With the use of the Zeeman effect, he established in 1908 that sunspots were a result of magnetism.

After this discovery, Hale found that the sun had an east-west magnetic alignment, mirror symmetry exhibited across the equator, and the changing of polarity of the sun's hemispheres orientations over the course of sunspot cycles. The systematic properties of sunspot magnetism are now known as "Hale's Law".

In 1890, he acted as the director of the Kenwood Astrophysical Observatory, only for him to then become a professor of Astrophysics at Benoit College for the next two years. He was an associate professor at the University of Chicago until 1897, when he became a full professor and worked until 1905. He coedited the book Astronomy and Astrophysics and edited the Astronomical Journal. Between 1921 and 1923, he served on the board of trustees in the Society for Science and the Puiblic.

Hale was an influence to both Harlow Shapley and Edwin Hubble, hiring them while he worked at Mount Wilson (he also worked at Yerkes, Palomar, and his own Pasadena workshop Hale Solar Laboratory). He developed the California Institute of Technology into a leading research college as well as founded a multitde of institutions. Despite his keen organisational skills and unrelenting ambition, he suffered from both neurological and psychological problems, including insomnia, headaches, and schizophrenia (one of his most reoccurant hallucinations was of a little elf who acted as his advisor). While director at Mount Wilson, he would take large spans of time off to be secluded at his Maine sanatorium, which led to his eventual resignation.

Of the many awards he won, the most note worthy are the Henry Draper Medal (1908), the Bruce Award (1916), and the Copley Medal (1932). He passed away in Pasadena at the age of 69 on the 21st of February, 1938.