GEORGE ELLERY HALE

George Ellery Hale 1868-1938

The family lives in Chicago but Hale, from the very young child of George Hale, she moved to the suburb of Hyde Park, before the great fire of 1871.
The father owns a business and that of hydraulic lifts in the factories of his father that the young George Hale acquired a technical skill that will serve all his life. Her mother communicates her love of literature and poetry. Hale considered that taste for literature as essential to the development of his creative imagination of science. George Ellery Hale suffers from poor health.
Three times, he will give up his job for long recovery periods in sanatoriums.
Joined in 1886 at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), he finds the current mind-numbing, but he also works at the Harvard College Observatory as an assistant volunteer.
In 1889, Hale developed the spectroheliograph, spectroscopic scanning device to obtain a complete picture of the sun in a single spectral line.
In 1890 he received a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The same year he married Evelina Conklin. He continued an ambitious program of solar observation and is the first to observe magnetic fields in sunspots. He discovered the inversion cycle of 22-23 years, magnetic polarities.
It is a pioneer in Observational Astrophysics.
In 1891, he founded the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, which will become the prestigious Astrophysical Journal.

After a stay in Berlin in 1893 where he met among others Helmholtz, Planck and Rubens, he returned to Chicago and organized the Kenwood Observatory.
The same year, he organized an international conference on astronomy in relation to the Colombian Exposition. With his own money and borrowed capital that Hale is building an observatory on Mount Wilson, east of Los Angeles.
Thus he aroused the interest of wealthy businessmen like Andrew Carnegie, and obtained funds to build the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904. It equips the observatory telescope 1.5 meters in 1906 and 2.5 meters in 1917.
After retiring as director of Mount Wilson, he built the Hale Solar Laboratory in Pasadena, California In 1928, the Rockefeller Foundation is providing funding of six million dollars to the California Institute of Technology, to build a giant telescope of 5 meters of openness that will see George Ellery Hale unfortunately.
George Hale has suffered a lifetime of neurological and psychological problems.
Schizophrenic, he says he was advised in its work by an elf. He died in Pasadena, February 21, 1938.

Image: The name of Hale is associated with many large organizations, it is the first to observe magnetic fields in sunspots.