Goethe Link and the Stars

During the 1930s, Indianapolis physician Goethe Link had achieved great prominence in his field, earning the respect of his fellow doctors with his skill as a surgeon. “I had several lucky breaks in my practice,” Link noted. “In fact, it seemed that if I got ready for something, opportunity soon knocked on my door.”

  

With his medical practice a success, Link sought escape from the busy city life of Indianapolis. He purchased more than fifty acres in northern Morgan County, building a country home on land that had formerly been an apple orchard. “When I got here, like Brigham Young I said, ‘This is the place!’” Link recalled. He named his property Tanager Hill after the scarlet tanagers and summer tanagers that flocked to the area.

  

Although he continued to hone his surgical skills, Link believed that pursuing other activities “rested me intellectually and thus aided progress in my life’s work.” As a young boy, Link had become fascinated by a book on astronomy he found in his father’s library. “I used to watch large birds that could fly across a valley without moving their wings,” he recalled, “and I became fascinated by ascending currents of atmosphere and astronomical facts.”

  

Years later, Link renewed his interest in the subject through a class taught by K. P. Williams, a professor of mathematics, through an Indiana University extension program in Indianapolis and membership in the fledgling Indiana Astronomical Society, founded in 1933. Planning a honeymoon to the West with his new wife, Helen (his first wife had died in 1930), Link also took with him on the trip a letter of introduction from Williams to three former IU students—Earl C. Slipher, Vesto M. Slipher, and Carol O. Lampland—all of whom worked as astronomers at the Lowell Observatory, a privately owned astronomical research institution in Flagstaff, Arizona. Link later joked that he received so much information from the astronomers that he suffered “intellectual indigestion.” During the trip Link also met with Russell W. Porter, an amateur astronomer who had helped design the Mount Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California. Porter sketched out for the Indiana physician plans so Link could build his own observatory close to his Morgan County home.

  

Establishing the Goethe and Helen Link Foundation for Scientific Research, Link began construction on his observatory in 1937. The facility received support from a variety of members of the IAS and was supervised by Victor E. Maier, a noted Indianapolis amateur astronomer who had previously advised other enthusiasts on how to build telescopes. The facility immediately attracted the attention of members of the IU astronomy department, who visited the site along with groups from Indianapolis. One fellow physician told Link after seeing the partially completed observatory: “Goethe, you are going to have to operate in all doubtful cases to pay for this.”

  

Work at the observatory centered on building a facility to securely house a telescope equipped with a thirty-six-inch mirror that had been a test pouring for the two-hundred-inch mirror provided by the Corning Glass Works for the Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar. It took ten months and the building of a special machine by Carl D. Turner, an Indianapolis engineer, to grind and polish the ribbed Pyrex mirror, which cost $385. To support the four-hundred-pound mirror and its cross-axis German equatorial mounting, which weighed 5,000 pounds, crews using wheelbarrows and shovels constructed a concrete pier resting on bedrock. “Readings were made on the concrete every hour while it was hardening,” Maier remembered, noting that measurements indicated the pier had been set within one millimeter of its correct position despite its great weight (two hundred tons) and height (thirty feet above ground level).

  

After the pier had been completed, workers used wood from a nearby forest to construct the building’s frame made of oak posts and beams, with an interior of oak hardwood floors and knotty-pine walls. The lower floor included a large auditorium that could seat 150 people, a darkroom, library, sleeping quarters, and a kitchen. To keep the large dome housing the telescope the same temperature as the outside air, the building had no central heating system; those who worked there had to rely instead on portable electric heaters. The dome itself measured thirty-four feet in diameter and included an eight-foot-wide shutter opening through which the telescope could peer into the heavens. The entire dome could be moved to different positions by using only a half-horsepower electric motor that could be operated by the push of a button. In a second, smaller dome, located on the flat roof over the auditorium, Link placed his own personal telescope, a five-inch Zeiss refractor.

  

With the observatory ready to begin operations in early January 1939, Link made the facility available to scientists at local colleges and universities. IU President Herman B Wells quickly took advantage of the offer for the university’s astronomy department. In October 1938 the university announced it would establish a postdoctoral fellowship (first awarded to Doctor James Cuffey, a graduate of Harvard University) to conduct research at the observatory on a year-round basis. Cuffey took the first celestial photograph from the observatory in August 1939.

  

In addition to the research work, the observatory also hosted field trips from IU astronomy students and regularly scheduled visitor nights open to the general public. On those nights the auditorium became jammed with people listening to presentations on the stars while another group crowded up the circular staircase waiting their turn to mount an observation platform for a glimpse through the 5,200-pound telescope at the evening sky.

  

Cuffey continued his research into star clusters at the observatory until World War II intervened, and he left in June 1941 to serve in the navy, teaching navigation at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He returned to the Bloomington campus in 1946 as an assistant professor. Following the war, IU astronomers, in cooperation with the International Astronomical Union, used the observatory to track the orbits of asteroids (called minor planets in those days) that had been lost track of during the war years. For the asteroid observations, Link and the university reached agreement with the University of Cincinnati for the permanent loan of a ten-inch diameter astrographic lens. Link funded the construction of a separate building for the telescope. From 1948 to 1967, astronomers at the observatory took more than 6,000 photographs and discovered more than a hundred new asteroids.

  

Shortly after arrangements had been made for the installation of the new astrograph, Link decided in 1948 to donate the observatory along with twelve acres to IU. He later told a reporter that as he got older he could no longer do as much work in astronomy as he wanted to because of the late hours involved. Doctor Frank K. Edmondson, chairman of the IU astronomy department, noted that Link’s generous gift greatly expanded the scope of the department’s activities. “It gave us a large telescope, a vital element which we lacked and which is necessary to support a graduate program in astronomy leading to a Ph.D. degree,” Edmondson said. In 1978 the university, with financial help from the National Science Foundation, added a control room to the main dome for the use of researchers.

  

By the 1980s, light pollution from Indianapolis’s urban sprawl had hampered use of the Link observatory’s telescopes and IU had to move its research activities to other locations. The public, however, continued to visit the site whenever possible for programs given by the university and the IAS, as well as to marvel at the numerous varieties of daffodils planted on the grounds by Helen Link—a pastime she started with a gift of bulbs from her husband. The couple continued to enjoy the beauties of Tanager Hill until their deaths; Goethe, at the age of 101, in 1981, and Helen, at the age of ninety, in 2002. For Goethe, there existed no great secret to his long life: “I never drank, never smoked, stayed physically active and always left the table a little bit hungry.”