Promethean Fire on YouTube - With Hila Plitmann

Promethean Fire Text by Alfred Noyes

I sing of those who caught the pure Promethean fire

One from another, each crying as he went down


To one that waited, crowned with youth and joy. 

Take thou the splendour, carry it out of sight


Into the great new age I must not know

Into the great new realm I must not tread.

Promethean Fire - Program Notes

The piece was composed for the July 7, 2019, Mount Wilson Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome series, curated by cellist and artistic director Cécilia Tsan.

Mount Wilson Observatory founder George Ellery Hale invited his friend, the English poet Alfred Noyes, on a night when no members of the press were invited, to commemorate the night of first light at the 100-inch telescope dome in 1917. The text of Promethean Fire comes from this poem. Hale’s colleague, my grandfather, Harold D. Babcock, used the text in his obituary of Hale in 1938, wherein he also describes an evening open house held at the observatory in 1919, with music supplied by a strolling harpist.

Promethean Fire is essentially a short tribute to Hale. He  had previously built Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, but Mount Wilson was Hale's first mountain-top observatory, which involved multiple logistical difficulties. It eventually included three solar telescopes and two large reflector telescopes for night-time work. Andrew Carnegie and others helped make the success of Hale's observatory possible, Edwin Hubble and others helped make it internationally known, and scientists such as Albert Einstein came to visit. But Hale had the original vision for the mountain.

Discoveries made at Mount Wilson include the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and our position in it, proof that we are not the only galaxy in the universe, and proof that the universe itself is expanding.

Hale did not live to see the completion of his dream for Mount Palomar, the 200-inch telescope, in 1948. He could only imagine the images that this elegant machine would collect. Nor could he have foreseen the progress brought by the Hubble Space Telescope, nor can any of us know what the still-under-construction Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Las Campanas, Chile will reveal about our universe. But each successive generation of observers has built on the foundation of the last and carried on the Promethean Fire. 

A REMARKABLE LIFE

Following Hale’s death, colleague Harold Babcock ended his words of memoriam with these words:

“Few men have enjoyed a life so rich as Hale’s in those returns that bring the deepest satisfaction. …His life was a rebuke and a refutation to cynicism. In the midst of our irreparable loss, the words of his friend, poet Alfred Noyes, stand out in clear relief:

“….I sing
Of those who caught the pure Promethean fire
One from another, each crying as he went down
To one that waited, crowned with youth and joy, 
—
Take thou the splendour, carry it out of sight
Into the great new age I must not know
Into the great new realm I must not tread.” 

For more on George Ellery Hale, see this excellent  documentary by my friends Todd and Robin Mason: 

http://www.journeytopalomar.org/#