Southern California is the land of sunshine, outdoor adventures, and opportunities. It is the place of movies, aerospace industry, and a bastion of scientific research activities. These images are the result of active promotion by the region’s boosters for the past 150 years, as Southern California lacked natural resources with only the climate to boast of. With incoming railroads in the 1880s, Southern California developed via rampant land speculation and boosterism of all sorts that ranged from orange cultivation to wholesome living to tourism. Astrophysicist and science statesman George Ellery Hale was one of these successful boosters of Southern California. Arriving in 1903, he founded the Mount Wilson Observatory (MWO) in 1904 with grants from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. MWO soon became one of the world’s leading astronomical observatories. The Observatory was put into brochures advertising the region along with its hotels, gardens, and churches, as well as becoming a tourist attraction.
I propose that Hale was a speculator both in the financial and scientific sense. Hale succeeded in founding and developing MWO into a leading research institution because he chose the right place at the right time. Hale was able to court patrons both nationally and locally and to attract good scientists because of the ongoing promotion of Southern California had generated enthusiastic expectation that the region will grow in size and importance. MWO can be regarded as the starting point that put scientific research as one of the faces of Southern California.
