"THE WONDERFUL MECHANISM"
They gathered in Vermont to see stars with their own hands (Cate McQuaid, 7/6/2003, Boston Globe)
In August 1920, more than a dozen men and one woman gathered here to make their own telescopes. The men were mostly machinists, toolmakers, and pattern makers at the Jones and Lamson Machine Co. in Springfield. [...]
In 1923, the group built a clubhouse atop Breezy Hill and called it Stellafane, from stella, Greek for ''star,'' and fane, old Anglo-Saxon for ''temple.'' The Stellafane Society meets there to this day, and holds a convention every summer (Aug. 1-2 this year). The enthusiasm for the group by bigwigs like Hartness and Ralph Flanders (a machinist who went on to become a mechanical engineer and, in the '40s, a US senator) as well as Porter, drew the attention of Albert Ingalls, a writer for Scientific American who penned two feature articles and then a regular column about making telescopes.
''In those days, you had two choices,'' says Tom Spirock of the Stellafane Society, which now boasts 70 to 80 members and hosts close to 2,000 people at its annual convention. ''You had to build a telescope yourself or pay someone to build it for you. Porter said, ` It's not hard to build.' He was the founder of the amateur telescope-making movement.''
Today, the Stellafane clubhouse, painted hot pink, is a national historic monument. This year's convention features telescope-making demonstrations, telescope competitions judged on mechanical and optical expertise, talks on telescopes and on astronomy, and, of course, stargazing. The society also holds all-day monthly meetings, free mirror-grinding classes in the winter, and occasional star parties.
These days, you can buy a decent telescope for about $1,000. The Springfield Amateur Telescope Makers still build their instruments for the fun of it, something those first members discovered back in the '20s.
''For it is true that astronomy, from a popular standpoint, is handicapped by the inability of the average workman to own an expensive astronomical telescope,'' Porter wrote in 1923. ''It is also true that if an amateur starts out to build a telescope just for fun he will find, before his labors are over, that he has become seriously interested in the wonderful mechanism of our universe. And finally there is understandably the stimulus of being able to unlock the mysteries of the heavens by a tool fashioned by one's own hand.''
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 9, 2003 12:56 PM
