Sky and Telescope - January 2016 - 70

History Paid Forward
Immediately greeting us was a letter from John A.
Brashear stating that the cornerstone was placed on
August 14, 1894. Furthermore, we read in Brashear's
ﬂowing script, "I have a wish to express, and that is
that in this building devoted to the advance of scientiﬁc
research that every piece of work shall be made as perfect as human hands and human brains can make it. No
excuse ever to be made for imperfect work. I hope when
I am gone that these precepts will never be forgotten by
those in whose hands I leave it."
Neatly tucked inside were newspapers dating from
1891 to a few days before the stone was laid. Nestled
between them was a cloudy slab with the inscription,
"One of the ﬁrst pieces of optical glass made in America."
A small leather book elegantly titled In Memoriam
William Thaw detailed, with pictures, the magnate who

MEMENTO MORI The envelope
with a lock of Phoebe's hair.

funded much of Brashear's life work. A multitude of
photographs followed. There were portraits of Brashear's
mother, Julia Smith Brashear, and perhaps the only
known photo of his father, Basil. We turned over prints
of lightning photographed by Brashear in June 1894, the
company's exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition
dated 1892, Brashear's famous spectrograph attached to
the tailpiece of the 30-inch Thaw refractor at Allegheny
Observatory, and more.
One of the most shocking and remarkable items had
once belonged to Phoebe Brashear. On a small, sealed
envelope was the following inscription: "A lock of my
dear wife's hair. It was she who stood by me through the
darkest hours [see below] and whose good cheer, helping
hands and loving sympathy were prime factors in my
success. JAB." A lock of hair was visible inside when we
held the envelope up to the sky.
Personal letters were abundant. On Warner & Swasey
stationery, the builders of giant telescopes Worcester
Warner and Ambrose Swasey wrote to Brashear on
July 31, 1894, with congratulations on the new factory.
Professor Hermann von Helmholtz, the great physicist
and polymath of thermodynamics fame, requested two
ﬂat metal mirrors in his native German. A typed and
signed letter from Samuel Pierpont Langley, on Smithsonian letterhead dated July 19, 1894, noted the quality of
Brashear's large prisms, lenses, and mirrors.
After our short review and partial documentation, we
returned in order all the contents removed to their original position. Most of the 70 or so items we examined
were in immaculate condition.
That afternoon a cameraman from a local TV news
company asked to see the capsule, and it was opened for

John Alfred Brashear 1849-1920
The son of a saddle maker and a schoolteacher, John Brashear was born in his
grandfather's tavern in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. As a boy of nine he viewed the
Moon and Saturn through a telescope
owned by a traveling showman. The experience kindled a passionate interest in
astronomy that transformed his life.
The young Brashear went to work as a
machinist in the steel mills of Pittsburgh,
where he soon gained a reputation as
one of the city's most skilled millwrights.
For years, after working 12-hour days,
he labored until midnight in a coal shed
behind his house that he had converted
into an optical workshop. Assisted by his
supportive wife, Phoebe, he spent hun-

Januar y 2016 sky & telescope

dreds of nights making a
5-inch refractor lens. And
then, as he was removing
it from a polishing lathe, it
dropped and broke.
He and Phoebe started
over. They completed a ﬁne 5-inch
refractor in 1875. The director of the nearby
Allegheny Observatory, Samuel Pierpont
Langley, was impressed by Brashear's
handiwork and encouraged him to try his
hand at making a larger reﬂector.
Brashear laboriously ground, polished,
and ﬁgured a 12-inch mirror of plate glass
- only to have the disk shatter from thermal stress when he immersed it in the
warm chemical solution used to deposit its

John and Phoebe Stewart Brashear
when they were married in 1862.
ALLEGHENY OBSERVATORY / UNIV. OF PITTSBURGH

ﬁnal coating of silver. This second
disaster might have broken a less
determined man. "I slept little or
none that night," he wrote. "I went to
n
the
th mill the following morning; walked
around
arou like a crazy man." When he came
home he found that Phoebe had prepared
everything to start again. "The little shop
in prime order, a ﬁre burning under the
boiler, engine oiled ready to start, and the
extra [glass] disk in the lathe ready to have
its edge turned with the diamond tool and
its surface roughed out to the approximate
curve. Could anyone have done more? The
memory of that moment, ﬁlled with the love
and conﬁdence of the one who was more
than life to me, I can never forget."

Sky and Telescope - January 2016

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