Sky and Telescope - January 2016 - 71

THE MECHANICAL
DEPARTMENT
The company's
machinists wrote
on the back of their
photo, "With the best
wishes for success
and a long and useful
life to our employer,
and The hope that
this building shall
stand for many
generations, serving
the purpose for which
it is being erected,
The Advancement of
science, We deposit
our names into this
cornerstone."

the last time. When the cameraman ﬁnished ﬁlming,
Jadell wrapped the box safely in a heavy towel and placed
everything in the cab of a Minnieﬁeld company truck.
The story ran brieﬂy on the news that evening. Working late into that night, I posted the afternoon's photos
on my website and wrote captions for them, then sent
announcements to astronomy-history blogs and websites.
The next morning brought a ﬂurry of internet activity followed by calls not only from the media but the
legal department of the City of Pittsburgh! By evening
the story and my photos were on the front page of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The press and television were
soon asking, "Who owns the Brashear Time Capsule:
the Minnieﬁelds by salvage contract, or the City of
Pittsburgh as a historic artifact?" Mayor Bill Peduto
demanded the box and ﬁled a court order to obtain it.
As the controversy continued, journalists tended to
portray the mayor as a hero attempting to save the time
capsule from some unknown and disastrous fate. In
my estimation this was misguided; Jadell Minnieﬁeld
and his brothers are honorable businessmen and kept
the time capsule safe under lock and key awaiting a
response from the courts.
After months of negotiation, the claims were settled
in a private agreement between Minnieﬁeld Construction
and the City of Pittsburgh. The Brashear Time Capsule
and its contents now rest timelessly in the Heinz History
Center for future generations to view and admire.
Al Paslow is a member of the Antique Telescope
Society and is currently building an 8-inch refractor. Many more of his images from the box's opening
are at al-paslow.smugmug.com.

Brashear not only ﬁnished
the replacement mirror but
also developed a novel roomtemperature recipe for silvering
mirrors. He shared it widely and
refused to patent it. It became the
he
preferred method until the advent
nt of
vacuum-deposited aluminum coatings in the
1930s made chemical silvering obsolete.
In 1881, exhausted by the killing schedule
of working as a mill foreman by day and
telescope maker by night, Brashear suﬀered
a breakdown. Langley came to his rescue by
introducing Brashear to the wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist and philanthropist William Thaw, who paid oﬀ the mortgage on
Brashear's house, provided him with a larger,
well-equipped workshop, and placed his

ﬂedgling instrument-making ﬁrm
on a solid ﬁnancial footing.
Brashear's ﬁrm soon began turning out telescopes of great precision and excellence, optically and
mechanically.
They eventually included
m
18 refractors
from
12 to 30 inches aperre
ture and four reﬂectors from 30 to 72 inches.
The Brashear Company also made many
of the instruments that gave rise to the infant
science of astrophysics, notably:
* The spectroheliograph invented by George
Ellery Hale that revolutionized the study of
the Sun.
* The optical components of the interferometer used by Michelson and Morley in 1887 to
disprove the existence of the "ether" that was
supposed to carry light waves, laying the foun-

dation for Einstein's theory of relativity.
* The spectrograph later modiﬁed and used by
Vesto Slipher at Lowell Observatory to detect
the ﬁrst Doppler shifts of galaxies.
In his later years Brashear received many
honorary degrees from the world's most
respected universities and scientiﬁc societies. He served as acting director of Allegheny
Observatory, chancellor of what is now the
University of Pittsburgh, and a trustee of the
Carnegie Institute.
His ashes and Phoebe's lie beneath the
James Keeler Telescope at Allegheny Observatory. Their epitaph, adapted from the classic line in Sarah Williams' 1868 poem "The
Old Astronomer," reads, "We have loved the
stars too fondly to be fearful of the night." ✦
- Tom Dobbins

Sk yandTelescope.com Januar y 2016

http://al-paslow.smugmug.com http://www.SkyandTelescope.com

Sky and Telescope - January 2016

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