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Clark's Observatory.
Down near the
Charles River, a person about to cross the old Brookline bridge spies through the trees what looks like an astronomical dome.
Old citizens of
Cambridge regard it with pride, and speak of it as “
Clark's Observatory.”
It marks the site of the world-renowned telescope factory of
Alvan Clark and Sons.
The story of its beginning is romantic.
If
Alvan Clark was known in early life as a successful miniature painter.
His son,
George B. Clark, became a student at Phillips Academy,
Andover.
The dinner bell broke.
and the boy obtained the fragments.
Taking them home, he melted down the metal over the kitchen fire, with the avowed intention of making a telescope.
His father found out what he was doing, and was glad to give him a helping hand.
The two succeeded in making a good reflecting telescope.
They became so much interested in the work, that they made other reflectors together, and attained considerable skill.
Then it occurred to them to try to make lenses for a refracting telescope.
There was no firm, in this country or in
England, which undertook to grind astronomical lenses.
The twin fifteen-inch telescopes at
Harvard and Pulkowa Observatories, then the largest in the world, had been made in
Germany, and it was hardly expected that they would be surpassed.
The grinding even of small
