Dean chats with one of the all-time experts in antique telescopes and curator of the most unique telescope museum, the Astronomical Lyceum in New Mexico, John Briggs.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: On the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison sits a building from a different era, high up on a hill, tucked away in a remote part of campus, an overlooking Lake Mendota, you will find a small brick edifice with an obnoxiously large black dome atop it. This is the Washburn Observatory, a place full of astronomy history.
And first off, it's best to go at night. Walk inside, send the strangely angled staircase, open a creaky door, and you enter into a pitch-black cavern of a room with a ceiling of undetermined height. It's so dark in there, but as your eyes adjust, you see standing upright mounted on a metal pier, a baby blue painted telescope, about 20 feet long.
There's no mistaking. That's a telescope and the astronomer at Washburn, Jim Lattice, well, he turns to me, and he said, well, I'll look through it from the studios of Cincinnati public radio. I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is looking up the show that takes you deep into the cosmos. Or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours.
So great. My guest today is one of the all-time experts in antique telescopes and the curator of the most unique telescope museum called the astronomical Lyceum in New Mexico, and I'm talking about John Briggs.
[Dean Regas at Washburn Observatory]: All right. We're here at the Washburn Observatory, Madison, Wisconsin. Uh, we're looking at the telescope here, the old refractor.
[Jim Lattis at Washburn Observatory]: And so, uh, Jim Lattice, uh, UW space place is the best title.
[Dean Regas at Washburn Observatory]: There we go. There we go. And knows everything about the telescope.
Dean Regas: Yeah, the Washburn Observatory at the University of Wisconsin. This is a really cool place. It was completed in 1881. And so, most of the equipment in that room is more than a hundred years old.
[Jim Lattis at Washburn Observatory]: So, it's a, uh, 15. 6-inch Clark refractor that was made in 1878 and became operational right. Here in January of 1879.
Dean Regas: And it's still works. I mean, they use this for teaching. They use it for the public. You can put your eye up to that telescope.
[Jim Lattis at Washburn Observatory]: It was modified a lot though, over the years when it was actively used in research, it was used for photoelectric photometry here for decades. This is really where astronomical photoelectric photometry started.
Dean Regas: And so, for the past four years, I've been touring and visiting historic observatories around the country and each historic observatory has its own little story, each contributed to discoveries in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
So, my favorites are the Detroit observatory in Ann Arbor. This is at the University of Michigan. So, it's right on campus on this little hillside. They have an old telescope, but then they also have this other building. That's called a transit room or Meridian telescope, where the roof opens from North to South, and you can measure the stars in Pittsburgh.
They have their own observatory as well called the Allegheny observatory. This dates back to 1861, one of the oldest in the country. Now I'm going to be telling you about the Allegheny observatory a little bit more. There's some drama. We'll get to that, but there are some other places around the country too.
Like Des Moines has the Drake municipal observatory. Denver has the Chamberlain observatory. Uh, there's a little observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Yerkes observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, Cincinnati observatory, which is the oldest telescope in the whole country. So. If you're really into like cool, functional steam-punky things, well, antique American telescopes are for you.
And there are probably more of these antique observatories around the country than you might think. In fact, there's probably one pretty close to where you live and you should visit them because all the ones, I know about are open to the public and we'll let you look through the telescope.
John Briggs: I'm, John Briggs, speaking for Magdalena, New Mexico. And I run an informal astronomy museum out here that we call the astronomical Lyceum.
Dean Regas: So, what is it for you that makes antique telescopes so unbearably cool?
John Briggs: Oh boy, they're functional works of art, in my opinion, the craftsmanship in these beautiful older instruments, it's inspirational, often the makers signed them engraved into the brass.
The name of the maker and the day in the same way a painter would sign a painting, but the fact that you couldn't use these things like time machines, because let's say you're looking through a telescope, a fairly big telescope that might have been made back in the 18 sixties, but yet after all these decades.
Over a hundred years, this thing is still working to show you a beautiful, crisp view of Saturn and its rings, or Jupiter. The fact that these old telescopes work as well as they do, and they're just cool, it's easy to get wrapped up in how interesting they are.
Dean Regas: Well, you've seen quite a few designs over the years. Are there some special like telescope manufacturers, some, you know, really unique engineering ones that kind of stand out to you?
John Briggs: Well, yeah, among American enthusiasts for telescopes, we tend to celebrate. The American makers like Elvin Clark and sons that became active in the mid 1850s in Massachusetts.
And there was another wonderful early maker named John Brashear who started making tall scopes in, I think, in the 1870s in the Pittsburgh area. And of course there were European tall scope makers. Excellent. Uh, even earlier, and I'm talking mainly about lens type tall scopes because fundamentally a tall scope might use either lenses or mirrors to gather the light and focus the light modern tall scopes more often use mirrors. Uh, the older telescopes often used big lenses and, uh, often antique telescope enthusiasts focus on lens type or refracting telescopes.
Dean Regas: And so fast forward, quite a bit in the future, your love of antique telescopes took a particular turn when you started your own museum called the astronomical Lyceum in, New Mexico. Tell us about it. The, this museum, or do you even want to call it a museum?
John Briggs: Well, yeah, it's very informal. I live in very rural New Mexico. I was able to purchase it for a very reasonable price. An old, abandoned school gymnasium building, a gymnasium theater building, Magdalena, New Mexico. And it was built by the WPA in 1936.
And I got this as a space to work on instruments that I had collected over the years. But when I told my many telescope friends, when I bragged to them, boy, I've got this space now. I can unpack all this stuff I've had in storage for a lifetime and begin working on it. I'm very lucky to have this space.
Some of my friends, after my bragging, retaliated a bit. They said, okay, Briggs, if you have so much space, That's great. I'm going to give you all of my stuff, and I, I accumulated things, a lot of things actually given to me by fellow enthusiasts, so that my building is almost overflowing now, but they are wonderful artifacts, some of them very historical, and I could go on and on describing the details.
But that, that is how what I call the astronomical Lyceum started.
Dean Regas: All right. This is going to be an almost impossible question to answer, but maybe it won't. What is your favorite antique telescope in the United States?
John Briggs: Oh, my goodness. Of course, that is very hard because each of them is potentially so interesting.
Maybe I could answer it this way. In terms of one that was particularly inspirational to me as a young person, there is a refracting telescope at Seagrave Memorial Observatory in North Scituate, Rhode Island. And it's an Elvin Clark lens type telescope made in 1878 in the 1930s after its original owner, Frank Seagrave, passed away.
Fortunately, this little observatory became the property of a Rhode Island astronomy club that's been running ever since. And the organization is called Skyscrapers Incorporated. And it's in many ways, it's a lot like the Cincinnati Astronomical Society. In fact, Cincinnati Astronomical Society owns a nearly twin eight-inch Clark refractor.
In any case, the one in Rhode Island is one I got to use a lot when I was a teenager and young man, and I have particularly nostalgic feelings about that one, but I'm afraid it's only one of many were inspirational to me because they've all been so exciting and they all bring neat memories of experiences and things I've seen through them.
Dean Regas: Absolutely. And so how can people find you at the Astronomical Lyceum and do you need an unpaid assistant to go through some of the equipment?
John Briggs: Yeah, I'm afraid I do. But if you came out and saw how much stuff. I have, I've amassed, I'm afraid, for all your enthusiasm, you, Mike, are running away in terror because there's certain informality to this facility that we sometimes call a museum out here, but when people visit, they can tell that the interest in the subject is very earnest and, so yeah, come on out and I'll show you around and maybe you'll hang out a while.
Maybe you'll run away, but I am pretty easy to find. If you Google the Astronomical Lyceum, you will find contact information and my name, John Briggs, and I welcome contact. Anyone interested can also become involved with the Antique Telescope Society.
Dean Regas: Well, this has been a lot of fun talking with you, John, today, thinking back to my times with the antique telescopes, it's always a pleasure talking to a fellow aficionado.
John Briggs: Well, my pleasure. Thank you for your interest and the time we've shared.
Dean Regas: And trust me, I'm coming out to visit. I just got to get out there to Magdalena.
John Briggs: Good, good. We'll look forward to it. Take care.
Dean Regas: So, I mentioned the Allegheny observatory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And if you're going to have a giant historic telescope, open to the public. In some dark, you know, out of the way places. And you're there for long enough, you're going to have drama. And the drama struck on July 8th, 1872.
That's when the director of the Allegheny Observatory, Samuel Pierpont Langley, returned to work to find the lens that was missing from his giant telescope. My God, I can't even like my having a heart attack, even thinking, imagining that. What's more. The thief was bold enough to leave a ransom note. The note said, meet in the woods behind the observatory, or you will never see your precious lens again.
Well, Langley ended up meeting with the perpetrator, who, by the way, did not bring the lens with him to the meeting, and utterly refused to pay the ransom. Langley was like, sorry, dude, we're not getting that lens. We're not paying you anything, man. Astronomers were kind of tough back then, I guess. So, a newspaper reporter at the time was tracking down some leads and trying to help find who stole the lens.
And it seems pretty likely that this reporter found out the identity of the thief and threatened him well enough that the thief left town, but before he left town. We also left the lens behind, and the valuable lens was eventually discovered in a hotel trash can. I mean, you can't write this stuff. I mean, this is like, this is unbelievable.
So, Langley recovers the lens, but it is scratched and badly damaged. So, the lens actually had to be refigured and, um, I don't know if it turned out to be a good thing, but. Then, when they refigured the lens, it actually made it better. And so, it was significantly improved from its original design. So, the same lens is back in the same tube and, um, you can actually look through the stolen lens.
The identity of the thief remains a mystery to this day, but the moral of the story is obvious, don't you think? Don't mess with old timey astronomers. Looking up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati public radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017. Ella Rowen and Marshall Verbsky produce and edit our show and track down anyone who steals my lunch from the looking up fridge.
Jenell Walton is our vice president of content and Ronny Salerno is our digital platforms manager. Our social media coordinator is Hannah McFarland. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. I'm Dean Regas. Keep looking up.
