John Brashear became victim of his own success
In 1881, John Brashear became a victim of his own scientific success. Following the successful 1878 experiment in which John produced a superior method of silvering mirrors for refractive telescopes, he had placed the following advertisement in the Scientific American:
“Silvered-glass specular, diagonals and eye-pieces made for amateurs desiring to construct their own telescopes. Address: John A. Brashear, No. 3 Holt Street, South Side, Pittsburgh, Pa.’
“Alas for me!” wrote John in his autobiography. “Hundreds of inquiries came to me from that advertisement. I had no clerk, and I was still hard at work in the rolling mill – up early in the morning, home after six. How was I to answer those scores of letters? And how to make specula for the fellows that wanted them?”
In order to meet the avalanche of orders that poured into the little hillside in Pittsburgh, John and his wife Phoebe worked in the backyard shop every night after he returned home from working at the mill. Three years of this brutal day-night work schedule, taking only Saturday nights off, finally took its toll on John’s health.
“One evening,” John wrote, “Dr. Herron on one of his visits found me laid up in bed, a pretty sick man who did not know what was the matter with him.
The doctor at once pronounced it a nervous breakdown from overwork.” Dr. Herron warned the 40-year-old Brashear that he must “let up with caring for the machinery of the rolling mill and making optical instruments besides.”
After a long talk with Phoebe, the couple decided that John would quit his job at the rolling mill, team up with his son-in-law, James B. McDowell, and try and make a go of the business of making astronomical telescope lenses and mirrors. McDowell was married to the Brashears’ daughter Effie. He was employed at Bryce Glass Works and took a keen interest in John’s scientific work. The young couple lived with the Brashears.
The decision that John would quit his job was a gamble. The Brashears’ debts exceeded their meager savings, and they were not yet making a profit selling optical instruments. Could they hold out financially until the new enterprise became a money-maker?
“Fortune never helps the fainthearted,” wrote Greek tragedian Sophocles. John and Phoebe Brashear were anything but fainthearted. So perhaps it was divine justice that after years of unflagging dedication to their scientific work, a benefactor providentially appeared at this most critical juncture of John and Phoebe Brashears’ lives.
On an evening in July 1881, shortly after giving up his job at the rolling mill, John walked to the Allegheny Observatory to deliver a telescope mirror that he had silvered for Professor Samuel Langley. John could not have known that on that night, he would meet his “Good Samaritan” for the first time.
“It was quite light when I reached the top of the hill,” wrote John of his hike to the observatory. “I saw a gentleman sitting on the observatory steps talking with Professor Langley, so I kept myself in the background until Professor Langley saw me and called me to him.”
Langley eagerly unwrapped the silvered mirror, expressed great satisfaction with it, and showed it to his friend, who was also anxious to examine it. Langley then introduced his friend as William Thaw, a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, well-known philanthropist and great supporter of the observatory.
“Young man,” said Thaw to Brashear, after marveling at the beauty of his work, “I want to know you better. Come over to my house tomorrow night and let us have a talk together.”
The following evening, John visited Thaw at his home. “I found him awaiting me in the modest parlor of his house,” remembered John. “He asked me to be seated, and with his pointed queries, learned the general outline of my life-history from my birth to the day I met him. Then he bade me good night, saying, ‘Tomorrow night I am coming over to see you.'”
The next night Thaw arrived at the Brashears’ home after dark. He waited patiently as John showed some unexpected visitors the binary star Albireo through the 12-inch reflector telescope. When the visitors departed, Thaw expressed the desire to see the object as well.
“He climbed the ladder to the eye-piece,” said John, “and I well remember his expression, ‘I have never seen anything so beautiful in all my life!'”
After John showed Thaw the backyard shop, the men joined Phoebe in the house and chatted for a while. As Thaw was leaving, he turned to them, took both John and Phoebe by the hands, and spoke the words that changed their lives.
“I see you have the boat, the captain and the pilot,” he said, “and now what you want is some water to float the vessel in. You must have a better and larger workshop, better machinery, better equipment. Study out your plans, then come to see me as soon as you can. Good night.”
After he had left, John and Phoebe attempted to decipher Thaw’s cryptic statement. Was he proposing to lend them the money to improve their shop? If so, would they ever be able to repay it? John followed Thaw’s instructions and designed a modest plan that included a 12-foot-by-20-foot building containing all of the necessary machinery. Then he visited Thaw to deliver the plan.
“He expressed himself as well satisfied with my plans,” John wrote, “and at once wrote me a check for three thousand dollars to pay for the materials.”
John was stunned. He and Pheobe’s life savings amounted to $300. This stranger was handing him a check for 10 times that amount!
“I asked him when and how he expected me to pay the money back again,” said John, “telling him I feared debt, and was much concerned over the uncertainty of paying it back. He told me it was his privilege to do this for me in the interest of a science we both loved so well; and since I was loath to accept the money as a gift, he let me down easy by saying if I ever became wealthy, I could either return it to him or pass it on to the other fellow. Moreover, he at once proposed to take another burden off my mind by paying all the indebtedness on our home, which was done.”
By December, the new shop was built and fully equipped, and John and Phoebe were ready to “put full-time work on the orders we had secured both through Professor Langley and the single advertisement in the Scientific American.”
One year earlier on Christmas Eve 1880, John had written the following entry in his diary:
“Shipped the three mirrors I had made by Adams Express today. One to Hunt, C.O.D. $59.50; one to Hesse, $23.50; one to Bishop, $35. These are my first actual shipments and I do hope they will turn out good.’
“It had been my ideal in all my work,” wrote John, “to make it turn out good, as good as my ability and efforts could make it, and regardless of the time it took. It was this desire for perfection that made my work valuable to scientists, but coupled with a lack of interest in what it cost me in time and money to do my work, it led me from this time on into frequent financial worries. Without Mr. Thaw’s aid, I fear it would have been impossible for me to keep on.”
In the years that followed William Thaw’s remarkable gift, “orders began to come in that I found impossible to fill all by myself,” John wrote. John’s son-in-law, James, resigned his job at the glass works to work full-time in the Brashears’ new shop, and a third man was hired to help with the instruments.
John and James became so skilled at the crafting of another type of instrument, the spectroscope, that the Brashear Co. (as the business was now called) supplied them to major universities all over the world. This advance was followed by another, the highest quality precision work available in the manufacture of rock-salt prisms used in optical experiments.
Brashear’s scientific ingenuity and expertise were becoming known the world over. He was asked to present a paper before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia. The presentation was a success, and a technique that John developed for correcting optical surfaces was soon adopted by the world’s best opticians.
Through the dizzying years of the Brashear Co.’s growth and amid the increasing international acclaim for John’s work, William Thaw continued to generously support the Brashears financially, even to the point of providing John with railroad passes to attend scientific meetings. In 1886, Thaw constructed a much larger, fully equipped shop near the observatory, built to plans drawn up by John, then gave the Brashear Co. rent-free use of the entire facility. It was better than anything John could ever have imagined.
“I had never dreamed of having anything so nice,” he wrote. “All this Mr. Thaw did for me, not, he said, for charity, but to help push outward the boundary line of human knowledge. How I prayed for the ability to give a good account of my stewardship.”
The years that followed brought worldwide recognition of John Brashear’s contributions to science. Several tours of Europe saw him welcomed with admiration by astronomical societies and leading scientists all over the continent. For a boy who had first glimpsed Saturn’s rings at his grandfather’s knee in Brownsville, a lifetime of hard work and unerring dedication to his science had finally brought well-earned acclaim.
But there was one group of young admirers whom fate had decreed would never see those rings of Saturn. To these children, the somewhat elderly bearded man who rolled with them on the lawn or rode them piggy-backed as he laughed and played with them was “Uncle John,” their favorite visitor. Next week as our series concludes, we will join John Brashear at a special place where he was often found entertaining, in his own words, “the little ones who would never see the stars.”
Comments may be sent to day editor Mark O’Keefe, 8-18 E. Church St., Uniontown, Pa., or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com. Glenn Tunney may be contacted at 724-785-3201, glenatun@hhs.net or 6068 National Pike East, Grindstone, Pa., 15442.