Sep 1, 2002 By Glenn Tunney 10 min read

In 1855, 15-year-old John Brashear left the Brownsville common school on Front Street for the last time. The oldest of seven children, he felt a responsibility to help with his family’s finances, particularly because of his father’s poor health. After graduating from Duff’s Mercantile College in Pittsburgh in four months, John returned to Brownsville, where within one year he worked in a grocery store, as a “printer’s devil” at the “Brownsville Clipper” and at an auction store. Then he got his break. John’s father got his 16-year-old son an apprenticeship at the engine works of John Snowdon and Sons in Brownsville. The business was located near the Monongahela River on old Water Street, just north of the Flatiron Building. There John learned to make patterns for steamboat engines that were built at the Snowdon works, and he also learned to work with metal.

“Every one of the master mechanics was kind to me,” John said in his autobiography, “The Man Who Loved the Stars.” “I had every opportunity given me to do high-class work. Often I was taken into the drawing room to assist in making drawings.”

John completed his apprenticeship at the Snowdon works in three years, then went to work in Louisville, Ky., in 1859, building engines for the city’s waterworks. When the Civil War disrupted business in 1861, John lost his job and returned to Brownsville. Finding his father jobless, John sought work in Pittsburgh. He was hired as a mechanic in the rolling mill of Zug and Painter, and soon the intelligent 20-year-old was in charge of the machinery in the mill.

John was a religious man, and while attending church on Pittsburgh’s South Side, he met a young Sunday school teacher named Phoebe Stewart. She was originally from Fairchance, and in 1862 they married. The “addition” of the intellectually inquisitive Phoebe created a great scientific team.

They set up housekeeping in Pittsburgh with no savings, because John had continued to send his earnings to his parents in Brownsville. Each Sunday, Grandfather Nathaniel Smith, who was working in Pittsburgh at this time, would visit them. John reveled in the opportunity to discuss astronomy with the mentor who had first taught him about the heavens.

Although John worked long hours at the mill, he would come home each evening and continue his studies of astronomy.

“I made studies of the constellations,” he wrote, “particularly on Saturday nights, after the fires and smoke of the mills had ceased to darken the sky.”

At age 30, John secured a better paying position as a millwright at another Pittsburgh firm. He and Phoebe decided to build a new house on a steep hillside on the city’s South Side. John’s friends from the mill helped him erect the heavy framing and siding, then John and Phoebe labored for months laying the floors and completing the interior of their new home. When the house was finished, they immediately began planning a workshop for the back yard, because Phoebe shared John’s dream. They were going to build a telescope.

“I had never lost the interest in astronomy which Grandfather Smith had aroused in my early boyhood,” John revealed, “and I had determined that at some time I would have a telescope of my own.”

Anxious to begin making a lens, John ordered special optical glass from New York. While awaiting its arrival, he purchased his neighbor’s small 81/2- by 10-foot coal house for use as a shop, and he added a small shed to its side. He placed an engine in the shed, installed a small boiler in the shop and built a bench to hold a second-hand lathe he had bought.

“We had a pretty fair amateur outfit,” he said.

It was an exciting time for the couple. They were finally beginning their dream project, the crafting of a telescope with a 5-inch refractive lens that could capture and focus light from the night sky.

“My good wife and I went to work at it with all the zeal and interest of children with a new toy,” John wrote years later. “Our work was done in the evenings. I would not get home until about six o’clock, often much later if there had been any kind of a breakdown in the mill. When I arrived, I would always find steam raised, the shop immaculately clean, everything in order and a good supper on the table. After the dishes were washed, Ma would always come out to help me; and we often worked until twelve, one, and sometimes as late as two o’clock in the morning.”

What did John and Phoebe know about how to make a lens for a refractive telescope?

“I was absolutely ignorant of the various processes used in lens-making,” John confessed, “but I managed to cut the square disks [of glass] to circular form. Many, many trials did we have in those years of grinding and polishing.”

John made the tools they used for grinding and polishing the glass, employing the skills he had learned in the mills. For 700 nights they worked in their backyard shop, patiently shaping and polishing the 5-inch lens.

“Just as we would approach a time when we thought we could polish the surface, we would get a scratch on it, and it would have to be done over again,” John recalled.

Phoebe did much of the polishing. “Phoebe developed a rare skill for finish polishing called ‘fining,'” observed author Larry Schweiger. “Her skill of fining and patience finally brought the lens to completion.”

The moment of truth finally arrived.

“Removing the lens from the lathe, John raised it to the light.

Examining what appeared to be a finished product, his hands moist in excitement, John allowed the crown glass to slip.”

It hit the floor.

“It broke in two pieces,” lamented John Brashear, describing that horrible moment when 21/2 years of work was ruined. “It broke my heart, as well as my wife’s, in a good many hundred pieces!”

But John and Phoebe Brashear did not give up on their dream so easily.

This is as much a tale of human determination as it is a story of a remarkable scientific accomplishment. A sympathetic friend offered to order replacement optical quality glass from England, and it arrived in two months. The Brashears set to work again, beginning a new three-year-long labor of love: the construction of a refractive telescope.

“The work of getting the glass into circular form and grinding it to the correct curves all had to be done again,” wrote John. When the 5-inch lens was finished, John fashioned a tube 9 feet long to hold the 5-inch lens. He designed the patterns for the brass parts, had the parts cast, turned them on his lathe and with Phoebe’s help assembled the lens, tube and parts. Then they stepped back and quietly contemplated the instrument that lay before them.

They had built a telescope.

“I shall never forget the night,” John wrote, describing that magical evening, “that we mounted this tube temporarily in our room that looked to the south, stuck the telescope out of the open window, and pointed it to the planet Saturn.”

When John placed his eye to the end of the tube, he became 9 years old again.

“The view I had of the planet that night is pictured vividly in my mind today,” he wrote 40 years later, “as is that first view that I had of the same planet in the little telescope belonging to Squire Wampler, through which I had my first view of the heavens in old Brownsville.

“After my wife and I had enjoyed the sight, we could not rest until we had called in some of the neighbors,” John declared. He believed it was his responsibility as a scientist to make the instrument accessible to anyone who wished to observe the heavens through it.

John fabricated a mounting for the telescope. “The equatorial parts were made by my own hands,” explained John, “and a large opening was cut in the roof of our cottage so that we could command a fairly good portion of the heavens.”

Up to this point, this entire enterprise had been the hobby, perhaps an obsession, of a millwright whose wife shared his fascination with astronomy. But was this homemade telescope, even though lovingly fashioned, merely a sophisticated toy? What was the true scientific quality of the instrument?

There was only one way to find out. It was time to show their five-inch lens to an expert. “I plucked up the courage,” wrote John, “to write to Professor Samuel

Pierpont Langley, who had charge of the Allegheny Observatory, asking permission to bring the object glass to the Observatory that he might inspect it and perhaps give me advice about further improving it.”

On the appointed evening, Brashear carefully wrapped the 5-inch lens, placed it in his pocket, walked from Perrysville Avenue to the Observatory, and rang the bell. He was ushered into the presence of Professor Langley.

“As he took the lens in his hands and scrutinized its polish and general make-up,” recalled John, “I stood trembling before him. At last (and to me, at least, it was a long time coming) he said, ‘Mr. ‘Brazier,’ you have done very well!'”

Professor Langley was impressed with the workmanship. He offered to lend John a prized book on the “Construction of a Silvered-Glass Telescope and Its Use in Celestial Photography.” The book explained how a telescope might be constructed in a different way, using a silvered, reflecting mirror to capture the sky’s light.

John jubilantly returned home and described the professor’s favorable reaction to Phoebe. They had done the unthinkable. This 36-year-old millwright and his devoted wife, using common tools in a converted coal shed, had fabricated a precision instrument that met the high standards of one of the world’s leading astronomical authorities.

For some, such success would be the climax of a life’s mission. But Langley’s encouragement had re-stoked the fires of scientific ambition in John and Phoebe Brashear. John informed Phoebe that they would not attempt to further correct the 5-inch refractive lens that he had shown to Langley.

Instead, taking Langley’s suggestion, the Brashears would apply their rapidly improving skills to a new and different challenge. Still working in their backyard shop, they would attempt to build a large reflective telescope, one able to capture the light from the night sky using a curved silvered mirror.

Like the task they had just completed, crafting that mirror would be a challenge that would sorely try their patience and their skill.

Comments may be sent to day editor Mark O’Keefe, 8 – 18 East Church Street, 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. Past articles are on the Web at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~glenntunneycolumn/