Sep 8, 2002 By Glenn Tunney 10 min read

Professor Alexander Graham Bell, writing in The World on May 17, 1896, was describing the flight of a steam-powered airplane circling above the Potomac River, a flight he had witnessed. The aircraft was designed by Samuel Pierpont Langley, astronomer and then-director of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. At the time, the historic 12-second-long manned flight of the Wright brothers’ airplane was still seven years into the future. “It seemed to me,” wrote Bell, “that the experiment was of such historical importance that it should be made public. The flying machine in question was of steel, driven by a steam engine.” Bell compared its flight to that of a huge bird spiraling upward, “the spirals with a diameter of, perhaps, 100 yards, until it reached a height of about 100 feet in the air, at the end of a course of about half a mile, when the steam gave out, the propellers which had moved it stopped, and then to my further surprise, the whole instead of tumbling down, settled as slowly and gracefully as it is possible for any bird to do, touching the water without any damage and was immediately picked out and was ready to be tried again.”

The 25-pound, 15-foot-long, unmanned aircraft could have flown further, but its one-horsepower steam engine ran out of fuel. Langley’s experimental plane was such a success that when he turned his efforts to designing an airplane that could carry a man, Congress allotted $50,000 to the project.

Langley asked his long-time friend from Pittsburgh, Brownsville native John A. Brashear, to build the airplane that Langley would design. Seven years later, in October, 1903, a crowd of reporters gathered on the banks of the Potomac River for the first public demonstration of Langley’s vtsgvy

Unfortunately, Langley’s devotion to creating a small, but powerful, steam engine to propel his airplane came at the expense of refinement of the plane’s flight controls, and the piloted aircraft fell into the Potomac.

On Dec. 8, 1903, a second test had similar results. News reports ridiculed the unsuccessful demonstrations, and Congress withdrew its financial support.

” . . .Just as he [Langley] had reached the point of success with his man-carrying flying machine, the failure of one part of the mechanism wrecked it,” revealed John Brashear. “It wrecked my dear friend’s hopes, too, and the unkindly comments of the press overwhelmed him.”

Nine days after Langley’s second failed demonstration, Orville Wright piloted an airplane 45 feet into the air, flying it a distance of 120 feet at Kittyhawk, N.C. It was the first sustained powered flight of a heavier-than-air manned aircraft in history.

The flight immortalized the Wright brothers. For the 63-year-old Brashear, the near-miss at being the builder of the world’s first manned powered aircraft was merely a disappointment.

But for Samuel Langley, the public failures crushed his spirit.

This was the same professor Langley who, 27 years earlier at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Observatory, had examined a trembling John Brashear’s 5-inch telescope lens and told him, ‘You have done very well, Mr. Brazier!’ Langley had then encouraged the ambitious millwright to build a reflecting telescope, a project that resulted in the greatest discovery of Brashear’s career.

John and his wife, Phoebe, decided to attempt to make a 12-inch reflector, the largest diameter they could handle in their little backyard shop.

They purchased glass disks from a New York firm, and as John had always done, he worked each evening in his backyard shop after a long day’s work at the mill.

“Our evenings were frequently interrupted by visitors who wanted to see the heavens in the 5-inch telescope, which was mounted in what was then the garret of our home,” wrote John in his autobiography, “but I do not and did not regret the delay, so great was the pleasure of our visitors at seeing the moon, planets, star clusters, nebulae and occasionally a comet, in our telescope. But it required many months of labor before we had carried the work far enough along on the reflecting telescope mirror to do the polishing and testing. After many nights of polishing, figuring and testing, I concluded that the glass was as good as I could make it.”

It was time to silver the glass.

“There were several known methods for silvering front surfaces of glass,” explained Brashear, but his limited knowledge of chemistry prevented him from applying them.

He tried modifying a method that had been used for silvering the inside of mirrors, but the results were unsatisfactory.

Then, a friend showed him an article that explained how to silver a glass by applying heat. He and Phoebe decided to try it.

Phoebe readied the shop.

When John arrived home from work, they excitedly ate supper, then went to the shop to silver the disk they had been so carefully grinding and polishing.

“We had poured the silver solution with its reducer,” wrote John, “to change it to the metallic form; and you can imagine our delight and joy when we saw a beautiful deposit of silver covering the surface.”

Then, once again, came heartbreak.

“But, alas, alas, our joy was soon turned to sorrow, to grief, to keen disappointment that never could be described in words, when we saw and heard our disk crack from edge to center. Not to this day have I determined the real cause of the disaster.

“I do not like to write about this second disappointment in our optical work when we appeared to be just at the climax of success; for this last failure seemed to affect me more than the first one. Failure after all these months, and just when we had reached the goal.

“I slept little or none that night, though my dear wife tried her best to cheer me by saying we could finish another glass, as we had both (another) disk and the experience. I went to the mill the following morning; I walked around like a crazy man; I could not collect my thoughts or concentrate them upon anything.

“About four o’clock in the afternoon, I stopped and pondered for a moment, and this expression came from me, and could almost have been heard, I am sure, had there been anyone near me: ‘What a fool you are, to worry this way; this worry will never mend that broken glass.’

“I am not certain that I was a believer in telepathy then, or that I am now, but somehow I felt in my innermost soul that something was going on at home. I started home as early as possible that evening, and as I climbed the hill it was not with the same heavy heart that I had as I walked down it that morning. As I opened the door, I was met with a smile and a kiss, and then dear Ma asked me to go out to the little shop before we sat down to supper. I thought possibly something unfortunate had happened out there.

“But, instead, what did I see? The little shop in prime order, a fire burning under the boiler, engine oiled ready to start and the extra disk in the lathe ready to have its edge turned with the diamond tool, and its surface roughed out to the approximate curve. Could anyone have done more? The memory of that moment, filled with the love and confidence of the one who was more than life to me, I can never forget.”

“To make a long story short, in about two months from that evening, in the early spring of 1878, the new 12-inch mirror was ready to be silvered.”

In the interim, John had experimented with various methods of silvering and modified a technique previously used only for silvering the back surfaces of mirrors and looking glasses.

Using this modified method, “I succeeded in obtaining most admirable results in silvering mirrors on the front surface,” John explained. Of his new discovery he wrote, “So simple, so certain was this method, that I at once sent a communication to the ‘English Mechanic and World Of Science,’ describing it in full for the benefit of my amateur friends.

“Little did I think at the time that this method would become THE method, and be universally used for front-surface mirrors. The formula has been published in perhaps every chemical journal in the world; and although I am writing this note more than 40 years after I had the pleasure of giving it to the world, without money and without price, I often have pleasant reminders of the value of my first humble contribution to the makers of reflecting telescopes.”

The silvering technique John Brashear discovered was his greatest contribution to the science of crafting reflecting telescopes. Despite his method’s immeasurable intellectual and monetary value, Brashear refused to patent the process he had discovered. Instead he allowed it to be used freely by everyone.

“Almost 40 years later,” he wrote in 1912, “I stood in the laboratory of the Mount Wilson Observatory, admiring the beautiful silvered surface of the great one-hundred-inch reflecting telescope mirror, made by my old-time friend, Professor Ritchey. Expressing my pleasure to him, he replied, ‘Well, it was silvered by Brashear’s process.'”

After silvering the 12-inch lens that he and Phoebe had made in his backyard shop, then using the new technique successfully several more times, John placed an ad in “Scientific American” offering his lens making services to amateurs. The response to the 1878 ad was overwhelming – too overwhelming.

“He and Phoebe were soon flooded with requests,” wrote author Larry Schweiger, “not only from amateurs, but professional scientists, as well. Working the mill by day and his workshop by night, in 1881 John collapsed from complete exhaustion and required three full weeks of bed rest to recover.

“He had to give up something. He just could not physically keep up the pace. He knew he could not make enough [money] as an instrument-maker to survive, but that’s where his heart was.”

John Brashear faced the agonizing prospect of abandoning his life’s work in order to continue supporting his family on a mill worker’s salary. It appeared that his greatest triumph, the development of a world-acclaimed silvering process, was to be cruelly followed by his farewell to the scientific world. His health and family obligations would no longer permit him to be both scientist and breadwinner.

And then it happened – an almost miraculous turn-of-events that allowed John Brashear to leave the mill forever and devote his life to the crafting of astronomical instruments. To this gentle man who, as a child, devotedly attended Brownsville’s First Methodist Church, the remarkable offer that would save his scientific career seemed nothing less than Divine intervention.

Next week – The visitor who transformed John Brashear from millwright and part-time instrument-maker to world-famous scientist.

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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.