Science: Stargazers at War

In the postwar hot-stove debates about who really won the war, a respectful hearing will have to be given to the claims of a mildly wacky group of scientific playboys—the amateur stargazers and telescope-makers. Without them, U.S. ordnance men would have been hard up for gun sights. These amateurs, who turned from telescopes to making essential roof prisms* for sights, have been considered so important in the war effort that they worked under aliases. Last week they finally gave their right names.

Amateur telescope-making is a cult with some 20,000 devoted addicts. With homemade equipment, they work at a hobby that requires a very high degree of workmanship—grinding telescope mirrors which must be accurate to two-millionths of an inch (TIME, Aug. to, 1942). The man who taught most of them the technique is a onetime Arctic explorer (who sailed with Peary) named Russell W. Porter. His amateur grinding has made him so expert that he is now a consultant on the polishing of Caltech’s famed 200-in. Mt. Wilson telescope. Since 1926 Porter and an enthusiastic partner, Editor Albert G. Ingalls of the Scientific American, have made telescope-making a worldwide hobby; their stargazing clubs now stretch from the U.S. to Java.

Glass Polishers. Two years ago Stargazers Porter & Ingalls marched into the Frankford Arsenal with an opportune proposal. The Army desperately needed workmen to make roof prisms for field and anti-aircraft guns and other military instruments. Porter & Ingalls said that amateur telescope-makers, who had years of experience in just such exact work, were eager to take a crack at the job.

The Arsenal doubtfully doled out 2-4 pieces of precious optical glass, told the amateurs to go ahead and try. The amateurs failed to hit the mark at their first attempts. Porter, Ingalls & Person thereupon lined up So top-notch amateurs, named them “The Gang,” sent them instructions, set up a system of postcard communication, soon began to deliver roof prisms by the thousand.

Glass Widows. Tooling up for roof-prism-making cost the amateurs from $100 to $200 apiece. They were mostly middle-aged business and professional men (including a gravestone manufacturer, a dentist, a candymaker) and spent most of their spare time at the job; a few became so enthusiastic that they quit their jobs to make prisms fulltime. Their pay: expenses, a small profit, and an incentive to ride a hobby as hard as possible. Cried one fanatic: “To hell with the money!”

Amateur telescope-makers are so notoriously single-track that their wives call themselves “glass widows.” One wife, out of pique, once locked her husband in his cellar workshop; another sued for divorce and won. Editor Albert Ingalls last week proudly called off some of his pet names: D. T. Broadhead (alias “Jim Fogarty”) of Wellsville, N.Y.; William Buchel (alias “Robert Gray”) of Toledo; Paul Linde (alias “Pavel Uvaroff”) and Fred Person (alias “Alex MacTavish”) of Biloxi, Miss. Said Ingalls solemnly: “A good roof-prism maker is the equal in military value of a whole company of soldiers.”

*A roof prism is used in a gun sight’s elbow telescope, which enables an anti-aircraft gunner, for example, to look horizontally into the eyepiece and see his target overhead. The elbow telescope inverts the image; the roof prism’s function is to turn the image right side up. Roof prisms are thum-sized, polished crystals whose two top facets are shaped like a peaked roof. In manufacture, a piece of glass is first sawed roughly to shape, then ground to exact proportions by a delicate hand. In the final product, every facet must be absolutely flat; the right angle between the roof facets must be accurate within one 1,800th of a degree.