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Historical AttributesThis Clark Corporation telescope was formerly owned by Thomas A. Lawes (1852-post 1927), a mechanical engineer with the Pennsylvania Rail Rroad, the “Big Four” Rail Road, the Erie Rail Road, and the Nickel Plate Rail Road (New York, Chicago, and St. Louis Railroad Company) among others.
It is equipped with an equatorial mount patterned after that for the Lowell Observatory’s 24-inch refractor, also by Alvan Clark & Sons.
The telescope was sold by Lawes to Edward Drake Roe, Jr (1859-1929) in 1906. Roe attended Syracuse (AB 1880) and Harvard (AB 1885, AM 1886). He was a professor of mathematics at Syracuse University. According to a biographical memoir on Roe:
“Professor Roe's interest in astronomy was so great that in 1906 he erected on his own grounds a private observatory equipped with an Alvan Clark equatorial telescope, a superb 6 - 1/2 inch refractor with an objective by Lundin, a driving clock by Kandler, a micrometer by Gaertner, and several other smaller instruments. His observatory was considered one of the best equipped private observatories in the country. After his death, this observatory with all the equipment was given to Harvard College. In it he had found his recreation; besides making many observations of the sun, moon, planets, and comets, he discovered and measured 75 double stars.”
The telescope went to the Harvard College Observatory in 1930, and was soon after set up at Oak Ridge Observatory.
It is an excellent example of a prototypical university / student research instrument. It was a favorite of visual observers for decades.
ProvenanceOak Ridge Observatory, Building # 1; lens transferred to CHSI, November 2014. Optical tube assembly and clock drive transferred to CHSI, August 2016. Equatorial Mount and Pier to come in 2020.
Published ReferencesArtists in Optics, 116, n. 392, and 150, n. 497.
Related WorksExcerpts from manuscript autobiography of Law in file.
“Biography of Professor Edward Drake Roe, Jr., Founder of Pi Mu Epsilon,” in the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal. (Copy in file.)