Maker Info
Students' Astronomical Laboratory, Harvard University
The Astronomical Laboratory was located on Jarvis Street in an old building that was called "one of the most travelled and variously used and named of Harvard buildings." Originally built on Kirkland Street around 1850, it was relocated to Divinity Avenue, and then to Jarvis Street. It first had no name, and then was called "Zoölogical Hall" and later "Society Hall." It served as Louis Agassiz's museum of comparative zoology; the site of the first engineering instruction at Harvard; a dormitory; the home of the Hasty Pudding Club and Institute of 1770; the college hospital; the Department of Architecture; and then returned to a scientific space as the Students' Astronomical Laboratory.
The Astronomical Laboratory was established in 1903 by Robert Wheeler Willson, Professor of Astronomy, for instruction in practical astronomy as applied to navigation and exploration. A platform on the roof served for naked-eye observations, and there fixed positions for the use of about a dozen small instruments that did not require "the most stable sort of mounting."
Students in courses on navigation and nautical astronomy were provided with sextants, chronometers, pelorouses, a ship's compass with compensating binnacle, and numerous other instruments.
Historical navigational instruments, including some owned by Nathanial Bowditch, author of the American Practical Navigator, were on display in the lecture room, and can be seen in photographs.
In separate shelters in the yard adjoining the building were a Clark Equatorial of 7 1/2 inches aperture (the gift of George R. Agassiz, AB 1884), a 4-inch Meridian Circle ((no doubt, the Troughton and Simms meridian circle that had served the Harvard College Observatory on Garden Street), and a 4-inch Almucantar (the instrument built by G. F. Ballou and John Clacey). These were used by advanced students but the Clark equatorial was also used to show students of Descriptive Astronomy interesting objects and for general public viewing on special occasions.
The 1920 Harvard course catalogue boasted that "for the teaching of Descriptive Astronomy by modern methods the Laboratory has an unusually good equipment."
For students of Practical Astronomy, there were a 4-inch Clark Equatorial, and a 3-inch Transit with a zenith level by Fauth. There was also a transit house with three 3-inch transits and chronographs.
The basement of the main building contained a well-equiped machine shop for the construction of apparatus for teaching and research, a photographic dark room, and an instrument room equipped specially for investigations in photographic photometry and thermo-electric photometry. In 1917, the instrument shop was supervised by D. W. Mann.
With the advent of World War I, it became the headquarters for the University Naval Training Courses for enlisted men enrolled at Harvard. (For a long description of activities there and photos, see the report by Harlan True Stetson in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin of 1917.)
More detailed descriptions of the apparatus and eclipse expeditions undertaken by the Astronomy Laboratory are found in Stetson's 1928 paper in Popular Astronomy.
