The Glass Giant of Palomar: Amazon.com: Books

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The Glass Giant of Palomar Hardcover – January 1, 1953

4.6 15 ratings

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Language

English
Publisher

DODD MEAD & COMPANY
Publication date

January 1, 1953
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4.6 out of 5

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Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2011

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This is the total story of what led up to the building of this great telescope starting with the 40 inch Yerkes refractor and then the 60 and 100 inch mount Wilson reflectors. The building of this instrument had all the excitement and drama of the manned lunar landing. I read this book years ago and was really fascinated by it. That one was from the library. Now I've got the book to have. I am very pleased with the quality of this book. It will be a cherished item.

James Keller

Amazon Customer

Good condition arrived quickly

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2021

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Great book arrived in a timely manner in good shape.

The 200 inch Telescope at Palmar Mountain

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2013

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Astronomy is my hobby. This book is very informative concerning, at the time, the world's largest telescope; and, how it came about to build it and how?

Book was in almost excellent condition. The service was very fast!

This is apparently a badly photocopy of the original book ...

Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2016

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This is apparently a badly photocopy of the original book, which is why it's getting two stars versus the content inside. Not sure if this is even legal to do, looking into that next. If it's not legit I'll move the rating to one star

Fascinating story

Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2008

Verified Purchase

I read this as a teenager. I love glass in general, so maybe I'm biased, but I found this to be a fascinating tale of how the Palomar telescope was engineered and made.

Classic work about a magnificent machine: the Palomar telescope

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2020

I originally read this book when I was in junior high school—it was one of the few astronomy titles in the school's library.

Seventy years after it was originally published (the 1948 and 1953 updates added only minor information on the final commissioning of the telescope and a collection of photos taken through it), this book still inspires respect for those who created the 200 inch Hale Telescope on Mount Palomar, and the engineering challenges they faced and overcame in achieving that milestone in astronomical instrumentation. The book is as much a biography of George Ellery Hale as it is a story of the giant telescope he brought into being. Hale was a world class scientist: he invented the spectroheliograph, discovered the magnetic fields of sunspots, founded the Astrophysical Journal and to a large extent the field of astrophysics itself, but he also excelled as a promoter and fund-raiser for grand-scale scientific instrumentation. The Yerkes, Mount Wilson, and Palomar observatories would, in all likelihood, not have existed were it not for Hale's indefatigable salesmanship. And this was an age when persuasiveness was all. With the exception of the road to the top of Palomar, all of the observatories and their equipment promoted by Hale were funded without a single penny of taxpayer money. For the Palomar 200 inch, he raised US$6 million in gold-backed 1930 dollars, which in present-day paper money amounts to US$78 million.

It was a very different America which built the Palomar telescope. Not only was it never even thought of that taxpayer money would be diverted to pure science, anybody who wanted to contribute to the project, regardless of their academic credentials, was judged solely on their merits and given a position based upon their achievements. The chief optician who ground, polished, and figured the main mirror of the Palomar telescope (so perfectly that its potential would not be realised until recently thanks to adaptive optics) had a sixth grade education and was first employed at Mount Wilson as a truck driver. You can make of yourself what you have within yourself in America, so they say—so it was for Marcus Brown (p. 279). Milton Humason who, with Edwin Hubble, discovered the expansion of the universe, dropped out of school at the age of 14 and began his astronomical career driving supplies up Mount Wilson on mule trains. You can make of yourself what you have within yourself in America, or at least you could then.

Is there anything Russell W. Porter didn't do? Arctic explorer, founder of the hobby of amateur telescope making, engineer, architect…his footprints and brushstrokes are all over technological creativity in the first half of the twentieth century. And he is much in evidence here: recruited in 1927, he did the conceptual design for most of the buildings of the observatory, and his cutaway drawings of the mechanisms of the telescope demonstrate to those endowed with contemporary computer graphics tools that the eye of the artist is far more important than the technology of the moment.

This book has been out of print for decades, but used copies are generally available at prices (unless you're worried about cosmetics and collectability) comparable to present-day hardbacks. It's as good a read today as it was in 1962. A more recent work about the Palomar telescope is Ronald Florence's 1995 The Perfect Machine .

SO READABLE IN WODBURYs NY TIMES - U R THERE STYLE...

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2017

This is the so readable, by just us plain star folk, book that launched my astronomy and planetarium careers.
Its a wonderful understandable U R There style...

Robert Williams

Great book on the Palomar telescope

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2009

I read this book long ago (1965) when it was recommended to me by my calculus professor. Read it over a weekend and really enjoyed it. It goes into lots of detail about the construction and transportation of the huge mirror. Turns out I will be in the San Diego area around the end of September, 2009, and will take the tour of the observatory.

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