This gave them a little peep into the heavens, but was really only a tantalization.
They set to work making a telescope-tube out of pasteboard. It was about eighteen feet long, and the "board" was made in the genuine pasteboard way—by pasting sheet after sheet of paper together until the substance was as thick and solid as a board.
So this brother and sister worked at all odd hours pasting sheet after sheet of paper—old letters, old books—with occasional strips of cloth to give extra strength. Lenses were bought in London, and at last our precious musical pair, with astronomy for their fad, had the satisfaction of getting a view of Saturn that showed the rings.
It need not be explained that astronomical observations must be made out of doors. Further, the whole telescope must be out of doors so as to get an even temperature. This is a fact that the excellent astronomers of the Mikado of Japan did not know until very recently. It seems they constructed a costly telescope and housed it in a costly observatory-house, with an aperture barely large enough for the big telescope to be pointed out at the heavens. Inside, the astronomer had a comfortable fire, for the season was then Winter and the weather cold. But the wise man could see nothing and the belief was getting abroad that the machine was bewitched, or that their Yankee brothers had lawsonized the buyers, when our own David P. Todd, of Amherst, happened along and informed them that the heat-waves which arose from their warm room caused a perturbation in the atmosphere which made star-gazing impossible. At once they made their house over, with openings so as to insure an even temperature, and Prince Fusiyama Noguchi wrote to Professor Todd, making him a Knight of the Golden Dragon on special order of the heaven-born Mikado.
The Herschels knew enough of the laws of heat and refraction to realize they must have an even temperature, but they forgot that pasteboard was porous.
One night they left their telescope out of doors, and a sudden shower transformed the straight tube into the arc of a circle. All attempts to straighten it were vain, so they took out the lenses and went to work making a tube of copper. In this, brother, sister and genius—which is concentration and perseverance—united to overcome the innate meanness of animate and inanimate things. A failure was not a failure to them—it was an opportunity to meet a difficulty and overcome it.
The partial success of the new telescope aroused the brother and the sister to fresh exertions. The work had been begun as a mere recreation—a rest from the exactions of the public which they diverted and amused with their warblings, concussions and vibrations.
They were still amateur astronomers, and the thought that they would ever be anything else had not come to them. But they wanted to get a better view of the heavens—a view through a Newtonian reflecting-telescope. So they counted up their savings and decided that if they could get some instrument-maker in London to make them a reflecting-telescope six feet long, they would be perfectly willing to pay him fifty pounds for it. This study of the skies was their only form of dissipation, and even if it was a little expensive it enabled them to escape the Pump-Room rabble and flee boredom and introspection. A hunt was taken through London, but no one could be found who would make such an instrument as they wanted for the price they could afford to pay. They found, however, an amateur lens-polisher who offered to sell his tools, materials and instruments for a small sum. After consultation, the brother and sister bought him out. So at the price they expected to pay for a telescope they had a machine-shop on their hands.
The work of grinding and polishing lenses is a most delicate business. Only a person of infinite patience and persistency can succeed at it.
In Allegheny, Pennsylvania, lives John Brashear, who, by his own efforts, assisted by a noble wife, graduated from a rolling-mill and became a maker of telescopes.