Monday, December 17, 2007

A Belated Thank You to Norman W. Edmund

In 1963 I purchased a three inch reflector from Edmund Scientific Company. This telescope included a simple fork type equatorial mount on a wooden tripod, a simple finder scope, an eyepiece that provided a magnification of 60×, and a Barlow lens in case I needed more magnification.

The telescope was delivered a few hours before we left for a two week vacation to Sussex County, New Jersey not far from Stokes State Forest. This being many years before the developers discovered the area, seeing was always excellent up there. During this vacation I spent many hours looking at planets and trying to find some of the objects listed in my dad’s Norton’s Star Atlas.

I was a real novice but quickly discovered the joys of astronomy. Double stars were new to me and though they seem somewhat boring to me now they were generally easy targets and provided me with lots of experience in finding objects in the sky. For those unfamiliar with the term, a double star is simply two stars whose images are so close together that they appear as one with the naked eye.

The excellent seeing and my youthful eyesight made finding the globular cluster M13 in Hercules a cinch. The ring nebula M57 in Lyra was more challenging, but I found it. I quickly learned to adjust my expectations since I was looking through a 3 inch telescope at objects that I had only seen before in photographs taken with enormous instruments such as the 200 inch telescope at Mt. Palomar.

Some time later I purchased a copy of Webb’s Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes which provided information about just about everything worth seeing using a small instrument. More and more astronomy filled my waking hours. The only books I read were on astronomy and I began to believe I would eventually make a career out of it.

In 1966 my dad recognized my passion for observing and decided to help me out with an upgrade. He drove me to the Edmund Scientific store in Barrington, New Jersey to buy the parts needed to upgrade to a 4¼ inch instrument. Our shopping cart included the mirror, mirror mount, a larger equatorial mounting, aluminum tube, diagonal mirror, new finder scope, and a rack and pinion focuser. I can’t be absolutely sure but I think this was the trip on which I purchased my very own updated Norton’s Star Atlas. This book still sits proudly in my bookcase and gets used at least monthly. But the real prize was getting to spend a few hours in the coolest store I had ever been in before or since.

Walking into the store I immediately noticed the hundreds of radiometers on my left with their rapidly spinning vanes making a pleasant tinkling sound. A few meters away the store had mounted a working World War II vintage Japanese periscope. Looking through it provided the prelude to a journey of discovery. An entire room filled with surplus items including aerial cameras, lenses, mirrors, magnets, and other stuff lay before me. Shelves and tables filled with one of a kind items cast their hypnotic spell over me. I still recall that trip to Edmund Scientific many years ago. I also recall when I took my own boys there. Even though their interests are very different from mine they still thought visiting the store was a marvelous experience.

Over the years I acquired dozens of items from Edmund Scientific and spent many hundreds of hours entertaining myself with them. Upon reflection I realize how influential all this exposure to the tools of science was to my choice of careers. I still have a lot of the things I purchased there including magnets, polarizers, tools, lenses, and books. I still use the meter stick that was a part of a very inexpensive optical bench bought there.
I am pretty sure Edmund Scientific changed the nature of their business not too long ago, selling off everything except their industrial optics business. Times change and business decisions are made for very good reasons. The important thing is that Edmund Scientific Company was there when I needed it. For this reason I am sending here and now a big thank you to Norman W. Edmund who founded the company that made my journey into science a little bit easier.