Sky and Telescope - May 2017 - 25

inspired Russell Porter, back from the Arctic, toward his new
interest. Porter befriended the enthusiastic young Frederick, and in 1914 Porter hosted the ﬁrst SPA Convention in
his own home in Maine. It was a small affair, but a sign of
greater things to come.

Flowering in Vermont

SPRING FIELD TELESCOPE M A K ERS

p STARS Albert G. Ingalls (left) and Russell W. Porter pose in the early
1930s with a reflector on an equatorial "Springfield mount" of Porter's
design. It kept the eyepiece at a fixed position, at the cost of three mirror
reflections and a high counterweight.

the son of a farmer and living in Madison, Wisconsin. He
was not only an accomplished telescope maker but also a
very good observer, scrutinizing the planets and discovering
a number of comets.
In 1907, when Mellish was about 21, the new American
magazine Popular Mechanics published an article by him on
building telescopes. By the time he was 26, Mellish had made
increasingly large reﬂectors with apertures of 7½, 8½, 10, 11,
12, and 16 inches. A letter Mellish published in the English
Mechanic in 1912 shows him proudly standing in a Wisconsin ﬁeld by his massive, long-focus 16-inch.
Mellish also became secretary of the Society for Popular
Astronomy (SPA) when it was formed in 1909 by Frederick C.
Leonard - who was 13 years old. Perhaps because of his age,
Leonard wasn't afraid to rufﬂe establishment feathers. The
prevailing view at the time was that amateurs ought to work
on behalf of professionals, and that to form a society of their
own would interfere with the more learned bodies. Leonard's
society lasted only until 1918, but by then it had set the mold
for future amateur astronomical societies in America. Leonard was a proliﬁc writer from an early age, and his articles
and letters were a common feature of the English Mechanic.
Meanwhile, a 1910 article in Popular Mechanics had

By that time Porter was 42 years old. Born in Springﬁeld,
Vermont, in 1871, he was educated as an engineer and architect but his dream was to reach the undiscovered North Pole.
To this end he participated in six arctic expeditions, generally as a surveyor and artist. Most of these ventures ended
in shipwreck or other calamity. The Ziegler-Fiala Expedition
of 1903-05, whose crew was stranded for two years on the
northernmost island of the Franz Josef Archipelago, ﬁnally
ended Porter's polar ambitions. He tried to set up an artists'
colony in Port Clyde, Maine, but it failed. He did, however,
marry the local postmistress, Alice Marshall.
It seems that while recovering from an illness in the
home of his friend James Hartness, an amateur astronomer
and president of the Jones & Lamson Machine Company of
Springﬁeld, Porter passed time skimming through some back
copies of magazines. Two articles from 1910 caught his attention: one by John Mellish on telescope making in Scientiﬁc
American, and one on mirror making by Leo Holcomb in
Popular Astronomy. In 1913 Hartness sent Porter two 16-inch
glass blanks and some notes. Porter used these to make his
"Polar Reﬂector," which he described in Popular Astronomy
in 1916. It is thought that Porter used a book titled Glass
Working by Heat and Abrasion, by Paul Hasluck, for very basic
instruction on mirror making and testing. But it was published in 1899, and he would have had to make signiﬁcant
adjustments for newer grinding and polishing materials.
Porter moved back to Springﬁeld in 1919 to work at Jones &
Lamson. With his and Hartness' telescope-making experience,
the company's facilities, and its technically skilled workforce,
all the ingredients for something special were in place.
In 1920 Porter recruited 14 of the company's workers
and a local schoolteacher into a series of evening classes on
telescope making. Many of the group completed Newtonian
reﬂectors and, in 1923, they formed the Springﬁeld Telescope
Makers. That year Porter wrote an article for Popular Astronomy describing the group and their work. He also provided
some hilltop land, where the men built a clubhouse and
named it Stellafane, "shrine to the stars." The club invited
visitors and other groups to its site. In 1926 it hosted the ﬁ rst
Stellafane Convention, which continues annually to this day.

Going National
We now turn to another key player in the story. In the photo
of that ﬁrst Stellafane Convention on page 22, Albert G.
Ingalls stands at far right next to Porter. Ingalls had become
an editor at Scientiﬁc American in 1923 and apparently saw
Porter's many articles in Popular Astronomy. The two met in
1925 and started the long association and friendship that
s k y a n d t e l e s c o p e .c o m

* MAY 2017

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