Tuesday, May 05, 2020
Irrelevant connection
In previous item I compared the 1855 Silicon Valley settlers of Kansas with the modern hi-tech corridor. Same corridor, same people.
Running through the navigation from the East Coast to Manhattan reminded me of a distant connection to the Ancestral Clocks set that I just released today.
Colonel George Park had already founded Parkville, Mo, and Park College, before he tried to found Polistra. He failed because NYC Isaac Goodnow had already cornered the market. Park returned to Missouri, and the site of Polistra became a brewery. Now it's just an abandoned rail embankment.
Around 1900, Park College built a serious observatory and used it for instruction and research. Highly unusual for a small Christian college. As I was reading publications from that era, trying to understand the sidereal Equation of Time, I kept bumping into Park's observatory. Many journals had articles about Park or articles written by Park's faculty. The equipment and functions were broader than the Elgin observatory, including a general purpose telescope; but students spent time practicing the same sidereal transits that were Elgin's specialty.
From the 1910 Park College catalog:
The Charles Smith Scott Observatory building is located on an elevation above Mackay building. It is equipped with an eight-inch Warner and Swasey equatorial telescope, having ten eye pieces, magnifying four hundred eight diameters, a filar micrometer, with electrical lighted wires, and a helioscope. It is mounted equatorially and provided with a driving clock. The sidereal transit room is equipped with a three inch sidereal Warner and Swasey transit, properly mounted; a Riefler, break circuit, astronomical clock, and a Warner and Swasey chronograph. The lecture room is ample for the needs of small class computation work.Same equipment as Elgin.
Labels: Answered and unasked, Metrology
¶ 3:04 PM
