This top page is for the series of articles that John M. Pierce did in the '30s for Everyday Science and Mechanics magazine on the various topics of telescope and optics making.
Pierce was a member of the Springfield Telescope Makers, part of the original group that Stellafane is the home of. This group was a very innovative group of telescope makers that, when World War Two came around, did a lot of optical work for the Armed Forces, many of the amateurs of which did excellent work producing some of the optics that our men in the armed forces used to win that war.
The articles range from a simple reflecting telescope to the art of making flats and other things. Mention is made of different months in the various articles and you will have to refer to the index here in order to ascertain which article is being discussed. I've not changed the verbiage of the articles to conform to these pages although I may in the future. Also note that these articles were written in the middle of the Depression so some of the things like prices are going to be wildly different from those of today along with attitudes towards showing things to groups.
| These first are the magazine articles. | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 - Sept. 1933 | Making the Mirror of a Reflecting Telescope. Part 1. |
| Part 2 - Oct. 1933 | Finishing the Mirror and other parts of the Telescope including Silvering. |
| Part 3 - Nov. 1933 | Telescope Mounts and diagonals. |
| Part 4 - Dec. 1933 | Making Small Lenses. |
| Part 5 - Jan. 1934 | Setting Circles and Finder Telescope. |
| Part 6 - Feb. 1934 | Making a Refractor. |
| Part 7 - Mar. 1934 | The Scout Telescope. |
| Part 8 - Apr. 1934 | Optical flats. |
| Part 9 - May 1934 | Compound Telescopes. |
| Part 10 - June 1934 | Amateur Photography With Your Telescope. |
| Part 11 - July 1934 | Housing the Telescope, Covers and Observatories |
| Part 12 - Sept. 1934 | In the present article, some facts about telescope making are presented. |
| Part 13 - Oct. 1934 | Some Interesting Questions and Their Answers. |
| Part 14 - Nov. 1934 | Spectroscopes. |
| This next part is the Hobbygraf articles. | |
| Hobbygraf #1 | Amateur Lens Making. |
| Hobbygraf #2 | Amateur Eyepiece Making. |
| Hobbygraf #3 | Achromatism and the Making of Refracting Telescopes. |
| Hobbygraf #4 | Making Optically Flat Surfaces. This article was an exact copy of the Part 8 article above |
| Hobbygraf #5 | Cassegrain Telescope. Not found. |
| Hobbygraf #6 | Adjustment of Telescope Parts for a Reflector Telescope |
| Hobbygraf #8 | Blue Print of Mounts Made From Pipe Fittings. Blueprints not found. |
| Hobbygraf #9 | The Herschelian Telescope. |
| Hobbygraf #10 | Reminder Sheet, Formulae, etc. Not found. |
| Hobbygraf #11 | How To Make a Reflecting Telescope. This is a minor rewrite of the #1 magazine article from the magazine to which I direct you. |
| Hobbygraf #13 | How to Design a Richest Field Telescope. Not found. |
| Hobbygraf #14 | This is a list of drawings for Equatorial Mounts. |
| Hobbygraf #15 | Diagonals and Diagonal Supports. |
It will be noted that the articles are not in their original format that was in the magazine - multi-columns can be done in HTML (as done here in this comment) but the requirement really isn't there as that would make copying the pages to a word processor for printing would be more difficult. The images were captured from the scans of the various pages of the magazine and, to some | degree, cleaned up so that the text in the images are, to some degree, readable. Some of the images weren't reproduced as they were basically so poor that it really wasn't worth it to bother. As a result, there are a few places (usually noted at when the image is mentioned) where the images weren't reproduced in this set of pages. Have fun reading and following these articles. |