Editing Perkins Observatory (section)

==Early history==
[[Image:2012sept WesleyanUniversityStudentObservatory000.jpg|thumb|right|320px|The old building (now Ohio Wesleyan University Student Observatory). It was here Perkins actually worked most of his career, as he had died by the time the new observatory was finished in the 1920s.]]
The observatory is named for [[Hiram Perkins]], a professor of [[mathematics]] and [[astronomy]] at the [[Ohio Wesleyan University]] in [[Delaware, Ohio]] from 1857 to 1907. A devoutly religious [[Methodist]] and a man of deep convictions, he was also known as an uncompromising and demanding instructor.Perkins' believed that “The public should have an opportunity to see with a great telescope the objects such an instrument reveals and by so doing ‘Learn to love God and serve Him more acceptably.’"<ref name='p553'>{{Cite journal|url=https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1929PA.....37..553C|title=1929PA.....37..553C Page 553|journal=Popular Astronomy|bibcode=1929PA.....37..553C |access-date=2019-12-10 |last1=Crump |first1=Clifford C. |year=1929 |volume=37 |page=553 }}</ref>

Perkins graduated from Ohio Wesleyan in 1857, just nine years after the university was founded. He was immediately offered a position on the faculty. Shortly thereafter he married Caroline Barkdull, a graduate from OWU's Women's College.

In 1861 Perkins temporarily left OWU when the [[American Civil War]] began. He intended to enlist in the [[Union Army]], but was deemed physically unfit for service. (At 6’4” tall and 97 pounds, his students referred to him as “the human skeleton.”) Perkins then returned to his family [[Pig farming|hog farm]] and worked to help feed the troops. ([[Salt pork]] was a staple military food at the time.) Applying his mathematical skills to the science of pork production, by war's end he had amassed an impressive (for the time) fortune. After the war Perkins returned to his university teaching position and lived a very frugal life on his small salary. Meanwhile, his shrewd business investments caused his fortune to multiply considerably.

In 1896 Professor Perkins donated the funds necessary to build the first of two observatories to bear his name. It is located on West William Street in [[Delaware, Ohio]] right next to Hiram and Caroline's former residence.  This original “Perkins Astronomical Observatory” later had its name changed to “the Student Observatory” when the second Perkins Observatory was built a quarter century later.

Perkins's marriage never produced children. His older sister never married. Therefore, toward the end of his life Perkins realized he had no living relatives to whom to leave his fortune. Retiring in 1907, Professor Perkins applied himself to the creation of “an astronomical observatory of importance.” It was his desire that this second observatory be a place where cutting-edge research could be conducted. It took 15 years to find an appropriate location and secure the necessary funding (Perkins himself provided about $250,000, the equivalent of roughly $3.8 million dollars in 2019, of the approximately $350,000 budget).

Construction began in 1923 with the frail 90-year-old professor as Guest of Honor at the groundbreaking ceremony. Within a year, however, both Hiram and Caroline Perkins had died. Neither saw the completion of the new observatory.

The building features a reproduction of [[Robert Le Lorrain|Robert Le Lorrain's]] (the original article in 'Popular Astronomy' misidentified him as Robert de Lorain) [https://www.wga.hu/art/l/le_lorra/horsesun.jpg "Apollo Watering the Horses of the Sun"] over the front entrance and a frieze of antique marble panels around the building bears the names of seventeen astronomers:<ref name='p553' />
{| class="wikitable" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: none;"

|[[Pythagoras]] || [[Aristarchus of Samos|Aristarchus]] || [[Eratosthenes]] || [[Hipparchus]] 
|-
|[[Ptolemy]] || [[Copernicus]] || [[Tycho Brahe]] || [[Galileo]] 
|-
|[[Kepler]] || [[Isaac Newton|Newton]]  || [[Laplace]] || [[William Herschel|Herschel]] 
|-
|[[Joseph von Fraunhofer|Fraunhofer]] || [[William Huggins|Huggins]] || [[Simon Newcomb|Newcomb]] || [[Jacobus Kapteyn|Kapteyn]]  
|-
|[[Edward Emerson Barnard|Barnard]] 
|}

The building and telescope mount were completed in less than two years. The work was done by the Warner and Swasey Company of Cleveland, Ohio. (Warner and Swasey also built other observatories and telescopes, including [[Yerkes Observatory]] near [[Chicago]], [[Theodore Jacobsen Observatory]] in [[Seattle, Washington]], [[McCormick Observatory]] in [[Charlottesville, Virginia]], and (of course) the [[Warner and Swasey Observatory]] in [[Cleveland, Ohio]].) The building included a lecture room, library, office space, walk-in vault, small bedroom for visiting astronomers, and spacious work rooms and metal fabrication shops.

However, Professor Perkins had stipulated that the telescope mirror be cast in the [[United States]]. At this time no U.S. companies had experience in [[casting]] such a large mirror, so the [[National Bureau of Standards]] agreed to take on the project. It can be argued that casting of this mirror launched the optical glass industry in the United States.

The first four attempts to cast the mirror were unsuccessful. The fifth attempt, using a different technique, created a {{convert|69|in|m|adj=on}} blank (somewhat larger than originally intended). Three years of grinding and polishing followed. When installed in the [[telescope mount]] in 1931, it was the third largest mirror in the world. (Prior to installation of the {{convert|69|in|m|adj=on}} mirror, the observatory used a {{convert|60|in|m|adj=on}} mirror on loan from [[Harvard University]].)