Rediscovery of a Classic

Thirty-five years ago Fred Schleipman, engineer and avid amateur astronomer, photographed a solar eclipse in Mauretania with an expedition of like minded individuals. There he befriended Bert Willard, an optical engineer, fellow stargazing enthusiast and member of the venerable Springfield Telescope Makers of Springfield, Vermont. Prior to joining the club, Schleipman visited their museum where he saw their collection of antique telescopes and rare documents. Among the treasures was an original Porter Garden Telescope. Schleipman was instantly smitten, and so began the dream to reintroduce, from obscurity, a historic and beautiful instrument.

The Porter Garden Telescope is a masterful marriage of art and science. Fluid in stature, the piece looks more like a ginger leaf than a telescope. Its Art Nouveau lines were designed to grace luxury gardens, solaria and formal spaces, to be admired as statuary as well as used as a telescope and sundial. As the optics are quite easily removed, the bronze sculpture can safely remain outdoors, aging beautifully over the years as an elegant addition to any garden landscape.

Russell W Porter, father of amateur astronomy in America, founder of the Springfield Telescope Makers and instructor at MIT, designed the garden telescope in the 1920s. Little did he realize that his innovations in design would later apply to the 200 inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Mountain Observatory, which he helped design. Nor did he anticipate that his masterpiece would find a home in the nation's glorious attic, the Smithsonian. Or, finally, that a fellow Vermonter of similar passions would resurrect his artistry so many years later.

Schleipman's crusade posed many hurdles, the first of which was to find an original, from less than twenty known, which he could borrow for patterning. The Springfield Telescope Makers had been approached in that regard many times, but in each instance had denied the request. However, in the Fall of 2006, the stars aligned for Schleipman and the STM agreed, convinced that Schleipman would produce an instrument worthy of their endorsement.

An original procured, the more daunting technological hurdles loomed: engineering, patterning, casting and machining. It was at this point that Schleipman set about finding the craftsmen necessary for success. He knew he was looking for skills that are disappearing, and scoured the continent for a high-caliber staff of artisans and engineers. They all surfaced in New England.

Dave Nugent, the pattern maker, and Lincoln Charles, the foundryman, whose joint work embellishes the homes of global luminaries and many government buildings, including the Japanese Diet, are the talents behind the patterns and castings. The optics are designed and inspected with obsessive accuracy by Bert Willard and Jim Daley, both optical engineers at a national laboratory.

Finally, Schleipman machines the castings. The moving parts of the instrument rotate and slide with the quiet gravitas of a bank vault door. Details include knurling, with burnished highlights that yield the look of a scientific instrument from the 1700s.

Schleipman commented that working with the castings, though they are new, is a bit like restoring a Rembrandt. He is reverential of the craftsmanship reflected in the bronze pieces, and is thankful to have found skilled artisans capable of such delicate work in an age when this caliber of artistry is disappearing.