Three great inventors in this country were portrait painters. Fulton, the builder of steamboats, was one of them; Morse, who planned our first electric telegraph was another; and Alvan Clark, who found a way of making the largest and finest telescopes in the world, was another.
Alvan Clark was the son of a farmer. When he was eighteen years old, he set to work to learn engraving and drawing... After a while he began to draw portraits.
Once he sent to Boston to get some brushes to paint with. When the brushes came, there was a piece of newspaper wrapped around them. In this bit of newspaper was an advertisement that engravers were wanted. He went to Boston, and found regular work as an engraver.
When he was not busy engraving, he was studying painting. After some years he became a painter of portraits and miniatures. He lived at Cambridgeport, near Boston.
While Mr. Clark was living at Cambridgeport, his son was at a boarding school. The young boy had become interested in telescopes. He learned that there were two kinds of these instruments. One brought the stars near by showing them in a curved mirror. The other magnified by means of glasses that the light shone through...
Mr. Clark now looked through the tube himself. Sure enough, there was the companion of Sirius never seen before by anybody on the earth. The large glass which had been a year in the making had won its first victory. But Mr. Clark made much larger glasses even than that one. He had nobody to show him how. But by patient thought and hard work (PHW) he had made the greatest telescopes in the world. Medals and other honors were sent to him from many countries.
-Edgar Eggleston, Stories of American Life and Adventure, 201
No comments:
Post a Comment