Observatories

Observatories. Observatories are astronomical institutions equipped with telescopes. In the United States, the 1830s and 1840s marked a landmark for observatory development, with the formation of a national network of astronomers and the founding of the Harvard College Observatory (1839), the Cincinnati Observatory (1843), and the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. (1844). The next sixty years saw a rapid expansion of observatories. By 1904, when George Ellery Hale established the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California, with its hundred‐inch reflecting telescope, the United States had the greatest number of observatories, and the largest telescopes, in the world. Several factors contributed to this growth. Religious believers hoped that study of the heavens would reinforce biblical accounts of creation; for patriots, astronomy supported science, which promised utilitarian benefits to the nation. Big telescopes embodied the prestige of science, so civic boosters and university administrators competed for ownership of the largest telescopes. For example, when the former Wisconsin governor Cadwallader C. Washburn donated an observatory to the University of Wisconsin in 1877, he specified that its refractor telescope must be larger than Harvard's—as it was, by one‐half inch. The rise of business fortunes in the Gilded Age enabled single donors to fund observatories. In 1892, for example, the Chicago financier and street‐railway tycoon Charles Yerkes (1837–1905) gave the Yerkes Observatory, at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to the University of Chicago. The development of astrophysics spurred observatory growth as well, as the spectroscopic analysis of starlight enabled astronomers to study not just the position of celestial bodies, but their composition as well.

In the absence of federal support, the advocates of observatories initially based their funding strategies on business models. The Cincinnati and Harvard observatory projects started as joint‐stock enterprises, to which many patrons donated relatively small sums. By the early twentieth century, observatory builders turned to new philanthropies such as the Carnegie Foundation. The Cold War Era brought increased federal, university, and foundation funding. The 1948 Mount Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California, with its two‐hundred‐inch telescope, was jointly administered by the Carnegie Institution and the California Institute of Technology. The 1958 Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, administered by a consortium of universities, was initially funded by the National Science Foundation. The late twentieth century saw the advent of radio astronomy, which measured radio waves emitted by celestial objects, and space‐based observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990.
See also Education: The Rise of the University; Mitchell, Maria; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations; Physical Sciences; Science: Revolutionary War to World War I; Science: From 1914 to 1945; Science: Since 1945.

Bibliography

Owen Gingerich, ed., Astrophysics and Twentieth‐Century Astronomy to 1950, vol. 4A of The General History of Astronomy, ed. M.A. Hoskin, 1984.
John Lankford , American Astronomy: Community, Career, and Power, 1859–1940, 1997.

Philip Shoemaker