In 1865 Hugh Robert Rump of Wells Next to the Sea, Norfolk purchased an equatorial mounting on an iron pillar from Thomas Cooke & Sons.
I don’t know what kind of telescope he had, what kind of observing he did or whether or not it was a Cooke telescope.
The Royal Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London ordered from Thomas Cooke & Sons a 5 inch telescope. There were 5 eyepieces and it was mounted on an equatorial mounting.
In 1865 the Royal Astronomical Society at Somerset House, Strand, London ordered a 4.25 inch telescope from Thomas Cooke &Sons. It was mounted on an iron pillar and had a driving clock.
August is both a supermoon and blue moon month, and we can also look forward to the Perseids, one of the most important meteor showers of the year.
There will be two full moons this month, falling on August 1 and the 31. The second full moon in a month is referred to nowadays as a ‘Blue Moon’. The Moon takes around twenty-nine and a half days to orbit the Earth once and except for February all months have either thirty or thirty-one days, meaning it is possible to have two full moons in a calendar month.
This use of the term ‘blue moon’ only goes back to the 1940s when a letter, sent to the American astronomy magazine ‘Sky and Telescope’ which incidentally is still published, asked the question ‘what is a blue moon?’. The answer was that it is the second full moon in a calendar month. The publishers of the magazine, realising that their answer was unproven, retracted their original statement. However, it was too late; the genie was out of the bottle, and for the last seventy-five years everyone has accepted this definition.
I have my own theory about the term ‘blue moon’. Each month I give the name of the next full moon, and as I often say, these names go back to the times of the monastic period in Britain around 1,000 years ago. The monks, who were amongst the cleverest people around during the middle ages due to their vast monastic libraries, knew full well that in some years there were thirteen full moons rather the normal twelve.
Monks liked order in their lives. They kept diaries and special dates were always marked in red ink; you may have have heard of the phrase ‘a red letter day’ which is a monastic saying going back over 1,000 years. I just wonder if, when this thirteenth full moon occurred, it was marked in diaries in blue ink as a source of irritation because it messed up a very orderly system. I once checked the reference library in York minster without success, but a future researcher will check the Vatican library and discover a monk’s diary with a full moon marked in blue ink!
In August we will see the second of the four supermoons visible in 2023. When the Moon rises on August 1 and 31 it will be closer to the Earth than normal, and consequently will appear to be 7% larger than usual. This will make it a wonderful sight. Of course, cloud can spoil the occasion, but with two supermoons in August and another in September, we would be very unlucky not to see at least one of the three.
The average distance between the Moon and the Earth is 238,900 miles, (384,472km). When the moon is closer than that we have a supermoon. The August 1 supermoon will be 222,158 miles (357,530km) while the August 31 supermoon will be slightly closer at 222,043 miles (357,344km).
Join me, Martin Lunn tonight and every Monday evening from 7.00 pm-9.00 pm on the Astronomy Show, probably the only regular astronomy show on any radio station in the country.
I will take my weekly look at the night sky and look at all the latest news in astronomy. There will be the astronomical anniversaries this week plus the A-Z of Constellations and Astronomy in Yorkshire - God’s Own Country.
The Astronomy Show every Monday evening only on Drystone Radio 102 and 103.5 FM the Astronomy show can be heard live on line at www.drystoneradio.com and can also be heard later on the Drystone Radio Podcast.
In 1864 Dr William T Radford of Sid Mont, Sidmouth, Devon purchased from Thomas Cooke & Sons an equatorial mounting for his French 4.25 inch Steinheil telescope. He also purchased in 1865 two Cooke & Sons eyepieces for above telescope.
Charles Pritchard FRAS (1808-1893) Hurst Hill on the Isle of Wight purchased from Thomas Cooke & Sons in 1865 an equatorial mounting for his Cooke telescope. I can only assume he wanted to upgrade the mounting for the telescope he had .
In the late 1850s Pritchard purchased from Cooke & Sons a 6.75 inch telescope.
Pritchard was elected Savilian professor of Astronomy at Oxford University in 1870.
In 1882 he undertook the study of the brightness of 2,784 stars, this was an important project at the time and for this work he was presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1886.
If you think of Worcester Sauce you may think of Lea & Perrins, what you might struggle to find is a link with astronomy. However in 1867 James Dyson Perrins (1823-1887) purchased a 3.25 inch educational telescope from Thomas Cooke & Sons York.
James Dyson Perrins was the son of William Henry Perrins who joint founded the company in 1837 with John Wheeley Lea. He would help run the company after the death of his father.
James was keen to increase the educational institutions in Worcester. He also supported the Public Library and many charitable institutions in Worcester.
As is often the case I have no further information on what happened tom the telescope.
Algernon Peckover FRAS (1803-1894) was a banker from Wisbech, Cambridgeshire and in 1864 he purchased a Thomas Cooke & Sons 5.5 inch telescope.
There were 5 astronomical eyepieces and it came with a plain equatorial mounting. The cost was £130 (today 2023 that would be £21,100).
In 1865 he purchased a driving clock for the equatorial.
In 1865 the Rev James Parkes of Adelaide Street, Blackpool purchased a Barlow lens in a tube from Thomas Cooke & Sons York.
I don’t know what kind of telescope he had or which church he was vicar of as there appears to be more than one church in Adelaide Street in the 19th century.
On 23rd April 1858 Dr John Pringle Nichol (1804-1859) FRAS FRSE purchased for Glasgow University an object glass 6.5 inches aperture for the transit instrument.
The old glass to be improved and made worthy of a rough equatorial mounting.
In 1856 he was appointed Professor of Practical Astronomy at the University of Glasgow.
John Pringle was born in Brechin in Forfarshire and educated at King’s College Aberdeen. Although he studied with a view to entrenching the church it was science road he would follow.
There had been plans to build a bridge across Sydney harbour since 1815 but nothing really happened in the 19th century. Although there were plans to build a bridge in 1914 World War stopped all those ideas.
After World War 1 tenders were put out in 1921 for companies to put forward ideas for the bridge, in 1922 Cooke and Sons of York designed a new type of Level which would be used to help the engineers construct the bridge. This level enabled a difference in height of a quarter of an inch of any two lines at a dissonance of one mile to be determined.
This order was placed before Cooke and Sons became Cooke Troughton and Simms later in 1922.
Eventually in 1924 the Australian government awarded the contract to Dorman Long and Co Ltd of Middlesbrough who would also build the Tyne Bridge at Newcastle upon Tyne. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was formally opened in March 1932.
If you have ever been over the Sydney Harbour Bridge just remember that without the superb optical equipment of Thomas Cooke and Sons of York it would probably never have been built.
Join me, Martin Lunn tonight and every Monday evening from 7.00 pm-9.00 pm on the Astronomy Show, probably the only regular astronomy show on any radio station in the country.
I will take my weekly look at the night sky and look at all the latest news in astronomy. There will be the astronomical anniversaries this week plus the A-Z of Constellations and Astronomy in Yorkshire - God’s Own Country.
The Astronomy Show every Monday evening only on Drystone Radio 102 and 103.5 FM the Astronomy show can be heard live on line at www.drystoneradio.com and can also be heard later on the Drystone Radio Podcast.
By the mid 1930s the various Thomas Cooke buildings in York were old and small and dispersed over different sites. It was decided to concentrate on one new site. In 1937 managers looked for a new site and decided on a site on Haxby Road about 1.6 miles from the railway station.
The new site opened n 1939 and quickly production turned from civilian to military optical products. Demand was such that by 1943 seven floors of the nearby Rowntree's factory was taken over and the original workforce of 995 increased to a peak number of employees of 3,036 of these 1,184 were women.
After World War 2, the Haxby Road works returned to producing microscopes and surveying equipment. In 1963 the firm was taken over by Vickers Instruments and in 1989 it had moved into the production of electronic and software equipment and was sold to the American firm Bio Rad Measurements.
With the downturn in work the Haxby Road works was closed and demolished inn 2008.
Two Cooke telescopes have just been completed for the Government of South Australia for the upcoming Transit of Venus in December 1874.
One telescope is an 8 inch telescope that will be used by the government astronomer at Adelaide. The telescope is based on the example exhibited by Cooke and Sons at the International Exhibition in London in 1871.
The instrument has been viewed by astronomers from the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London who were very much impressed by what they saw.
A second telescope is also being set out to Australia, also to the Australian Government and its destination will be Melbourne. It is a smaller 4 inch telescope.
At about 4.00 pm Mr Noton, a plumber of little Stonegarte in this city and his son were preceding up Stonegate in their pony carriage when their horse took fright. The pony and carriage set off at full speed, Mr Noton was thrown clear into a shop and was seriously injured. Mr Noton jnr also fell out but held onto the reigns, the carriage righted itself and the pony took off again with young Mr Noton being dragged along the ground. The pony and carriage then crashed into several crates of crockery ware and then demolished several squares of glass in the window of the shop of Mr Cook the Optician.
Mr Cook was unhurt and apart from the damage to the windows there was no serious damage done to the scientific instrument in his shop. The history of telescope making in York could have taken a very different course has the damage caused by the runaway horse proved to be more serious to Cook’s shop.
The pony and carriage finally came to rest when it got stuck at a lamp post, the carriage was badly damaged the pony was seemed OK. It is believed that the injuries that were suffered by Mr Noton senior would not prove to be fatal.
N.V Ginori in Florence, Italy, visual observations of the spectrum of Nova Cygni 1920 were made with a McClean star spectroscope mounted on a 9 inch Cooke equatorial refractor.
The spectrum was continuous with dark H/3 just visible. Subsequent observations on August 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, September 1st, 3rd, 8th, and 11th record the changes in intensity of the hydrogen and enhanced metallic lines.
Nova Cygnus was discovered by William Denning in Bristol on August 20th 1920 at magnitude 3.5.
Dr.. William Evan MacFarlane was born on the island of New Caledonia which is located in the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Fiji. He was born in 1866 the son of a missionary.
He was educated in England and entered the medical profession and after first practising in Edinburgh moved to China. However due to civil unrest and then the war with Japan MacFarlane returned to England. He then served with the British army during the Boer war as a medical officer.
In 1903 he obtained the appointment as Government Medical Officer to a large mining district in North Queensland, Australia where he remained to his death. Outside his medical career he was very keen on astronomy.
He took charge of the Walsh Hospital at Irvinebank, North Queensland in 1906 where he also installed on Hospital Hill an observatory which housed a Thomas Cooke 7in telescope.
He observed Nova Aquila 1918 which he named ‘The Vulcan Star’, which the nova is still known locally as. This was probably named after The Vulcan Mine, a tin mine adjacent to his home and observatory.
He died on August 18th 1919 from influenza, he never married. It was reported in the Cairns Post that the funeral of William MacFarlane was the largest and most impressive ever seen in Irvinbank with 200 mourners.
Join me, Martin Lunn tonight and every Monday evening from 7.00 pm-9.00 pm on the Astronomy Show, probably the only regular astronomy show on any radio station in the country.
I will take my weekly look at the night sky and look at all the latest news in astronomy. There will be the astronomical anniversaries this week plus the A-Z of Constellations and Astronomy in Yorkshire - God’s Own Country.
The Astronomy Show every Monday evening only on Drystone Radio 102 and 103.5 FM the Astronomy show can be heard live on line at www.drystoneradio.com and can also be heard later on the Drystone Radio Podcast.
We regret to hear that a serious accident happened to Lord Rosse on the 19th March 1864, while superintending the felling o some trees at Parsontown, one of which in falling, struck him and rendered him insensible for a quarter on an hour. It is reported that he is progressing favourably.
On Saturday evening the 3rd January 1863, a respectable clerical looking man, called at Mr Slater’s in Euston Road, and inspected the telescope which that gentleman exhibits in front of his house. He was particularly interested in the mountings, and also in the manner of fitting the object glass into their cells. After making several remarks on the grandeur of the Science of Astronomy, the wonderful works of the creator &c, he proposed to give Mr Slater’s assistant 5 shillings and sent him into the house to get change for a sovereign, at the same time asking Mr Slater to be so good as to call a cab for him. This was done, and he drove off “to the Paddington Station”. Scarcely was he out of sight, when it was discovered that the object glass of the telescope, which had elicited so much praise was missing. In great haste Mr Slater pursued with a Hansom and met the cab returning, the driver stating that the gentleman had suddenly recollected an engagement, and had got out in Portland Place. The object glass was one of 6 inches in diameter, in preparation for the Rev Professor Sellwyn.
Thomas Slater 1817-1889 was an instrument maker based in London
In 1859 Edward Moore of Queens College Oxford purchased a 3 inch telescope from Thomas Cooke.
I have no further details on either the man or the telescope
In 1859 W. Mitchell of St.John's Wood , London purchased a 3.5 inch telescope from Thomas Cooke. The telescope had a focal length of 4 feet and 4 inches, plus 4 astronomical and 1 terrestrial eyepieces, It cam with an equatorial mount. The cost was £60. In 2023 prices that would be £9.650.
I have no other information at the moment about W Mitchell.
Henry Mann FRAS (1806-1879) Spen Bank, Cleckheaton, W. Yorkshire purchased in 1867 a 4.5 inch Thomas Cooke telescope for £100 (in 2023 that would be equivalent to £14,300).
I am not aware of any astronomical observations he made with the telescope
Apart from his interest in astronomy he was also a distinguished musician.
Join me, Martin Lunn tonight and every Monday evening from 7.00 pm-9.00 pm on the Astronomy Show, probably the only regular astronomy show on any radio station in the country.
I will take my weekly look at the night sky and look at all the latest news in astronomy. There will be the astronomical anniversaries this week plus the A-Z of Constellations and Astronomy in Yorkshire - God’s Own Country.
The Astronomy Show every Monday evening only on Drystone Radio 102 and 103.5 FM the Astronomy show can be heard live on line at www.drystoneradio.com and can also be heard later on the Drystone Radio Podcast.
The Rev Edward Litton was appointed rector at St. Andrew the Apostle Church, Naunton, Cheltenham in 1860. He was a noted writer on theology and a friend of Revd Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) who is said to have stayed several times at the rectory.
In 1866 the Rev Litton purchased a 4.5 inch Thomas Cooke telescope with 4 astronomical eyepieces. I wonder if Lewis Carroll ever had the chance to look through this telescope?
In 1865 William Ladd (1815-1885) of London purchased a 4 inch telescope from Thomas Cooke together with 6 eyepieces for £85 and 10 shillings.
He brought and sold scientific instruments from 1843-1882, I don't know if the Cooke telescope was for his personal use or for re sale..
Ladd experimented with electricity and developed new devices. From the early 1860s onward electrical apparatus were a big part of his retail business.
John Phillips 1800-1874 was an eminent geologist. He would become the first keeper of the Yorkshire Museum which was built by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in 1829, he also had a great interest in astronomy and photography.
He brought a Thomas Cooke 6.25 inch telescope in 1852 which he set up in the Museum Gardens and in 1853 took some of the earliest photographs of the Moon. One very early one was taken on July 15th 1853. He was a keen observer of the Moon and the Sun. He used the 6.25 inch Cooke to observe both objects.
He left the Yorkshire Museum in York around 1854 and moved to work at the University of Oxford firstly as deputy reader in geology and then in 1856 he became professor of Geology.
He was still using the 6.25 inch in the early 1860s, but as with so many Victorian telescopes after his death in 1874 it just disappeared and I have no idea what happened to it.
Comet Tebbutt which was discovered by the Australian astronomer John Tebbutt graced the skies during the summer of 1861 over Europe.
Among the people who observed this comet was Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the future King Edward VII, the telescope they used was a 5.25 inch refractor made by Thomas Cooke & Sons of York
In a 7-inch Cooke the star seemed to have half its spurious disk projected, but, when the central point of the disk touched the limb, the star instantly vanished.
This was in reference to the occultation of Aldebaran by the Moon.
This was the 7 inch Cooke that was attached to the 20 inch reflector owned originally by Isaac Roberts.
T H E DURHAM UNIVERSITY OBSERVATORY.—Mr. Harold Thomson, F.R.A.S., was appointed Hon. Director of the Observatory in succession to the late Col. Ε. H. Grove-Hills, F.R.S. In this report, he reviews the equipment and work of the observatory.
The Almucantar and the Zenith Telescope are not in present use, and indeed the bad weather conditions prevailing in Durham almost preclude their use.
The 6.4 inch refractor, used for many years by the late Mr. Charles Grover at Sir Wilfrid Peek's Observatory, has been refigured by Messrs. Cooke, Troughton and Simms, York, and the object-glass will now divide double stars down to the theoretical limit; and whilst this was at the works, the Observer made use of the Hon. Director's 5-inch Cooke refractor, and 220 observations of variable stars have been reduced and will be forwarded to the Variable Star Section of the BAA . for inclusion in the Memoirs.
Mr. Sargent also secured on May 7 an occultation of the Star BD—14°-4045 by the planet Jupiter and his results have been forwarded to Mr. L. J. Comrie at the Sproul Observatory U.S.A , .
