No. 2 at Work

Fourteen years ago Clarence Augustus Chant, longtime professor of astrophysics at University of Toronto, gave a talk on a comet, in his usual simple lyrical style, to a group of amateur astronomers. When he had finished a stranger went up and shook his hand warmly.

"I enjoyed that very much, Dr. Chant," the man said. "It made me think how fine it would be if your university had an observatory of its own."

"Oh, indeed it would!" exclaimed the greying astronomer, who had been thinking the same thing for many a year. Born near Toronto, educated at Toronto University and head of its astronomy department for 16 years, he had written scores of books and papers, spent much time spreading his own enthusiasm for the stars. But he had no observatory.

The man who spoke to him was a rich, retired lawyer named David Alexander Dunlap who had made his money not at the bar but by grubstaking prospectors, acquiring shares in the pioneer mines of the Cobalt field. Dr. Chant's talk impressed David Dunlap profoundly. He spoke to his wife about his idea of giving the university an observatory with a powerful telescope. Not long afterward he died.

His widow, however, did not forget his idea. For years she pondered it, conferring at times with Dr. Chant. Finally announcement was made of a gift of $500,000. Together Widow Dunlap and Astronomer Chant looked over the ground near Toronto, found a suitable site on a ridge nine miles from the city. Her son laid a cornerstone. A graceful administration building went up, with three housings for small telescopes on the roof. Fifty yards away a great telescope was installed in a circular building topped by a gleaming copper-clad dome.

Meanwhile, across the U. S. border in Corning, N. Y., famed Corning Glass Co. cast the telescope's most important part--a 5,000-lb. mirror of Pyrex glass. The disk was 74 in. across, a foot thick. After cooling for three months, it was shipped across the Atlantic to Newcastle-on-Tyne, where Sir Howard Grubb, Parsons & Co., spent a year and a half making a polished concave surface true to the ideal paraboloid curve within two-millionths of an inch. Then it traveled back to the new observatory, where it was laboriously removed from its elaborate packing case, coated with silver, mersed into place at the bottom of the 3O-ft. telescope tube.

Last week came Clarence Augustus Chant's 70th birthday. That same day David Dunlap Observatory was officially opened and Dr. Chant officially became its director--master of the world's second largest telescope in service.

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