Never met the guy.
Oh, but what an affect he had on my life... and those of so many others like me.
From sixth grade (mid-1960's) onward, untold hours of my youth were spent totally absorbed in the
Edmund Scientific Catalog. Like a Bible-toting missionary I literally carried it with me
everywhere I went, including with me to school every day and even to our fishing camp on weekends. In those days I literally had no money, no allowance or such, yet so it was that I carefully set aside change from trolley fares and occasional school lunch money and scraped together $4.00 to buy an optical experimenter's kit, the
"Chipped Lenses" kit of factory seconds with a booklet of instructions of how they could be combined to make magnifiers, slide viewers and even simple (
very simple) telescopes. It was from this I built my very first telescope, a
12.2x, 32mm refractor . It had a cardboard tube from the
Cut-Rite waxed paper box, this I painted black on the inside and made a field-stop of the correct size and placement in the tube to cut down on internal reflection; the eyepiece/focuser was one of mom's thread-spools with one end lopped-off so the barrel of which fit just snugly in the end of the tube with enough travel to allow careful focusing. I stole a rickety collapable camera tripod from my brother and contrived an adjustable alt-azimuth mount from some Erector Set parts. Now twelve power was not much more than a common set of binoculars but it was with this scope I first was able to see the tiny but unmistakable roughness at the edges of the crescent Moon, yes, at last, I was seeing
craters...
How I longed, how I
ached, for the possibility of somehow coming into the unspeakable sum of
$29.95 and be able to afford the
Edmund "Space Conqueror", their 3 inch f-10 Newtonian Reflector starter-scope. Nope, Ralphie and the
Red Ryder BB-gun had nothin' on my unrequited suffering over that unattainable Grail of a scope. I never did get it but eventually Santa had mercy on me and gave me my first nice scope, my
Selsi 3" f8 Newtonian Reflector, a much more physically and optically sound scope.
An Edmund "Space Conqueror"
Omigod omigod omigod ! - - Ain't she a beauty?
(No, that wasn't me; just some other guy, lucky b#st@rd...)
As the years passed I was to make more extensive albeit cautious purchases from the Edscorp catalog, perhaps the best were a couple of books and booklets which I still prize and wish were more readily available to kids today: the books from the
Edmund Popular Optics series by
Sam Brown*, an amazing instructional artist and author now 12-15 years passed whose legacy stands as a hugely underrated influence on a couple of generations of DIY telescope tinkerers.
- Eric C.
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* IHMO, the neglect of Sam Brown's legacy has been all but criminal. Let's hope that someone at S&T eventually does a decent spotlight feature on him instead of the sad little postage stamp of an obit they wedged into the news section back when he passed.
