Exploration of Veblen House history got me interested in the history of my father and his colleagues in physics and astronomy, which includes some Nobel Peace Prize winners and pioneering women:
There are two scientists named Albert that I know of who loved to sail. One was Albert Einstein, who discovered his now legendary love for sailing at the age of 18 in Switzerland, around the time he was hatching his revolutionary theories of the universe.
What made the two telescopes special was the material used to make the mirrors. Ordinary glass can expand or contract, depending on the temperature inside the observatory's dome. But Owens Illinois in Toledo came up with a glass-ceramic material called CERVIT that could be ground to a precise shape like regular glass, but would not warp as the temperature changed. This zero-expansion quality allowed the telescopes to capture more precise images in the heat of summer and cold of winter.
For astronomy afficionados, I include Adolf Witt's full telling of the story of the twin 41" reflecting telescopes below. Full disclosure: they are actually 40" reflectors, but are nicknamed 41" to avoid confusion with the famed 40" refracting telescope at Yerkes.
One other thing about John Turin and sailing. After he died prematurely of an illness in 1973, his wife Sybil became a leader in helping women become part of the sailing world. As this Toledo Blade article describes,
If there is a glass ceiling in the business world, then there was a taut piece of canvas stretched across much of the sailing world. It kept women out of some clubs and made it difficult for them to take part in competitive racing in others.
Sybil Turin helped change that.
For anyone curious about Yerkes Observatory in the 1960s, wants to learn more about the twin 41" telescopes, or read about Sybil's breaking of barriers for women in sailing, click on "read more," below.
Astronomer Adolf Witt sent me this 1967 photo of faculty and staff at Yerkes Observatory. He was a grad student there, and I was a kid at the time, counting myself lucky to have Yerkes Observatory and grounds as my playground. Seeing these familiar faces from childhood makes me feel like Dorothy after she wakes up at the end of the Wizard of Oz, surrounded by the adults in her world. My father is leaning against the railing over towards the left, and Bill Morgan is standing in front in an overcoat towards the right.
I'm grateful to Adolf for telling this story, which might otherwise have been lost:
| Hi Steve, |
Thank you for contacting me. I certainly remember you and your brother Bill and your sisters Kathy and Anne, although Anne was already off to graduate school and not around Williams Bay very often during my years there. To answer your first question, I did my PhD under the guidance of Bob O'Dell. However, I did work with your father quite extensively during my first two years at Yerkes (1963-65). He supported me during my second year through a research assistantship, under which I was responsible for carrying out UBV photometry with the (then) new 24-inch telescope with the rotatable tube, every clear night. This work led to a joint paper with Anne Cowley (Cowley, Hiltner, & Witt 1967). During my time there, I recall only Rudy Schild and Delo Mook doing their PhD work with your father. Peter Pesch and Joe Wampler had already left but were frequently mentioned as examples to follow.
I am attaching an image of the Yerkes Observatory faculty, staff, and students taken during the spring of 1966. Rudy and I are standing on the right behind Anne Cowley. Students working on their PhD theses at that time were Bob Garrison (Morgan), Morris Aizenman (Chandra), Janet Lesh (Morgan), Steve Jackson (Limber), Mike Marlborough (Limber), Rudy Schild (Hiltner), Witt (O'Dell). Immo Appenzeller, standing behind and next to Rudy, was a visiting PhD student from the University of Göttingen, who was carrying out his thesis observations with the 24-inch telescope under your father's supervision. His Göttingen thesis advisor was Prof. Alfred Behr, a friend of your father's.
Among your father's Toledo connections was his close friendship with John Turin, the then-chairman of the UT physics department. John had a fine sailboat and I understand that the two frequently sailed on Lake Erie together. Out of this connection came the plan to build two identical 40-inch reflectors with CERVIT (zero-expansion material) mirrors, one to be installed at the new observatory in Toledo (1967), the other destined for the SE dome of Yerkes (1968). CERVIT had just been developed by the Owens-Illinois Company of Toledo as a material for the next generation of telescope mirrors. It was your father who alerted me to the fact that the University of Toledo was looking to hire an astronomer with experience with the then-new technology of image intensifier tubes, a particular skill I happened to have acquired during my first year at Yerkes while working along-side Rudy in your father's lab. I believe, your father had a lot to do with the fact that the University of Toledo hired me practically sight-unseen in the spring of 1967, in time for me to participate in every phase of the first telescope's installation. I also did build the image tube camera for the Toledo spectrograph according to designs developed by your father at Yerkes, as expected. From these early beginnings, our astrophysics group at UT has grown to where we now have 13 astronomers (some already retired, but still active), 24 PhD graduate students, and several postdocs. As it turned out, to help build up a new astronomy department from the ground up was just the right challenge for me. This wasn't entirely clear to me at the outset, but your father must have seen this in me when he recommended me, and I have been grateful to him for this ever since over the years. I was happy that we were able to meet frequently after his move to the Chair of the Astronomy Department at UoM, given that their library was the closest complete astronomy library for quite a number of years while we were still building up our library in Toledo.
I retired officially in 2006 but continued teaching part-time for a few more years and also supervised three more PhD students, the last graduating in 2020. My wife, Anita, whom I met and married at Yerkes, and I are still in good health and live independently in our Maumee house. Altogether, it has been a very good life.
Best wishes,
Adolf
Hello Steve,
I am so pleased that you are doing your part in keeping the history of Yerkes and your father's legacy alive. If you can gain access to your father's letters in the UM archives, I would expect that you'll find many references to the joint plans for building two 41-inch telescopes for Toledo and Yerkes, respectively. I knew Richard Monier and I was aware of his work of grinding and figuring the Yerkes 41-inch mirror in the optical shop in the Yerkes basement during my last year of graduate school. You can reassure Luke Schmidt that the two telescopes are not only similar but are indeed identical twins; they were both built by Warner & Swasey in Cleveland from the same set of blueprints. The mechanical design of the telescopes was scaled down from the design of the 82-inch telescope at MacDonald Observatory in Texas that Yerkes operated for the University of Texas for some 25 years. The two 41-inch CERVIT mirrors were the largest mirrors cast by Owens-Illinois in Toledo at that time and were intended as a demonstration that CERVIT could be cast into large mirror disks and could be ground and polished by conventional means. I imagine that your father learned about the CERVIT development work at O-I from John Turin, because John had a long-standing relationship with the scientists at the O-I Technical Center, which was located adjacent to the UT-campus, and he was aware of O-I's effort to develop a zero-expansion glass-ceramic material.
The Toledo disk was finished at the American Optical Company in Pittsburgh and delivered in August of 1967. The completion of the Yerkes mirror was delayed due to the untimely death of Richard Monier, requiring its completion by Tinsley Laboratories, Inc. in Berkeley.
During my first year in Toledo, I built a number of devices needed for the collimation of Ritchey-Chretien optical systems, which had proven to be much more challenging than what was done for conventional parabolic mirror systems. When the Yerkes 41-inch had been installed by the fall of 1968, a colleague and I from Toledo drove to Yerkes with our equipment and finished the collimation and optical tests of the new telescope in one weekend. Thanks to the identical design, we knew that we could bolt our equipment onto the Yerkes telescope without need for modifications. I am pleased that the 41-inch at Yerkes is again receiving good attention after years of inactivity. These instruments were built to last at least a century.
Best regards,
Adolf
| Dear Steve, |
I don't know the details of how the big Yerkes reflector came to be at the South Dome, but it was clearly in the same era of the 24-inch Boller & Chivens, when obvious major upgrades were going on all around the Observatory. It makes perfect sense to me that your father would have been intimately involved with both telescopes. There was also a major modernization of the 40-inch refractor at the same time!
The Warner & Swasey reflector has neat attributes that are nearly impossible to replace today (huge payload capacity; coude focus; three different secondary mirrors; huge R-C coma-free field; etc.). Future astronomers may be able to exploit some of these attributes in exciting ways!
I'm glad to be staying in touch with you!
Cheers--
--John.
BY MATT MARKEY
The Blade
Jun 15, 2014
LaSALLE, Mich. — It is an interesting and circuitous tack that carries a woman from her youth growing up on a potato farm in northern Maine to an evening sail out of North Cape Yacht Club here on Wednesday.
There are just 75 years in between those two events in Sybil Turin’s life, and she has filled them with a biography rich in pushing forward to new horizons, both on and off the water.
Sybil Turin does not look the part of a revolutionary, an activist, or a feminist. The engaging smile, contagious laugh, and effervescent spirit seem to contradict all of that.
But during the past half century, she has helped transform the local sailing community and given women a much more prominent role in it.
“It’s different now, that’s for sure,” said the 83-year-old Turin, who recently completed the all-night Mills Trophy Race for what is likely the 35th time. “For a long time, women were discriminated against. They didn’t really have a place in sailboat racing.”
If there is a glass ceiling in the business world, then there was a taut piece of canvas stretched across much of the sailing world. It kept women out of some clubs and made it difficult for them to take part in competitive racing in others.
But Turin was not one to stay ashore and let the sailing go on without her. She proved a skilled crew member and even skippered in a few major races.
“There were a lot of times when it was all guys — and me,” she said. “Things were slow to change, but it happened. I feel like I’ve lived through a great change. I had to work hard, and I had to not just be good but be better. But that’s the case with most everything for women.”
Turin got a few rudimentary lessons in sailing along the Maine coast from an uncle who had converted an old lobster boat into a sailboat, and she sailed a couple times on the Charles River while in college, but that was about it until she got together with her future husband, John Turin, who headed the University of Toledo’s Physics and Astronomy Department.
The couple first met at a ski resort in Vermont early in 1963, and they married later that year. John was an avid sailor of Dragon boats, which at the time were used in Olympic racing. When Sybil visited John prior to their marriage, he introduced her to Dragon sailing.
“I guess I fell in love with him, and I fell in love with sailing,” she said. “We sailed a lot together, and I loved sailing with him. And he wanted me there, and it was unusual for a woman to be out there at that time, so I guess he was instrumental, too, in bringing about a change.”
Shortly after moving to Toledo, Turin joined a number of other wives of racing sailors to form the “Wet Hens,” a collection of women that would get together monthly for an evening sail. She also served as president of the group.
Early in 1972, Turin was approached by a group of women who wanted to form an all-female crew and compete in the prestigious Mills Trophy Race. Taking “Ugly Duckling” through the arduous all-night race, they were the first all-women crew to race in the Mills.
John had helped form the North Cape Yacht Club, and when he died in 1973, the club membership urged Turin to stay.
“That was unusual for the time, because in some clubs if the husband died or they got divorced, the wife got kicked out,” Turin said. “Here, they said you can go sailing with us anytime.”
And sail she did.
Turin sailed the historic Port Huron-to-Mackinac Race a number of times, and just a week ago she completed another Mills Trophy Race. Since the 1990s, she has been part of the crew on John and Judy Greiner’s Santana 35 Red Cloud, and Sybil crewed on that boat’s victory in the 2010 Mills Race.
“That’s Sybil — it’s just her indomitable spirit,” said Kaye Soka, another veteran of Mills racing. “She just keeps going.”
Soka said Turin has not only witnessed a great shift in the makeup of the sailboat racing community, but she has also been a catalyst in that transformation.
“Things have changed a lot, because back when she first started, there were boats that women just didn’t go on — they weren’t invited,” Soka said. “But a few women said, ‘Darn it all, what are we doing just sitting here.’ There were so many of us that got into sailing around 1969, ’70, and ’71. She had to be one of the first.”
Turin, who holds a degree from Colby College in Maine and later earned a master’s in business administration from UT, said the change came incrementally.
“I noticed that after 1980, women were starting to buy boats, and a lot of the younger guys were starting to bring their wives and girlfriends out sailing,” she said. “Women wanted to sail, and they wanted to race. You see a lot more women involved in sailing now.”
Soka said Turin deserves credit for helping open the decks for women.
“Younger women can look around and see Sybil and what she has done and say, ‘Holy cow, if she can do it, I sure as heck can,’ ” Soka said. “A lot has changed in her lifetime. Today people don’t even blink about seeing women on the boats.”
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