This biography has been around for quite a while. Perhaps if he had patented
the design he would be very well off materially. If you can patent one click
shopping...................


"starlord" wrote in message
...
While digging around in the tons of text files on my old Atari TT030, I
found the following file.

JOHN DOBSON

John Dobson was born in Peking. China, on September 14, 1915.
His maternal grandfather was the founder of Peking University.
His mother was a musician; his father taught Zoology at the
University.

In 1927, John's parents moved the family to San Francisco due
to political and social unrest in China. John had three
brothers: Ernest,Lowry, and Harrison. John's dad accepted a
teaching position at Lowell High School and taught there from
1927 until he retired in the 195O's.

After completing a degree in Chemistry at the University of
California at Berkeley in 1943, he took a defense-related job,
which he held until he joined the Vedanta Monastery in
San Francisco in 1944, thus becoming a monk of the
Ramakrishna Order.

John spent 23 years in the Monastery. He built his first
telescope, (a small refractor made with salvaged optical
parts), because he wanted to see for himself what the
universe looked like. One of his fellow monks told him that
it was possible to grind a telescope mirror, so, in 1956
John made his first mirror out of a marine-salvage 12"
porthole glass.. when he looked at the third-quarter moon
with his finished telescope, he was surprised and deeply
moved by what he, saw. His first thought was, "Everybody's
got to see this." Thus began John's long commitment to
public-service astronomy.

John was transferred to the Vedanta Monastery in Sacramento
in 1958 and started getting seriously involved in telescope
making. The first telescope he made at Sacramento was a
5" reflector-the mirror was made out of the cut-out bottom
of a discarded gallon jug. It was John's greatest delight to
share the beautiful things he saw through the telescopes with
others. One of his friends was so amazed by what he saw
through the 5" telescope that he told John, "You've got to
make something bigger!"--and donated some salvaged 12"
portholes which had to be smuggled into the monastery in
fertilizer boxes. John had to screen his own sand for grinding,
and make his own polishing compounds out of garden supplies.
All of this had to be done without attracting attention of
those members of the monastery who felt that public-service
astronomy was not an appropriate pursuit for monks. The
noisy job of grinding mirrors had to be done late at
night--under water, to deaden the sound.

Since John was a monk and had no money, he had to find a way
to mount the mirrors using scrap materials that could be
gathered up at no cost. His telescopes were made with
discarded hose reels, plywood cutouts from doors, and
scrap wood. This was the humble origin of what has come to be
known as the "Dobsonian" mount.

The desire that drove John to make more and larger telescopes,
and to put himself in increasing peril of expulsion by
monastic authorities, was to give ordinary people the
opportunity to see the incredible beauty of the
universe first-hand. He put discarded wagon wheels on
his telescopes to facilitate wheeling them around the
residential neighborhood surrounding the monastery--delighting
kids and adults with views of the night sky. This required
him to be AWOL from the monastery for long periods of time.
Naturally, when they started to look through John's telescopes,
some of the neighbors and their kids wanted John to help them
make their own telescopes, and John realized that this would
cause his AWOL hours to increase, Nevertheless, he continued
and expanded his activities--and was thrown out of the monastery
in the spring of 1967, after twenty-three years as a monk.

After his traumatic expulsion from the monastery, John
decided to dedicate the rest of his life to public service,
Then as now, John had many friends, and they helped to keep
him fed, clothed, and sheltered. He retrieved some of his
telescopes from Sacramento and started setting them up at
the corner of Broderick and Jackson in San Francisco every
clear night. Thousands of people looked through the telescopes,
while John talked to them in detail about what they were
seeing. (This practice is still an integnal part of the
Sidewalk Astronomers' philosophy: astronomical information
should be supplied by the telescope operator in order to
make the viewer's experience more meaningful.) Eventually,
John was able to support himself by teaching classes in
telescope-making and astronomy at the Jewish Community Center,
the Randall Museum, and at the California Academy of Sciences,
where he still teaches to this day.

In 1967 some of the kids who had made telescopes under John's
guidance, and who joined him in setting up scopes at Jackson
and Broderick wanted to start a public-service astronomy
organization, and the name San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers
was chosen. As the organization grew, larger telescopes were
made and taken out to the streets. John continued to experiment
with larger and larger mirrors. By 1970, the Sidewalk
Astronomers had a 24" telescope which was freeway portable.The
possibility of showing dark-sky wonders to large numbers of
people with very large telescopes led the growing band of
Sidewalk Astronomers to National Parks and Monuments--places
where "dark skies and the public collide".

Several years ago, as word of the activities of the Sidewalk
Astronomers spread, the organization started to expand to
include members from all over the state and country, and
new "chapters" started to form. So it was decided to remove
the "San Francisco" from our name and call our organization
simply The Sidewalk Astronomers.

John Dobson has brought the wonder of astronomy to the public
in many ways. Millions of people all over the world have looked
through the telescopes of Sidewalk Astronomers. John has
simplified the art of mirror making, enabling thousands of
kids and adults with no previous experience or special training
in optics to experience the joy of turning slabs of glass into
powerful "eyes into the heavens" with their own hands. The
"Dobsonian" mount, which John declined to patent, has made
large, "user friendly" telescopes affordable and accessible
to the general public; thousands of people have made their own
sturdy, low-cost telescopes under John's direction, or on their
own by using his simple design. Telescopes with lightweight
mirrors previously considered unusable, on focal ratios
previously considered unmanageable, and apertures previously
considered unthinkable--are now in the hands of lovers of
astronomy around the globe.

John Dobson's life has been a tremendous inspiration to a
great many people. John and The Sidewalk Astronomers continue
to serve the public with large telescopes, providing free star
parties and slide shows under dark skies and city lights,
encouraging the citizens of this planet to think and wonder
about the universe, and giving them a cliance to see its
beauty with their own eyes.



--


"And for the second time in four million years, the monolith awoke."
Arthur C.Clarke 2062dyssey three

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