The Cannon

This is a really amazing device. It was designed and built around 1910, by a brilliant Vermont mechanical engineer and inventor, James Hartness, who was also a one-term governor of Vermont. This is not, of course a cannon. It is a telescope. Hartness wanted to build a telescope that would allow him to be indoors in a heated room and still be able to observe the heavens. So this is the result - a concrete structure with a rotating "head" which supports the telescope. You should see the huge gears inside that make this head rotate. Easy to produce at the time in this area of Vermont, which was known as "precision valley" because of the mechanical expertise at a number of manufacturing facilities. You feel as if you are in a submarine when you are at the eyepiece. My post on July 29 shows the tunnel leading to this telescope.