Home to the world’s largest refracting telescope, the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin was so influential that Albert Einstein insisted on visiting. Now you can too.
Geneva Lake, in the town of Williams Bay, it is emphatically 1897. The still-rotating metal half sphere is dominated by an enormous, lovingly polished refracting telescope—a 60-foot-long, six-ton contraption with two 40-inch lenses at one end and an eyepiece at the other. The thing is almost ridiculously fanciful.
For his 1921 U.S. tour, Albert Einstein insisted on visiting Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin.They call Yerkes the birthplace of modern astrophysics, but when I visited the facility about two years ago, it looked more like a place teetering on extinction. The monumental telescope was draped in thick, clouded plastic sheeting that movie gangsters tend to use to wrap the bodies of their victims.
Terra-cotta globes, complete with zodiac signs, were restored prior to being placed once again above Yerkes’s entrances. Yerkes’s face, however, is depicted on the observatory’s exterior columns—albeit with a sinister smile and devilish horns. “The artists had fun with that,” notes Dennis Kois, executive director of the Yerkes Future Foundation, which inherited the observatory from the university. “Nobody liked Yerkes.” The telescope’s 500-pound lens—cast in France, ground in Massachusetts—made the instrument the biggest ever version of the handheld, two-lens, direct-view telescope used by Galileo in 1609.
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