The Dupuyer acantha. [volume] (Dupuyer, Mont.) 1894-1904, 1896-01-30

There's only one place west of st.
Louis, where girls can learn to make
telescopes, and that is in San Jose,
CAL, so writes a San Jose normal
school girl.
When she wants to look at some
stars, she just takes a hammer and
some nails and goes out and makes IA
nice, clean, firm, little telescope all by
herself. She gets her lens from Paris,
of courSe-that'S where all the good
lenses come frOm-but the rest of the
affair she makes herself, every inch of
it, and has fun doing it. She learns it
in school. And they do say that a San
Jose girl would rather saw a good red
wood board into the proper telescope
length than to play the best game of
tennis in the field.
It's great fun to see the telescope
class at work. There are a whole lot
of jolly, bright-eyed, good-natured girls
in that class, and the way they work.
They wear big checked gingham
aprons with a big pocket for tool and
every one of those apron pockets hides
sooner or later an artistically smashed
thumb.
There's a whole lot of measuring and
planning and saving to do when you
make a telescope. But the first a San
Jose girl does is to learn to hold a
stick of wood firmly while someone
else saws it. When she's learned that
and knows how to make a nail go
straight into the wood, instead of slant
ing off and bending up like a crooked
pin, she's ready to begin serious work.
The serious work begins with two
straight sticks and a cross-bar. The
girls run out into the hall and lug in a
big, brown, understanding redwood
board, and then they get their meas
uring tapes, and they measure that
board, and mark off little places in it
with a piece of chalk and squ1nt up
their eyes and try to look as much like
carpenters as they possibly can.
When the standards are made to be
just exactly the height and the breadth
and the thickness they should be then
m the barrel. The barrel is the
thing you glue your eye to when the
man says: "View, view, view-the glor-
ious luna in full perfection"
That barrel is a nuisance to make.
You have to have just the right instru-
ments, and you have to use them just
so or you're gone, and so is your tele-
cope. IleIe ISL L HULL CudItcl LIZ AL
the big workroom where the telescopes
are made. The girls are too much in
terested in their work to chatter.
They hammer and saw and bore and
file away, and all you hear is IN occa-
siopal "ouch" when a hammer hits
somewhere where it wasn't expected.
The f1oor is knee deep in shavings
| and ankle deep in sawdust, and the
clean, refreshing smell of the wood
makes the room like a corner in the
| real woods, where the boards came
from in the first place.
The telescopes grow out of the rough
| pieces of boards, and the girls learn
enough about joining and planning
and measuring to make many an e
pert carpenter open his eyes. It's no
use trying to get one of the girls to ex-
plain that telescope. She will talk
te~chnicalities until you are bewildered,
and then she'll laugh at you till you're
vexed. and then she'll end it all up by
crying:
81 coud sell my telescope for a good
$500 or S4OO in the telescope market,
if | wanted to- and then she sQueezes
the telescope with her poor little pound
ed fingers and says: But l wouldn't
for worlds"
What's going to become of all the in
StrumentS?
Oh, nothing much. but the girls have
learned enough about nails and ham,
mers and saws and things to be able to
do a whole lot of good joining and car
pentering and telescope making. Their
teacher says they do all these things
better than boys, and if that isn't a tri-
umph what is?