page_title: Thomas Cooke (scientific instrument maker)
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Cooke (scientific instrument maker) / Life
caption_attribution_description: Thomas Cooke Telescope at Carter Observatory, The National Observatory of New Zealand, photo by Paul Moss paul moss wellington New Zealand photographer
context_page_description: Thomas Cooke was a British scientific instrument maker based in York. He founded T. Cooke & Sons, the scientific instrument company.
context_section_description: Thomas Cooke was born in Allerthorpe, near Pocklington, East Riding of Yorkshire, the son of James Cook (a shoemaker).
  His formal education consisted of two years at an elementary school (possibly the school of John Whitaker, also of Allerthorpe), but he continued learning after this and he taught himself navigation and astronomy with the intention of becoming a sailor.  His mother dissuaded him from that career and he became a teacher. He made such a success of being an impromptu teacher to the farmers’ sons of the Pocklington district, that only a year later he was able to open a village school at Bielby. He continued to teach others by day and learn himself by night, and soon moved his school from Bielby to Skirpenbeck.
  At Skirpenbeck he met his future wife, who was one of his pupils, and five years his junior. Fifty years on she spoke of how her husband developed his brief rudimentary education into becoming a schoolmaster: “He first learned mathematics by buying an old volume from a bookstall with a spare shilling. He also got odd sheets, and read books about geometry and mathematics, before he could buy them; for he had very little to spare”.
  But Cooke's interest in mathematics and science was practical as well academic. He had also retained his interest in navigation and instruments, and while at Skirpenbeck he made his own first rudimentary telescope – grinding a lens by hand out of the bottom of a glass whisky tumbler, then mounting in into a frame that he soldered together from a piece of tin. In 1829 he moved to York and worked as a mathematics schoolmaster at the Rev. Schackley's School in Ogleforth, near York Minster. He also taught in various ladies' schools to increase his income.
  His marriage to Hannah was to produce seven children, five of whom were boys. Two of these Charles Frederick (1836–98) and Thomas (1839–1919) subsequently joined him in the business he founded in 1836 at number 50 (now renumbered to 18) Stonegate, close to York Minster with the assistance of a loan of £100 from his wife's uncle.
  Cooke studied optics and became interested in making telescopes, the first of which was a refracting telescope with the base of a tumbler shaped to form its lens.  This led to his friends including John Phillips encouraging him to make telescopes and other optical devices commercially.
caption: Thomas Cooke telescope at Carter Observatory, in Wellington, New Zealand
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