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T. E. Bell (Managing Editor, Journal of the Antique Telescope Society)
Roger Hayward (1899-1979), now virtually unknown, was a multitalented architect, scientific illustrator, and optical inventor. Remembered primarily for illustrating Scientific American magazine's Amateur Scientist column between 1949 and 1974, he also illustrated more than a dozen textbooks in optics, physics, geology, oceanography, and chemistry, several of which became classics in their fields. He designed façades with astronomical themes for major buildings in Los Angeles, California, and sculpted mammoth, realistic models of the moon for Griffith Observatory, Adler Planetarium, and Disneyland. Throughout his life, he recreationally painted watercolors and oils that at least one critic likened to the work of John Singer Sargent.
Hayward is least known as an optical designer, yet he made significant contributions to the DU spectrophotometer that established the multimillion-dollar company Beckman Instruments. During the pre-radar days of World War II at Mount Wilson Observatory, Hayward invented a classified Cassegrain version of the Schmidt telescope especially adapted for nighttime infrared aerial photography, plus extraordinarily simple machines that allowed inexperienced soldiers to grind, polish, and test accurate aspheric Schmidt correcting plates at speeds compatible with mass production—and later received U.S. patents for them all.
This paper, drawn in part from unpublished letters between Hayward and Albert G. Ingalls, will feature little-known images of Hayward’s work.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: t.e.bell@ieee.org
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #4
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.