National Glass Centre

Mirror to Discovery 

“Starlight is falling on every square mile of the earth’s surface, and the best we can do at present is to gather up and concentrate the rays that strike an area 100 inches in diameter.” – George Ellery Hale, Harper’s Magazine, 1928

This exhibition features film footage from the Corning Museum of Glass and archival photographs reproduced from the Rakow Research Library, which look at the construction of the largest single piece of glass ever made for George Ellery Hales’s 200-inch disc reflecting telescope. Installed in 1948 at the Palomar Observatory in California, it remained the world’s largest telescope until 1993.

George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) American Solar Astronomer dreamed of expanding the area of the universe visible from Earth. His quest ignited a movement in the late 19th century to build larger and larger telescopes, stretching the limits of science and engineering knowledge. The Hale telescope had a lens that was 200-inch, that was manufactured by Corning and was twice the size of what had been produced before, and remained for over three decades the world's largest optical telescope.