0
0
People just kept recognizing Russell Porter’s genius and offering him jobs.
If Russell Porter ever wrote a resume, recipients could be forgiven if they thought someone was playing a joke on them. At various times, he was an artist, but also an engineer. An architect, but also a cartographer. He was a builder, and a death-defying arctic explorer, while also being a ground-breaking telescope designer.
In truth, Porter might never have had to write a resume and make sense of all this nonlinear bouncing between vocations and avocations. Resumes weren’t mandatory in the job market during the first half of the 20th century. More importantly, he didn’t seem to need one, because people just kept recognizing his genius and offering him jobs.
Here’s some of what his resume might have covered: Born in Springfield, Vermont, in 1871. Took college preparatory classes at Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, from which he graduated. Skipped freshman year of college, enrolling as a sophomore at Norwich University before transferring to the University of Vermont to study engineering. Left UVM before graduating when his family suffered a financial blow.
Moved to Boston, where he took a job appraising buildings for an insurance company. Became so fascinated with the buildings’ designs that he decided he would become an architect. Enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study architecture, while still working part time as an appraiser to pay his bills.
That’s when his career took its first surprising zag. In the fall of 1892, Porter attended a lecture by arctic explorer Robert Peary about his recent traverse of northern Greenland, which confirmed that it was indeed an island.
Porter was transfixed by one thought — he had to join Peary’s team. As he explained, “Out of a clear sky that evening came to me the undefinable lure known as arctic fever.” Porter managed to secure an interview with Peary that winter in Washington. The conversation went well; Peary agreed to consider Porter for his next expedition.
But Peary ultimately decided against taking Porter. Only years later did Porter learn that his mother had written the explorer, imploring him not to take her son.
The following year, Dr. Frederick Cook, who had been a member of Peary’s Greenland expedition, offered to take passengers to the Arctic for a fee of $500. Porter, who had studied painting under an accomplished MIT classmate and surveying in a college course, persuaded Cook to reduce the fee to $300. In exchange, Porter would serve as the group’s artist and surveyor. Apparently Porter’s mother didn’t object.
Porter took leave from his job — he was working as an architectural draftsman by then — and voyaged north with Cook and 50 other paying passengers aboard a steamship. The Miranda attracted mishaps like a magnet. Departing the pier in New York City, the ship’s crew accidentally rammed the dock instead of backing out into the Hudson. En route to Greenland, the Miranda struck an iceberg. The ship stayed afloat, but needed repairs. Underway again, the Miranda struck an uncharted submerged reef, tearing a gash in its hull. The shriek of shredding metal filled the vessel. “I had for the first time been thoroughly frightened,” Porter wrote, referring to it as “tasting copper,” a sensation akin to what “one feels when placing upon the tongue certain electrodes that will generate a slight current.”
The Miranda was beyond repair. Porter was one of a dozen men, including four Inuit guides, who boarded a sailboat to search for help. Sailing 150 miles north, crossing the Arctic Circle, the men located an American fishing schooner, the Rigel, which agreed to help.
Once everyone had transferred from the Miranda onto the Rigel, the cable securing the Miranda was cast off and the stricken vessel steamed off into a fog bank, never to be seen again.
Despite the dangers he’d faced, Porter was eager to return to the Arctic. He found the “fugitive glimpses of the shimmering ice cap” irresistible.
Porter spent the next decade splitting time between Boston and expeditions in the frozen north. MIT gave Porter a scholarship to pursue postgraduate studies, even though he had never graduated college. But his mind was equally occupied with thoughts of the next expedition. When visiting Vermont in wintertime, he made a habit of getting off the train in Bellows Falls and walking the dozen miles to his family’s home to acclimate to the cold. In all, he would make another eight treks into the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions.
Porter persuaded Peary to take him on an expedition hunting a large meteorite that had smashed into Greenland. Porter joined a small scientific team stationed in Umanak, a Danish settlement north of the Arctic Circle, where he oversaw the group’s food and camping equipment. In his free time, Porter helped the scientists monitor the movement of a nearby glacier. Peary didn’t find the meteorite, but Porter returned to Boston with watercolor portraits he had made of members of the local Inuit community. Porter rejoined Peary the next summer as he tried again to find the meteorite; this time, thanks to the help of Inuit guides, Peary was successful.
After trying his luck in the Klondike gold rush in British Columbia, Porter joined the Baldwin-Ziegler Polar Expedition of 1901 as a surveyor and artist. The latter job almost got him killed. While sketching the shoreline one day, Porter became so engrossed in his work that he didn’t notice a large white bear approaching until it was about 100 feet away. The polar bear was already well aware of Porter, who was alone and about three miles from camp.
Porter carried a rifle for just such an event. Aiming the gun at the bear, he pulled the trigger. The hammer moved as if in slow motion and came to rest gently on the firing pin. The gun’s oil had congealed in the frigid conditions. Porter dropped the gun, pulled out his knife and began shouting and dancing about. The display only made the bear more curious.
Porter tasted copper for the second time in his life.
In desperation, he whacked the gun over his knee in hopes of bringing it back to life, then raised the rifle again. This time it worked.
Although the Baldwin-Ziegler Polar Expedition never lived up to its name — it never reached the North Pole — Porter returned to Boston impatient for his next chance. He signed on almost immediately with the Fiala-Ziegler Expedition, this time as artist, surveyor and assistant scientist. This expedition would be the most trying he endured.
During the summer of 1903, Porter traveled to Russia, joining the expedition’s vessel, the America, and the rest of the crew in the far northern White Sea. While Porter and most of the men were camped on the northernmost island of the Franz Josef Archipelago, the America disappeared from its mooring one night during a heavy storm. Two days later, the men aboard the America managed to sail back to the bay, explaining that the ship had been blown out to sea.
Things didn’t improve from there. In November, the America became trapped in the ice. The men salvaged goods from the ship and stripped every useful part before the America sank during a January storm.
Subjected to cold and living off rationed food, the men split into feuding factions. To distract the men during the long, cold days, Porter fashioned a deck of playing cards from sheets of zinc, using his watercolors to paint the faces. The deck was four inches thick and weighed two pounds. His more serious task was taking celestial bearings to determine the location of their camp.
While stranded, expedition leader Anthony Fiala made several attempts to reach the North Pole, selecting Porter as part of the team. But each effort failed. A relief ship finally rescued the men in the summer of 1905, after two years marooned above the Arctic Circle.
After nine Arctic and sub-Arctic adventures, Porter decided at the age of 34 that it was time for a less perilous existence. His dream was now to start an art colony in Maine. He started by purchasing a house and 50 acres in Port Clyde from a fisherman. He soon married the fisherman’s daughter, Alice Belle Marshall. A few years later, the couple became parents to their daughter, Caroline.
If Port Clyde provided a fruitful place to start a family, his idea of forming an art colony there failed to take root. Porter shifted his attention to farming potatoes, like his neighbors, but only briefly. He moved on to something relevant to his actual training; he designed and built cottages to rent out, creating 14 unique designs for the houses, all done in a rustic English style.
The next turning point in Porter’s life arrived in the mail. An old friend from Springfield, James Hartness, knowing that Porter was captivated by the cosmos during his years of Arctic navigation, sent him a copy of Popular Astronomy magazine. Porter’s celestial obsession dovetailed perfectly with the part of his brain that loved the challenges of engineering. Soon he was constructing telescopes, meticulously making his own mirrors, and building a small, domed observatory next to his home.
Hartness, who had become wealthy as president of the Jones and Lamson Machine Company, mailed his friend $200 to support his telescope-building endeavors. He even gave Porter his decrepit Stevens Duryea automobile. The thing didn’t run, but no matter: its true value was providing parts for building telescopes. In Porter, Hartness had found a kindred spirit: the two corresponded regularly about telescope designs.
Porter was on the move again in 1915, relocating to Boston with Alice and Caroline to teach architecture at MIT, a testament to his lived experience since he himself had never graduated. Soon, however, with World War I raging, Hartness, a leader in the machine tool industry, convinced officials with the National Bureau of Standards that Porter would be invaluable in Washington to solve issues producing enough optical instruments for the war effort.
When the war ended, Hartness persuaded Porter to return to Springfield to help him develop an optical device to inspect screws for uniformity. It was less inspiring than spending nights gazing out through the Milky Way, but it paid the bills.
Porter’s biographer, Berton C. Willard, wrote that Porter wasn’t “a joiner,” or “socially or civically minded.” But he was far from a hermit, and in fact Porter’stime in Springfield seems to contradict that characterization.
In August 1920, Porter assembled a group of 16 men and one woman to teach them how to build telescopes, particularly the painstaking work of grinding and polishing mirrors by hand. Out of this first meeting of friends with a shared passion grew the Springfield Telescope Makers. Club members built a gathering place on a nearby hill owned by Porter, who naturally oversaw construction. He suggested they name it Stellar Fane, from the Latin for “shrine to the stars,” soon shortened to Stellafane. The group has held nearly annual gatherings since 1926, making it the longest-running astronomical convention in the United States.
Given Porter’s unique combination of talents, it wasn’t hard to surprise his friends. Stellafane member Ralph Flanders, a manager at Jones and Lamson and a future U.S. senator, recalled an incident during a backcountry trip with Porter in Quebec. One night, while camped in a farmer’s field, Flanders asked Porter where exactly they were. “I’ll tell you,” Porter replied, taking out a saucer and pouring in maple syrup from their food supply, then balancing it on their car’s fender. Sighting the North Star with his sextant and bringing its image together with its reflection on the syrup, which acted as an artificial horizon in place of the sea’s horizon, he was able to calculate their latitude. Then, using the sextant, his wristwatch, and tables from his copy of The Nautical Almanac, along with the maple horizon, he determined their longitude. Scrawling the coordinates on a piece of paper, he said, “That’s where we are.”
In 1925, Albert Ingalls, an editor at Scientific American magazine, visited Stellafane and came away impressed. His article about the club elicited enthusiastic letters to the editor from readers as far away as Alaska, Argentina, Australia, India, and Switzerland, demonstrating that amateur telescope building was becoming a global pastime. Porter became a leading figure in the hobby, writing regular pieces for Scientific American and other publications.
Among his readers was George Ellery Hale, a prominent American astrophysicist who dreamed of building the world’s largest telescope. Ingalls arranged a dinner with Porter and Hale in New York City in early 1928 at which Porter spoke expertly about how Hale could realize his dream. Grabbing any paper that came to hand, he sketched out his ideas.
Later that year, a pair of astronomers arrived in Springfield to speak with Porter. Not realizing who they were, Porter talked about a wide range of topics — the Arctic, art, life in Vermont. They might have skipped the topic of astronomy completely. Only when the men had left did Porter learn that Hale had sent them, and that he’d just been interviewed for a job.
Apparently, it had gone well. Some weeks later, Hale telegraphed Porter: “Can you come to Pasadena for several months to assist in designing a 200-inch telescope.” Hale hoped Porter could “come at once to push work rapidly.”
That telegram set the course for the final two decades of Porter’s life. Porter proved himself an invaluable addition to the team from California Institute of Technology building the massive telescope. With a mirror measuring 200 inches across, Hale’s telescope would be twice the size of the next largest in existence.
Porter was initially assigned to design a specialized telescope to test the suitability of various sites around the Southwest. The team ultimately picked Palomar Mountain, southeast of Pasadena, as the location of the future observatory.
Next, Porter designed a series of large Art Deco-style office and laboratory buildings. He also designed the mounting for the telescope, monitored manufacturing of the enormous mirror and devised the massive rotatable dome that would cover the telescope.
One of his greatest contributions to the project, however, was creating masterful cutaway drawings that showed how parts that hadn’t yet been fabricated would interact. His drawings were credited with resolving heated debates within the team.
“(T)o think that any artist had his pictorial imagination in such working order as to construct these pictures with no other material data than blue prints … is simply beyond belief,” declared famed New Hampshire painter Maxfield Parrish. “These drawings should be in a government museum of standards, in a glass case, along with the platinum pound weight, yard stick, etc. to show the world and what comes after just what a mechanical drawing should be. … The pity is that comparatively few will know about them, for their creation should be world news.”
When World War II broke out, Porter’s skills were used to show the inner workings of rockets before a prototype had even been made. And when the U.S. military ran short of prisms for use in antiaircraft and artillery pieces, he rallied telescope enthusiasts to boost the supply. The amateurs manufactured more than 28,000 prisms that met the military’s exacting specifications.
The war delayed the completion of the Palomar Observatory, but Porter lived just long enough to see it begin operation in 1948. The Hale Telescope allowed humans to see farther into the universe than ever before. It is still in operation today.
Late in life, Porter received an honorary doctor of science degree from Norwich University. In January 1949, Middlebury College’s president and fellows voted to do likewise at the school’s spring graduation, but Porter died before he could receive it.
As gratifying as those tributes might have been, Porter, that lover of barren landscapes, might have been more thrilled that two celestial craters — one on the moon, one on Mars — were named in his honor.
Average Rating