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  The biggest (optical refracting) 'scope everJul 26, 2011 2:36 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:That huge telescope first shown at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair--the one I was talking about on Thursday, I mean--isn't the largest optical refracting telescope ever! The record was set by The Great Paris Exhibition Telescope of 1900, which had a whopping 1.25 meter lens! But at 60 meters (197 feet) long, the tube of the telescope was so big that it had to lie flat; it was really just made to wow people with SCIENCE at the exhibition, rather than for scientific observation--after the exhibition, nobody wanted to buy it, and it was broken up for scrap. Wikipedia says that the academic community of the time made it the butt of a lot of jokes--but apparently people visiting the exhibition were impressed, so it did what it was meant to do. And now I get to re-use it for this blog!
 
To give a sense of scale, this is just the part that held the eye-piece:
 
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Since the nearly 200-foot-long tube had to lie flat, the idea was to use a 2-meter mirror on a swivel to direct light from the heavens into the horizontal lens tube:
 
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Here's what the tube looked like in place:
 
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