§ 2.1. Characteristics of Early Questar Telescopes

Main System Optics: From Cave to Cumberland

For corrector lenses, Braymer’s first source was David Bushnell, a Californian who earned his undergraduate degree in foreign trade from the University of Southern California in 1936. After graduating, he began his own import-export business. While he was on an extended honeymoon in Japan, he purchased two crates of binoculars that he sold upon his return home in 1948. His optical business took off from there. By the time Braymer was looking for a source of corrector lenses for his telescope, Bushnell had already become well equipped to do business with him. Using his contacts with Japanese optical manufacturers who did the actual production work, he supplied the corrector lens for the earliest Questar telescopes.^[12]

Braymer also needed a manufacturer for primary mirrors. Since Bushnell’s Japanese optical producer was unwilling to make them,^[13] Braymer turned to Thomas Cave. Another California-based entrepreneur who emerged during the postwar years, Cave was busy himself building his own business for producing mirrors and other optical components for reflecting telescopes. Later, he would offer complete telescope kits.

Cave was not Braymer’s first choice. Earlier, as Cave Optical Company employee O. Richard Norton recalled in an article appearing in the August 1994 issue of Sky and Telescope, Questar’s founder had already worked unsuccessfully with a number of optical manufacturers to produce the thin 3.5-inch primary mirrors that Braymer’s new telescope required. Using the blocking method for figuring lenses that producers had mastered during World War II, these manufacturers tried to minimize costs by grinding and polishing several mirror blanks at the same time. But once they removed them from the block, they released strains in the glass, and they became astigmatic. Norton remembered that “Braymer had set aside a number of these flawed mirrors, and Cave agreed to work on six of them. Instead of treating them as one large mirror, we put them on polishing machines one at a time and designed a system that would keep stresses to a minimum as they were polished. The results were spectacular—clean, sharp images at last.”^[14]

In 1952, Cave began making primary mirrors for Questar, and his company ultimately produced somewhere around 150 or 200 of them if not more.^[15] In April 1954, Cave produced a small number of corrector lenses.^[16]

In his advertisement that first appeared in the February 1955 issue of Sky and Telescope, Braymer was happy to share a letter in which Thomas Cave marveled at Questar’s optical quality. “We are simply amazed at the perfect optical performance of the system,” he wrote. With its resolution exceeding the Dawes limit for a telescope its size, it performed at least as good as a four-inch refractor. “The really nice feature of the telescope is its extreme compactness and its superb performance which makes it a telescope truly of the future.”^[17] But nowhere in this advertisement was there any mention of the fact that it was Cave’s company that produced Questar’s optics to begin with.

Contrary to what he claimed in his advertisements, Braymer was often unsatisfied. With his Japanese-made corrector lenses and his Cave-produced primary mirrors in his hands at last, Braymer attempted to mix and match components in an effort to get the best pairings he could. The star tests he performed over many long nights were tedious and imprecise, and few sets met his requirements. He returned many parts for refiguring.^[18]

Thomas Cave’s talents lay in fabricating mirrors for reflecting telescopes that needed far less precision than what Questar’s compound optics called for. When he turned to producing mirrors with unforgiving requirements, he ultimately failed to hold the tolerances for curvature radius errors that Braymer demanded. The optics he made could bring the image in focus either on the inside or on the outside of the focal axis but not both.^[19] On March 30, 1956, Questar and Cave Optical Company agreed to terminate their manufacturing relationship.^[20]

But Braymer still had imperfect optics sets on his hands, and he now had to find a producer who could not only refigure them effectively but also make new sets that were satisfactory going forward. At first, he contacted Perkin-Elmer Corporation, another company that grew quickly as a producer of optical systems for the military during World War II. But they proved to be too expensive. He then turned to J. R. Cumberland.^[21]

After doing work for the U.S. government at the Washington Navy Yard during World War II, Joseph Roland Cumberland opened J. R. Cumberland Optical Company in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1944.^[22] Still operating from his garage when Braymer hired him in 1956, Cumberland first turned his attention to fixing and matching the existing set of optics. Braymer was loath to waste anything and was not about to dispose of salvageable optics sets, a pattern of thrift he would often follow later in Questar’s history. After that stock was exhausted, Cumberland then began production of his own matched primary mirrors and corrector lenses. He also devised a way to mass produce them while also meeting Questar’s high standards.^[23]

After he refigured Braymer’s existing optics sets, Cumberland went through a relatively brief period during which he made his own primary mirrors for Japanese-made corrector lenses and his own corrector lenses for Cave-produced primary mirrors. He made his first complete optics set in June 1958.^[24]

With some help from Braymer, Cumberland eventually built up enough capital to operate out of his own building.^[25] He continued making optics for Questar and other clients until his retirement in 1997, when his sons Stephen and Dwight took over the company. And in 2015, longtime employees Robert Kautz and William Greening bought J.R. Cumberland Optical.^[26] The company is still Questar’s supplier for primary mirrors and corrector lenses.

Optical Testing

From its earliest days, Questar rigorously tested the telescopes it built. In its 1960 booklet, the company assured prospective customers that “every Questar is star-tested by our production manager on Polaris at night. None can be sold until he is satisfied that it beats Lord Rayleigh’s theoretical limit and equals or betters the Dawes’ criteria for perfect resolution.”^[27]

After workers completed enough units to fit onto four or five carts and did a first round of testing and alignment inside the shop, they stored them inside three locked metal sheds on the company’s grounds. After nightfall, they came back to do their star testing on each instrument, and they recorded the results. The production shop used a scale with five levels from low to high: 1, 1+, 2, 2+, and 3. Any instrument receiving a rating lower than normal (1 or 1+) was rejected. Those receiving a rating of 2+ were excellent and infrequent. Only exceptional examples received a rating of 3.^[28]

As part of its commitment to demonstrate the resolving power of its telescopes, Questar soon took an additional step. Around late 1957, the company began shipping new instruments with a high-quality copy of the National Bureau of Standards Microscopy Test Chart. In a set of instructions that accompanied the chart, Questar suggested that, in the absence of those rare nights with perfect seeing, one could use the NBS test chart in calm air at a distance between 34 and 95 feet. “THIS QUESTAR IS GUARANTEED TO RESOLVE 0.9 SECOND ON THIS TEST CHART,” the company boldly asserted on the instruction sheet.^[29]

Not failing to seize an opportunity to highlight such claims in its marketing, the company ran an advertisement featuring its use of this test chart in the November 1957 issue of Sky and Telescope. Under the headline “Questar Guarantees 0.9-sec. Resolution on National Bureau of Standards Test Chart,” the advertisement proclaimed that every new Questar included its final test record and a copy of the NBS test chart. Its copy went on to say that, when telescopes come with a guarantee, the theoretical resolving power as determined by the Dawes limit is usually the basis for that guarantee. For the 3.5-inch Questar, that theoretical resolving power is 1.3 second of arc. But, to Questar, that guarantee means little. Using charts from the Bureau of Standards, Questar bases “a performance guarantee and at the same time [furnishes] the simple means to prove it” without the need for an elusive night with perfect seeing. Using the test chart, the buyer of a Questar “can duplicate our test himself; the chart will tell him at a glance whether his 3 ½-inch Questar resolves the 0.9 second of arc that we guarantee.”^[30]

A little over a year later, Robert R. Hailey, one of the company’s clients, wrote to the company that its resolution claim of 0.9 seconds of arc was an error. In actuality, the Questar telescope resolved to 0.8 arcseconds on the NBS test chart.^[31] Every last shred of resolution counted.

Aspheric Optics

Following the design of Braymer’s friend Norbert Schell, the optical surfaces of the earliest production Questars were spherically figured. As such, they fell just short of being diffraction limited, a resolution threshold generally thought to be defined by one-quarter of a wavelength of light. The resolution those first Questars were able to achieve with their spherical optics, however, was no better than three-tenths of a wavelength of light.^[32]

In the December 1957 issue of Sky and Telescope, Questar announced that it had redesigned its optics to use aspheric figuring. Under the headline “Another Questar Achievement—Aspheric Catadioptric Optics,” the company wrote, “We have now learned how to add a final crowning touch to every set of Questar optics. Aspheric hand retouching is employed to bring each matching lens and mirror to their ultimate perfection. By these painstaking, skillful means the already minute residual aberrations of this most modern of all systems are still further reduced.” Questar boasted further that, with their instruments “now achieving such fine resolution, we doubt if 3.5 inches of aperture can be pushed much father. The limit appears to have been reached.”^[33]

Underscoring the change, Questar further clarified in its advertisement in the November 1958 issue of Sky and Telescope that each corrector lens and primary mirror set is “individually matched by aspheric hand retouching during prolonged performance testing, further reducing already negligible residual aberrations.”^[34]

Quartz Mirrors

From the beginning, the company offered primary mirrors made of Pyrex, a borosilicate glass that Corning Glass Works had developed decades before. Its low thermal expansion properties made it an ideal primary mirror substrate.^[35] Meanwhile, the paired 0.350-inch-thick corrector lens was made of “precision-annealed” BSC-2 borosilicate crown glass.^[36]

In the same announcement for its aspheric optics that the company made in the December 1957 issue of Sky and Telescope, Questar also introduced a quartz mirror option. The company saw an opportunity for a considerable increase in “Questar’s resistance to temperature shock by making its most sensitive element, the mirror, of quartz. For those who require the ultimate, we can supply Questar with quartz mirror.” Its cost was an additional $105 on top of the $995 standard price.^[37] The material that the company used at the time, as longtime Questar manager Jim Perkins noted, “was a low expansion vitreous non-crystalline substrate that had exceptional thermal... and tooling characteristics.”^[38]

Optical Mounting Hardware

Coatings

The primary mirror and secondary spot were vacuum-flash coated with a layer of aluminum. Only after performance testing was a protective silicon monoxide hard coating applied to protect the aluminum from oxidizing.^[42]

Out of concern that owners would overclean the corrector lens and damage the antireflective coating if it were applied to its front surface, only the inside surface of the corrector lens was coated with magnesium fluoride. Its outside surface was bare glass. Other optical elements inside the telescope also received a coating of magnesium fluoride.^[43]

The Care of Optical Surfaces

Considering all the hard work he put into delivering the finest optics he could get, Braymer made sure his clients knew how to care for fine optical surfaces properly. He closed his 1954 Questar booklet by writing “that the purchase of a telescope is in reality the selection of an heirloom, for fine instruments are made to weather time.” Such instruments thus deserve proper care. First, one must resist the temptation to engage in unnecessary and excessively frequent cleaning. Indeed, “the way to preserve a fine optical surface is to restrain as best we can our natural desire for cleanliness. Since we cannot avoid the presence of a little dust, perhaps it is wise to learn to live with a bit of it.” When optics do require cleaning, a light touch is essential. “Questar should exceed their useful life with only ordinary care. A nice thought, too. What other of man’s engines is built with such a life expectancy? Our thoughtful care may some day thus give pleasure to our great-great grandchildren.”^[44] By providing an informational service in his comments on how the optics of the Questar telescope should be cared for, Braymer also took the opportunity to sing the praises of its optics. And if a Questar was not to fall into the hands of an owner’s great-great grandchildren, then surely another person who was to become its owner would appreciate the longevity of Questar’s optics and the care that prior owners had given it.

Finder System

Emerging from patent applications that Braymer filed in the late 1940s, the control box that Questar ultimately implemented on the company’s production telescopes had most of the features that appeared in those earlier documents. It included a finder system with a pick-off mirror that was mounted at a 45-degree angle on the bottom side of the telescope opposite the eyepiece. With the internal prism diagonal shifted aside, the mirror directed light to a finder lens on the bottom of the control box housing. That light would then pass up to the eyepiece. The housing for its optical elements could be rotated up and down to achieve sharp focus.^[47]

The construction of the finder mirror assembly changed over the course of the first year of production. The initial design appeared as early as June 1951. It featured a bracket-mounted finder mirror that swung in and out of position beneath the finder lens. This arrangement allowed the user to move the mirror out of position to prevent potentially damaging sunlight from reaching into the control box—and, more importantly, the user’s eye—when a Questar was being used for solar observing.^[48]

It didn’t take long for Braymer and his colleagues to realize that this bracket-mounted finder mirror could easily be knocked out of alignment with the rest of the finder system’s components.^[49] By January 1955, Questar had redesigned the finder mirror mount using a much studier approach.^[50] In a letter to one of his prospective customers dated September 9, 1955, Lawrence Braymer described the change in design that had occurred after the company printed its Questar booklet in May 1954. He wrote that “the current model has a metal cage for the finder mirror which keeps this auxiliary reflector in permanent collimation.”^[51] This much heavier and more robust U-shaped finder mirror cage featured four screws for fine-tuning the position of the mirror. It attached to the control box housing by another set of four screws.^[52]

The same month that Braymer wrote to his potential customer, Questar ran an advertisement in Sky and Telescope that featured an illustration of this new finder mirror cage. The image appears to have been a modification of another photograph that the company had last used in its March 1955 advertisement in Sky and Telescope. Perhaps in an effort to showcase the new design, Questar rotated the barrel’s bottom towards the camera.^[53] In the future, Questar would often forego the cost of generating new promotional images by modifying existing photography to reflect design changes or new accessories.

Diagonal

Another important feature of Questar’s control box was a diagonal that moved side to side by means of a lever. With the diagonal engaged, light from the telescope’s main optics was directed up to the eyepiece. With it moved to the side, the same eyepiece could receive light from the finder system, and the main optics could send light to an accessory attached to the control box’s rear axial port.

At first, Questar used an image-correct Amici prism for the diagonal. Braymer probably acquired this component from surplus suppliers at a low cost. Since he intended his telescope to be operated at magnifications not exceeding 160x, he found the performance of the Amici prism, which erected the image at the expense of a small loss in light transmission, to be acceptable.^[54]

But as existing stock ran low and new prisms had to be manufactured at a much higher cost, Braymer switched to another material. Around June 1959, the company began offering the option of a “slightly more efficient star diagonal prism,” one that still erected the image but flipped it side to side.^[55] By the time the company printed its November 1960 booklet, Questar had begun to offer the option to include “the less efficient, more complex Amici full-erecting prism” at an additional cost of $50.^[56] The company continued to offer this option into the late 1960s. At the same time, Questar often replaced original Amici prisms with star diagonals on many early instruments when their owners sent them in for service over the years.^[57]

Barlow Lens

Operated by another lever on the control box was an image-magnifying Barlow lens. In its November 1960 booklet, Questar wrote that its “built-in negative achromat or short-focus Barlow amplifying lens is the one discovered by the late great lover of fine optics, Frank Goodwin. He sold thousands to all who use telescopes and probably has changed observing habits permanently. Eccentrically advertised and wretchedly mounted, each lens was nevertheless the finest procurable, and for his insistence that every last one be perfect, we honor the memory of an old friend.”^[58]

The built-in Barlow lens roughly doubled the size of an image compared to what the eyepiece could deliver by itself, although that factor varied over the decades. For higher magnifications, Questar suggested elevating the eyepiece further above its eyepiece holder by means of one or more camera coupling extension tubes and an eyepiece holder ring.^[59]

Together, the finder system, movable diagonal, and Barlow lens enabled the user to switch between a low-power finder mode and two higher-power magnifications simply by operating two small levers. “Thus a finger-flick at any time brings either system’s image to the eyepiece. The user never has to grope in the dark for a finder eyepiece and stand practically on his head to use it.” An additional lever moved an achromatic negative lens in place, doubling an eyepiece’s power and extending “Questar’s effective focal length from 42 to 84 inches.” As a result, “Questar has two focal lengths, and each eyepiece has three powers instead of one.”^[60]

Axial Port

Another key component of Questar’s control box was its rear axial port. Beginning in May 1952 if not earlier, it measured 0.925" wide and had 32 threads per inch.^[61] With use of a coupler and appropriate adapters, one could attach a camera body to the telescope and take pictures of whatever one could visually observe in the eyepiece.

Focuser

The earliest production Questar telescopes featured a pair of side-mounted knobs that operated a cam-style focusing mechanism. Not long after production began, however, Braymer realized that a far simpler approach was to machine a single centerless threaded rod that was parallel to the optical axis of the tube. Some very early production units that used this newer arrangement feature two rivets that plugged the holes that were added for the earlier design. One can see these rivets upon close examination of images that appeared in the earliest Questar advertisements and promotional literature of 1954 and early 1955.^[62]

However it was arranged, the focusing mechanism connected with the primary mirror’s mounting assembly and moved it back and forth along the telescope’s central baffle tube.

From Synthane to Aluminum

For the telescope’s barrel, Questar initially used Synthane, a laminate material that was generally made from paper- or fabric-like layers of asbestos, cotton, or glass held together with resin.^[70] The company’s advertisement that appeared in the February 1957 issue of Sky and Telescope indicates that the barrel was constructed of “Synthane, Grade XX, fabricated for Questar on mandrel, O.D. ground to tolerance and engine turned. [It was] stabilized after fabrication by controlled process.”^[71] Synthane Taylor was the company’s supplier for the material.^[72]

Not long after it had begun production using Synthane tubes, however, the company began exploring other options. Perhaps indicating that Questar was considering alternatives even at a very early point, a shipping label on a package from Alcoa Corporation shows that the company received 56 extruded flat-bottom aluminum shells in September 1954, a handful of months after Questar began marketing its telescope.^[73] This small piece of evidence invites speculation that Lawrence Braymer was not entirely happy with using Synthane and continued to experiment with other materials not long after the beginning of production.

However he came to a decision, Braymer ultimately transitioned away from Synthane. In February 1958, John Schneck completed a machining schematic that specified details for an aluminum telescope barrel and rear cell.^[74] By the time the company published its advertisement in the November 1958 issue of Sky and Telescope, Questar had already begun making its telescope barrel out of “forged aluminum” that was fully machined along its length.^[75] Alcoa continued to be the company’s source for these tubes.^[76]

Machining

With a number of his suppliers located well outside of eastern Pennsylvania and even beyond the shores of the United States, Lawrence Braymer was not shy about establishing business relationships with individuals in far-off locations. But some of his other suppliers and skilled craftsmen were located just down the road.

One such individual was Gerald Fegley, a local machinist who grew up in a house on the corner of High and Edgewood Streets in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. A lifelong resident of the area, he engaged with a number of local organizations including the service-oriented Pottstown Optimist Club, the Elks Lodge, the Pottstown Historical Society, and Saint James Lutheran Church. In addition to being an avid fisherman and gardener, Fegley shared Braymer’s enthusiasm for photography. He was in his mid- to late thirties when he began contributing to Braymer’s effort to build the Questar telescope.^[77]

At the beginning of his career, Fegley had already worked for another employer before he started his own machine shop. His business eventually grew to the point where he employed several other machinists.^[78]

Earning the respect of Questar’s founder, Fegley’s work stood out so much that Braymer featured him in Questar’s marketing. In an advertisement that appeared in the January 1961 issue of Sky and Telescope, Braymer wrote that, “rather than be superintendent in the die shop of a great die-casting firm,” Fegley chose instead “to make parts for Questar in his own shop.” The company highlighted Fegley’s craftsmanship by including a conspicuous photograph of numerous telescope barrels that his shop turned out from forged aluminum shells on an engine lathe. After machining each tube, Fegley then sent them to a paint shop. There, workers sprayed “a newly developed nonreflective paint” onto the inside of the tube.^[79]

Meanwhile, Fegley would machine a piece of 24S-T4 aluminum alloy to fit a ring that, together, formed the tube’s rear plate. “Stronger than steel, each composite plate is threaded to fit one tube. Both are numbered, and we now have a removable tube, held to its closure by large accurate threads we can trust.” Workers then prepared a central hole for receiving the central tube that supported the primary mirror. With a tolerance of ±0.0001 inches, “the matching tube, 3 inches long, fits its mate so well that it will pump air without a lubricant.” Fegley’s last step was to press “a lens cell into each barrel. The final cuts are not taken on the lens seat until the entire assembly rotates as a unit on the engine lathe with the inner tube running dead true.” The cell is black anodized, everything is reassembled, tested, and returned to Questar in individual cases.^[80]

Upon checking for alignment after installing the light baffle into the tube, Ernest Arndt, the company’s master mechanic, would rarely find any assemblies that were “off-center by more than .0008 inch, a quite permissible amount.” With Fegley and many others doing their part, the entire machining and assembly process resulted in an instrument that could deliver to its owner “perfect diffraction images year after year. You will never have to have it realigned.”^[81]

Bristol Screw Fasteners

The fasteners that Questar used during its first decades to link the telescope tube to its mount were chrome-nickel stainless steel Bristol screws, which featured a unique multi-spline socket head. “We think them the finest procurable,” the company wrote in its 1960 booklet. “If they are new to you, it is because their quality and cost keep them out of mass-produced articles. They hold so hard that when unscrewed they let go with a sharp cracking sound.”^[82] Questar also used small Bristol fasteners as set screws for various control knobs, and the company included a small Bristol spline wrench with new telescopes so their owners could make minor adjustments.

Side Arms

The production Questar telescope has always featured a fork mount with two side arms. But earlier prototypes used a very different approach.

Not long after he incorporated Questar in April 1950, Braymer continued to develop a single side-arm design that first appeared in patents he filed in the late 1940s. One document dated July 1951 depicts a single-arm casting with open sides and no ridges. Another document dated March 1952 shows a capstan screw knob for connecting a removable side arm to the turntable.^[84] This arrangement persisted into the middle of 1953, when Braymer created his prototype Questar featuring a telescope with a single-arm mount and a tube that stowed into an aluminum case.

But the single-armed design was short lived. By the fall of 1953, Braymer had abandoned it in favor of a dual-armed fork mount. Documentation from September 1953 describes a preliminary turntable casting with two side arms. Another document created a month later shows the final and current version of this configuration.^[85]

In an advertisement that first appeared in the December 1977 issue of Sky and Telescope, the company remembered the process by which Lawrence Braymer gravitated to this design. In his patent #2,649,791, Braymer described a one-arm support, but he also outlined a “fork-within-a-fork,” which later became Questar’s standard method for mounting. At first, the single arm design was his choice. But before long, he discovered by way of prototypes that a steady, vibration-free mount “could not be achieved with a one-arm support.” Other advantages became obvious. The design not only allowed the barrel to rotate 360 degrees around its optical axis, thus allowing the user to position the eyepiece at a comfortable angle. It also “made possible the rotating perpetual star chart, which is coordinated with the sidereal clock.”^[86]

Braymer himself commented on this design in his first Questar booklet in 1954. “The barrel is supported wholly at its rear closure by Questar’s patented double-U form of fork mounting,” he wrote. Separating the two parts that supported the telescope’s tube from the side arms were nylon bearings, which enabled “the finest, smoothest turning” and which helped ensure that “no lubrication should be required for periods of many years.”^[87]

The edges of the early Questar’s aluminum side arms were polished to a high-gloss shine, and their recessed surfaces were coated with a silver paint.^[88]

Logo Badges

Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the Questar telescope’s side arms was its logo badge. The earliest models produced between 1954 and early 1956 had red, silver, and blue badges with the Questar logo, specifications for effective focal length and focal ratio, and place of manufacture. Questar affixed these logos directly on top of the edges of a circular ridge using contact cement. Their position made them prone to being knocked off if they were bumped or snagged.^[89]

As marked by their first appearance in the company’s advertisement in the May 1956 issue of Sky and Telescope, Questar transitioned to a side arm badge that was seated inside a central recess at the center of the fork arm. The company’s logo was etched and filled with white enamel on a solid red anodized background.^[90] Questar used this design until the spring of 1963,^[91] when the company presumably exhausted its supply of the older badges and transitioned to ones that matched its updated branding which had first appeared in the June 1961 issue of Sky and Telescope.^[92]

A close examination of an early marketing photograph that first appeared in Questar’s advertisement in the November 1954 issue of Sky and Telescope reveals that a similar logo badge appears on the central cap of the base’s turntable.^[93]

Slow Motion Controls and Tracking

All fork-mounted Questar telescopes have a full complement of features that enable users to move the telescope for coarse aiming, make slow-motion adjustments using manual knobs, and track celestial objects by means of an electric motor drive. Along with various levers on its control box, Questar’s slow motion controls transformed the observing experience “from drudgery into relaxed pleasure.”^[94]

Lawrence Braymer beamed with obvious pride for Questar’s slow motion mechanism. In the company’s newsletter-style advertisement that appeared in the July 1959 issue of Sky and Telescope, he told his readers “about Questar’s wonderfully smooth slow motions that have no backlash, work all the time, and constitute their own safety slipping clutches.”^[95]

In a style of prose that only Lawrence Braymer could muster, he began by laying out the problem he solved in glowing, highly personal terms:

If you have ever used slow motions of this continuous 360° type, you will, of course, understand why we fussed around so long to get our drives exactly right. We know that nobody will continue so long to use a contraption that gives more trouble than pleasure, because, being human, we prefer fun to work any old time. So if our baby is anything, it is the sweetest-working little rig you ever lent an eyeball to. Compared to some, the luxury it gives you is practically sinful, thank goodness, so you’ll use it all the time.^[96]

Alongside a closeup image of the side-arm pinion, Braymer went on at length to describe its construction along with the spring-loaded bushing and the stainless-steel disks that were all part of the slow-motion control assembly:

Here is shown the 3/16-inch-diameter pinion whose tiny V-groove pinches the edges of two 4.1-inch-diameter stainless-steel disks. The large round object, smaller than your little fingernail, serves as bearing for the pinion shaft, and as spring-loaded [eccentric] bushing to exert the necessary pressure by rotating clockwise. This view is inside the right-hand fork; on the outside the pinion shaft carries the skirted control knob. Between the stainless driven disks is a third of less diameter, which acts as spaces and fulcrum for the pinching squeeze exerted on the rim. This is our famous friction drive, whose velvet feel will warm the heart of any lover of fine instruments.

Simple, isn’t it? Oho! That’s what we thought six years ago after we had given it some 30,000 revolutions under load without a sign of wear. What a drive! No backlash or dust-jamming or loosening, as with gears. But like many simple things, our fine drive had strict requirements. If the pinion’s temper is too soft, it quickly wears. If heat-treated to too great a Rockwell number, it will fracture from excessive brittleness. The size and angle of the pulley notch is very critical, to match the total thickness of three disks of stainless steel. So these must be held to plus or minus two ten-thousandths of an inch. The hardness or temper of these disks is also very critical, so here is what we do: We buy standard warehouse, full-hard-temper 18-8, type-302 stainless-steel strip of a certain greater thickness, then send it to a company in New England which has a little micro-rolling mill. It rolls are only 4.5 inches wide, just big enough, and after a few passes our steel has just the right degree of thickness and extra hard spring. An accurately ground $800 die is used to turn this very tough ribbon into perforated circles, one-third of which get turned down on the engine lathe. Not so critical is the [eccentric] bushing, which works best when made of marine bronze, with a brass arm silver-soldered to it. Lubrication is with “Molycote.”

Finally, both outside disks are hand-deburred, and polished on the engine lathe until they look the way we want them to. Then, upon assembly, each drive is “broken in” until it works and feels just right. At this writing some 300 pinions are being heat-treated first and having their V-grooves ground later, a method which costs more but may produce a finer piece. Slipping clutches in both side-arms and base use the “stickage” property of a thin sheet of nylon to resist first gross movement before sliding easily. This may keep you “on target” during an accidental jar, a useful feature quite unfelt when knobs are turned.

Yes, this is going to a lot of trouble to perfect just part of our machine. We tried an awfully large number of materials, and scrapped pieces of metal by the thousand, before we learned what not to do. It cost us a king’s ransom when pennies were in short supply, but we have never for a minute had regrets. Because this drive is just the thing our Questar needed, and we can just about guarantee it will spoil you for any other kind.^[97]

The earliest Questars featured control knobs on the fork mount’s side arms with hollowed out centers. But a trio of documents from late December 1954 suggest the timing by which the company moved to its current design with filled-in centers.^[98]

For tracking astronomical objects as they arced across the sky, the Questar telescope also featured a drive that was powered by a synchronous electric motor that was built into its base, one made by Cramer Controls Corporation. A “supreme touch of practical luxury,” as Braymer wrote, it held an object motionless in the eyepiece’s field of view by driving the instrument’s right-ascension motion at a sidereal rate. With the “lightest possible load on driving gear teeth, low tooth pressure and good balance,” the built-in motor drove the mount around its “friction-free polar axis” and held photographic equipment steady while preventing “microscopic jerks and jumps” that would ruin long-exposure images. “Liberated by this modern refinement from the necessity of manual following, the Questar owner is free to concentrate wholly upon observing and the problem of perception near the limit of vision. He will, of course, improve his visual abilities with practice, and will become better able to enjoy Questar’s powers of resolution to the full.”^[99]

Base and Tabletop Tripod Legs

By July 1953, Lawrence Braymer had settled on a casting for the Questar telescope’s bell-shaped base. Five months later, he completed a design for three slip-fit tabletop tripod legs that would support the telescope.^[100] Hand turned and bored on a jig, Questar’s base was made of sand-casted, heat-treated, and corrosion-resistant aluminum.^[101] The tripod legs stowed conveniently in the telescope’s case when not in use.

Here, Gerald Fegley contributed again using skills that only an experienced machinist could wield. In an advertisement that appeared in the November 1961 issue of Sky and Telescope, the company described how Fegley and other suppliers produced Questar’s mount base and tripod legs. To cast the bell-shaped base, Boose Aluminum Foundry in Reamstown, Pennsylvania, used Alcoa No. 356 aluminum alloy “tempered to the T-6 condition.” The base material consisted of 7% silicon, allowing the material to flow freely in its molten state and have exceptional resistance to the marring effects of perspiration, sea salts, and overall wear and tear. After being cast, the bases went to Fegley’s Pottstown shop, where he turned off “almost one-half the metal in accurate machining” that he performed by hand. He then drilled several holes in the base some of which were tapped for threaded fasteners. Others were precisely bored, reamed, and burnished to accept two of Questar’s three slip-fit tripod legs.^[102]

The third leg inserted into another hole in the middle of the base’s bottom. Its adjustable length enabled a user to equatorially align the telescope. It was a design that appeared in company documentation as early as December 1953.^[103]

To produce those legs, Questar first went to the warehouse of a Philadelphia metals supplier and selected tubes whose diameters and ovality varied by only 0.003 inches. Next, the Micromatic Company in Trenton, New Jersey, received the tubes for cutting, grinding, and milling. Workers there also added a long slot into the shorter tubes for later use in making the tube extension assembly that included a captive knurled knob. The tripod legs were then anodized by a shop in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, before making their way back to Questar’s factory in New Hope.^[104]

Upon their return to the final assembly shop, the process of hand-fitting legs to bases began. With all the necessary parts in front of them, Questar employees Peter Dodd, who was the son of Marguerite Braymer, and James Reichert, whose son would also work for the company years later, sat at a workbench as they chose tripod legs at random. As they did so, they tested them with each individual base to ensure that they fit “with just the proper feel. And feel is the right word to use, for we take leave of measurements at this point and work for the fit that feels just right.” When holes and tripod legs matched, Dodd and Reichert added a butyl rubber tip to each leg, placed them in an English leather case, and tagged each set so that they remained matched with one specific base. “There are no secrets about making the best telescope in the world,” Braymer wrote. “We try to make every single part just as fine as possible.”^[105]

Gerald Fegley continued to supply machined parts to Questar until the late 1960s or early 1970s, when another Pottstown native and Elks Lodge member, Robert Schwenk, took over much of Questar’s machining operations for the next three decades.^[106] Reaching the age of one hundred three months before he passed away in February 2018, Fegley never lived anywhere but his native Pottstown.^[107] He and many others like him made important contributions to realizing Lawrence Braymer’s vision for a fine telescope and a unique observing experience.

Auxiliary Mounting Options

In addition to the tabletop tripod legs that came with every Questar, the instrument’s owner could use other means to hold it in position.

One clever way in which Questar doubled the utility of the tripod leg hole plugs was to use them for hanging the instrument on an automobile’s window. Crediting Dr. Warner Schlesinger, the director of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, for the idea behind this innovation,^[108] Questar later dedicated one of its advertisements to illustrating how this was done. In the May 1957 issue of Sky and Telescope, the company wrote that, as spring emerged, many Questar owners would surely travel with their highly portable instruments sitting in the back seat of their car. By pulling out the leg hole plugs and threading them into two holes on the bottom of the base, one could hang one’s instrument off the side window and make a two-ton car a handy and steady place to mount a Questar.^[109]

An owner could also use a solid photographic tripod. Drawing the company’s attention in an advertisement that appeared in the September 1956 issue of Sky and Telescope, the German-made Linhof Professional De Luxe earned the praise of Questar as its choice for the most stable tripod the company was able to identify among the many others it had tried.^[110] Linhof tripods would appear regularly in Questar promotional literature throughout the rest of the 1950s and 1960s.

At first, Questar telescopes could not attach directly to a tripod. The company sold an auxiliary base plate with a central hole that was threaded to accept a tripod screw. The plate attached to the base of the instrument by means of the two threaded leg hole plugs that one used for hanging a Questar off a car window.^[111] But starting with instrument #0-685 (1960), the company added a threaded post directly to the inside of the Questar’s base for accepting a quarter-inch-20 tripod screw.^[112]

Base Plate

The bottom base plate of the earliest Questar telescopes were composed of black Synthane disks. But probably because this material was prone to cracking,^[113] the company switched to a more durable brushed aluminum base plate in 1959.^[114]

A few years earlier, Questar had also changed the kind of information the company included on those base plates. Upon completing work on each of the earliest production instruments, an individual would hand-etch the unit’s serial number, specifications about the built-in motor drive, and the numbers of those patents that Lawrence Braymer had been issued up to that point in time.^[115] By 1957, Questar had dispensed with indicating anything on the telescope’s base plate except its serial number, which had begun following a pattern that showed the last digit of the unit’s manufacture year along with a unique sequence number.^[116]

With these hand-made etchings, each Questar “has the autograph of its creator,” as Jim Perkins eloquently noted.^[117]

Solar Filter

Perhaps it was natural for the chain-smoking Lawrence Braymer to use a cigarette to demonstrate the danger of an unfiltered telescope. He often made a display of the risk to one’s eye by squaring an optical mirror with the Sun, holding a cigarette at the point where concentrated light came to a focus, and lighting its end on fire. “After seeing the flame at the end of the cigarette,” Questar commented in its 1972 booklet, “one needed no further warning of what could happen to the human eye should those rays be viewed through the telescope, or should an old-fashioned glass filter over the eyepiece suddenly crack from the intense heat.”^[122]

One accessory that made the Questar telescope so unique was its included solar filter. Amateur telescopes of the era sometimes came with dangerous eyepiece solar filters that were prone to failure. On the other hand, metalized glass solar filters were expensive to produce. More often than not, only those institutions or persons with ample resources could afford them.^[123] Questar’s approach was to include an accessory with a modest 1.5-inch off-axis filter that attached to the front of the telescope.

In its 1954 booklet, the company claimed that the chromium material of its solar filter produced a virtually straight transmission curve, allowing the observer to see all colors at equally reduced intensity. And by preventing the barrel from heating, no internal convection currents or warped optics spoiled the image. As a result, “the sun’s face may now be studied with Questar in safety, comfort and steadiness of detail previously unknown.” And not only was Questar’s electric drive useful for maintaining the Sun’s image in the eyepiece, but it also simplified group demonstrations and classroom observation by freeing the instructor from having to make constant adjustments for each individual who steps up to the eyepiece.^[124]

Detailing how the company made their solar filters, Questar noted it its 1960 booklet that “each uncoated disk must test to absolute invisibility. To keep them thin as window glass, they are made by optically contacting to a heavy flat. To eliminate the pinholes inevitable in all evaporated metal films, the full-aperture disks are three times coated and twice hand-rubbed.”^[125]

The way that the solar filter assembly attached to the front of the telescope evolved during the company’s earliest years of production. At first, Questar developed a solar filter with three gasketed tabs that pressed against the inner sides of the corrector lens cell. After a few years, the company adopted a design that threaded far more securely onto the corrector lens cell.^[126]

Before long, another solar filtering option appeared. Company documentation shows that Questar had begun to develop a full-aperture solar filter by October 1957.^[127] Along with its smaller off-axis filter that came standard, the company illustrated this new accessory, which featured a ventilated filter cell and plane-parallel glass, in its October 1958 booklet.^[128] And in its advertisement appearing in the May 1959 issue of Sky and Telescope, Questar announced the availability of its full-aperture solar filter complete with a walnut case. The addition was not trivial: it cost $150,^[129] or more than a week’s income for the median U.S. household.^[130]

Instruction Booklet

At first, Questar’s instructions were simply printed on a single sheet of paper with advice that supplemented the company’s promotional booklet. Later in the 1950s, Questar included a proper eighteen-page booklet that was sized for placement on top of the telescope tube as it was stored in its case. In late 1961, the company expanded that booklet to include 26 pages of detailed information for using the Questar telescope.

English Saddle Leather Case

As a final touch of luxury, Questar included a stitched cowhide saddle leather case made for the company in Staffordshire, England. It featured a deep tan color, an interior lined in red velvet, and leather pouches for accessories. The rim of the telescope’s base was held in place by two eccentric Synthane rings that secured it to the bottom of the case.^[131]

For protecting the finish of the instrument’s leather case, Questar later added a heavy vinyl luggage cover with drawstrings and metal grommets.^[132]

In so many ways, the Questar telescope was ahead of its time. Its Maksutov-Cassegrain optics were a fresh and modern departure from typical refractors and reflectors of its era, its self-contained, electrically-driven mount held it with grace, and its multitude of built-in accessories made it a highly versatile instrument. But in one particular area, the Questar telescope’s usefulness was truly groundbreaking.