Great Melbourne Telescope was used for 120 years before being destroyed in a bushfire

The Great Melbourne Telescope was supposed to be the city’s intellectual jewel until a stoush erupted about why it didn’t work.

The Great Melbourne Telescope was considered an intellectual jewel in the late 1880s.

When our fair city was known as Marvellous Melbourne in the late 1800s, dripping with cash from the goldfields, a huge machine known as the Great Melbourne Telescope was its intellectual jewel.

It was a time when Melbourne considered itself the grandest city in the empire outside London, one of the wealthiest towns in the world and a beacon of culture and knowledge in the Southern Hemisphere.

With money to splash on arts and science, Melbourne’s forward-leaning inhabitants were looking towards the stars, seeking to join the great minds of Europe at the breaking crest of celestial intelligence.

The Great Melbourne Telescope in about 1870. Picture: Museums Victoria

Nothing could better illustrate the city’s cultural potency than the commissioning of a 1.2m-wide, 10m-long telescope – the second largest stargazing machine in the whole world.

But there was a problem.

By the time the Great Melbourne Telescope was shipped from Europe, painstakingly assembled and erected towards the heavens, it didn’t perform nearly as well as expected.

A scorching public argument ensued about who was to blame.

But through persistent and meticulous reworking, the telescope was eventually transformed, and became a key astronomical tool, right up to the 1990s.

My telescope is bigger than yours

The first push among the London scientific elite for a big telescope in the Southern Hemisphere fixed its gaze on South Africa as an ideal location.

But the Crimean War sucked up all the funding until Melbourne, the cashed-up capital of the south, put its hand up to host the giant star gazer.

So began an ambitious plan to craft a huge telescope in Ireland with master designer Thomas Grubb, to be shipped to Melbourne and put together at the freshly christened observatory in South Yarra in 1869.

For its time, the so-dubbed Great Melbourne Telescope was meant to be at the cutting edge.

However, when it was finally pieced together in Melbourne, it failed to perform.

A lithograph image of the Great Melbourne Telescope in use, shortly after its assembly in Melbourne.

The telescope’s lacklustre view of the heavens caused the Royal Society of London to hang the blame on the “colonial boys” in Melbourne, claiming it was user error.

“Its performance since erection does not appear to have given altogether the same satisfaction at Melbourne that it did in Dublin,” the Society said in a published statement.

“(The) defects complained of may arise partly from imperfect knowledge of the principles of the instrument and inexperience in the use of so large a telescope, partly from experimental alterations made at Melbourne, and partly from atmospherical circumstances.”

This was especially cheeky since the Royal Society didn’t mention they had sent their own specialist, Albert Le Sueur, all the way from Britain to oversee the use of the telescope in Melbourne.

The telescope at the Melbourne Observatory in South Yarra. It was later moved to Canberra. Picture: Trove

Any error in assembly and use was ultimately his.

In fact, Le Sueur insisted he have the final say on everything to do with the Great Melbourne Telescope, and that all correspondence related to the machine be addressed to him, and him alone.

On the Melbourne end there were claims the wrong solvent had been used to clean the telescope’s mirror, giving its view of the heavens a grainy appearance.

It was also claimed other bits and pieces, including the viewing eyepieces, had been changed or incorrectly fitted.

The massive showy planet watcher was threatening to become a white elephant.

Seeing straight

In 1870, a year after the telescope’s assembly, Albert La Sueur abandoned the project after an attempt to get the telescope functioning properly by polishing its main mirror.

With La Sueur out of the way, Robert Ellery, head of the Melbourne Observatory, made further improvements and soon got the telescope operating at its intended capacity.

The observatory gleefully reported to Britain that hundreds of stars and the elusive southern nebulae were being successfully charted by the telescope.

The telescope during installation in 1869, and a machine used to polish the speculum, which controlled the movement of the telescope’s lenses. Picture: State Library of Victoria

Despite not being set up for photography, and relying on the increasingly obsolete method of sketching observations in pencil, some images of the moon were photographed using the Great Melbourne Telescope in the 1870s.

But the telescope fell out of common usage in the 1880s as it was superseded by new technologies.

It continued to be used on and off until 1944 when the observatory in Melbourne was closed.

The Great Melbourne Telescope was moved to an observatory at Stromlo in the ACT where, astonishingly, it was returned to the cutting edge of astronomy with a series of technical improvements.

It was used right up to the 1990s – more than 120 years after it was first built – to investigate some of the universe’s strangest mysteries, including dark matter.

When a bushfire swept through Stromlo in 2003, the antique telescope was almost completely destroyed.

It has since been painstakingly restored by organisations including Museum Victoria after returning to Melbourne, the city it helped glimpse the heavens.

Originally published as Great Melbourne Telescope was used for 120 years before being destroyed in a bushfire