Viewing the solar eclipse of 1869 with a spectroscope, J. Norman Lockyer (who founded the journal Nature) identified spectral lines that could not be matched up with anything he could identify in the lab. He claimed he had discovered a new chemical element, and named it helium. His colleagues laughed him off. It was some forty years later that those spectral lines were replicated in the laboratory, and Lockyer received credit for the discovery of helium. This marked the first time an element had been discovered in the heavens before it was identified here on Earth.
For readers not familiar with Chicago: the Hyde Park neighborhood lies a few mile south of downtown. In the 1890s, it was the location of mansions of many of the business people who had made their fortunes in Chicago. It became and remains home to the University of Chicago.
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There are two types of telescopes: reflecting telescopes and refracting telescopes. Reflecting telescopes use a dish-shaped mirror, and can gather more light, but is less precise. Refracting telescopes do not use a mirror, only lenses.
The U of C was founded in 1890 with funds from John D. Rockefeller. Envisioned from the start as a competitor to the top academic institutions in the east, the University arose from discomfort Rockefeller and others felt about the degree of liberalism in some of those eastern schools. It remains a top institution, whose faculty and alumni have included numerous Nobel laureates.
Chicago neighborhood on the southwest side of the city, best known from Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun."
Second element of the periodic table--familiar to most of us as the gas that makes balloons float. It's that very property that made helium difficult to isolate on Earth--it flies away. When it was finally identified in a terrestrial source, it was as the byproduct of radioactive decay, locked within a rock.
Commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World, this world's fair took place in Hyde Park, adjacent to the new University of Chicago. The fair's legacy to the city includes the building that would become the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Midway Plaisance, among others.
This is an aside rather than a definition: During college, I visited to the giant dome. I strayed from my classmates to the balcony that runs around the inside of the dome. A couple graduate students invited me to come look through the instrument. They located Saturn for me, and the vast floor gently rose to meet the angle of the eyepiece. As I looked at the Cassini division in the rings of Saturn, which I'd always wanted to see for myself, I remembered a picture in my textbook of Albert Einstein and numerous other luminaries standing on that very floor. The universe seemed immense and yet small at that moment, as I touched what great thinkers had touched, and looked at something they were no more able to reach than was I.
Cobb's exterior included carved images all over various surfaces. One motif showed a grotesque face being stung by a bee. Scandalized by the comical image, the administration ordered the bee removed before the dedication. But they missed one, and it can still be seen on a pillar.