Porter was born on December 1S, 1871, in the front bedroom of a venerable homestead in Springfield, Vt. He was the fifth and last child of Frederick and Caroline Porter. His mother was then 51, one unusual fact of Porter's unusual life. Frederick Porter, who had been born in the same room, manufactured 75,000 baby carriages a year and prospered. He was also an inventor. Parts for baby carriages remain today in the old barn beside the Porter homestead.

Porter's boyhood friends, who said that he was lazy and showed little promise, called him "Pussy." He spent more than a year at both Norwich University and the University of Vermont. Then he wanted to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study architecture, for he was already skillful with pencil and brush. His father, however, was no longer prosperous. Porter borrowed $1,000 to enter the Institute in 1894.

That year Porter heard Robert E. Peary lecture on the Arctic, an event that cost him a dozen years of his career. From this moment he burned with a passion for exploration and adventure. Peary half agreed to take him North but Porter's elderly mother secretly asked the explorer to reject him, and this Peary did without revealing the secret.

Porter's interest in the Arctic was not diminished. Soon he met the affable and plausible Dr. Frederick A. Cook another man who had designs on the North Pole. In the summer of 1894 he went with a large party to Greenland in Cook's antiquated vessel. The ship tore out her iron bottom on Greenland's rocks, and a hundred shivering men returned home packed on top of the codfish in a fishing schooner. Cook's Last Cruise of the Miranda tells the unhappy story.

Porter did go to the North with Peary in the summer of 1896. There was no hardship, a summer trip to Greenland being no worse than a January thaw in Maine. Yet the trip was a beginning, and the following summer the 26-year-old Porter herded a party of M.I.T. students to Frobisher Bay in Baffin Land at $800 a head. The trip was made on Peary's vessel, which debarked the voyagers continued to the North, and returned in the fall to pick them up again. Thus Porter paid off all his college indebtedness. In Baffin Land he found Silurian fossils, which he presented to the paleontologists of the American Museum of Natural History in an old sock. One of the fossils bears the name Orthoceras porteri. Forty years later Porter wrote, "Stefansson told me my report on Frobisher Bay had been invaluable during World War II."

In the summer of 1898 Porter led a three-man party into upper British Columbia. Ostensibly the expedition was to do ethnological research for the American Museum, but the real objective was to find an overland route to the gold in the Klondike. Defeated, the party was forced to turn back at latitude 56. The next summer Porter gathered another paying party of college men and took them on Peary's ship to northwestern Greenland. In this way he was able to support himself until he had finished college.

In 1901 William Ziegler, a rich manufacturer, backed an expedition to find the Pole under a leader who proved to be such a tyrant that the expedition failed. Under a new leader in the following year, a second Ziegler expedition sailed to Franz Josef Land north of Russia. Its men landed 10 degrees from the Pole. Soon their base ship, an old whaler, was crushed in the ice and sank in the Arctic darkness. The expedition was cut off for a year and a half. Even then its men made attempts to reach the Pole. The story of this long adventure has been told by Anthony Fiala in Fighting the Polar Ice, published in 1907 and now out of print.

TO THE same volume Porter contributed a lively account of his escape from a camp 160 miles from the main party. There he had lived for 100 days on half rations which were finally exhausted. With another man and dogs he set out in midwinter, and after many trials-skis lost, sledge lost, death often near-he reached the main party and food. The following from Porter's narrative recounts an attack by polar bears:

"Perhaps the bears took us for some animals good to eat. Surely we looked more like beasts than men in our bearskins, and with our long hair and grease-covered faces. At sight of these bears the savage man rose dominant within me, and in my hair and down my spine ran an indescribable prickling sensation, and I knew why the hair on the wolf's back bristles when he hunts." At another stop: "We lay there shivering all day. The worst had come. Stormbound and no fuel. 'Duncan,' I chattered, 'if I ever get out of this scrape alive, I'll make a beeline for the tropics and not go 10 degrees north or south of the equator for the rest of my days.'" Porter's unpublished diary makes even better reading than this, and shows remarkable literary gifts.

Porter forgot his oath about the tropics and headed north as a topographer with Dr. Cook in the next year. On this expedition Cook sent Porter and the others on a side trip; when they returned he claimed that he had climb Mount McKinley single-handed. His claims were later discredited. Porter was forced to attach Cook's luggage to recover his summer's earnings. "My hero's feet were made of clay," he commented years later.

On all these expeditions Porter acted as an astronomer, surveyor, meteorologist and artist. Sometimes he painted with water colors when the water had to be kept liquid over an alcohol lamp. Later in life he felt that the entire Arctic was hardly worth the misery it had cost mankind. The hardships described by later generations of explorers, who traveled with radio and other conveniences, did not impress Porter. It seemed to him almost wanton that planes quickly reached the places painfully attained by the earlier explorers on foot.

Fifteen years ago Porter summed up his exploring experiences in Arctic Fever, a 30,000-word manuscript copiously illustrated with his facile drawings. It remains unpublished, largely for economic reasons.

Porter was 36 when his Arctic fever was finally cured. In 1907 he met Alice Belle Marshall, the young postmistress of Port Clyde, Me. They were married and lived in a big farmhouse on "Land's End," a 50-acre peninsula near Port Clyde. There Porter built and sold cottage after cottage by the shore.

It was while living at Port Clyde that an article in Popular Astronomy caused Porter to make a 10-inch reflecting telescope (just as an article in Popular Astronomy later caused this magazine to discover Porter and to establish the hobby of amateur telescope making). Years later he jotted, "I shudder when I recall its horrible figure." Focograms of that mirror may be found in The Astrophysical Journal for June, 1918. Today's beginners will do well if they equal it.

From 1915 to 1911 Porter was an instructor in architecture at M.I.T. Then he worked in optics at the National Bureau of Standards. In 1920 he returned to his native Springfield to work with his old friend James Hartness, head of the Jones and Lamson Machine Company. His specific duty was to develop the Hartness screw-thread comparator. -Porter compressed this instrument with mirrors to save floor space. He also adapted it to profiling needle eyes, saw teeth and dozens of other products. Another "duty" was to do whatever interested him most. Hartness knew how to get the most out of a genius. Case-hardened old machinists at J. and L. remarked, "Why, Porter took right hold of our machine tools without any apprenticeship." During his life he took hold of many things thus.

PORTER had not been in Springfield long before he gathered 16 mechanics from the town's industries and taught them to make reflecting telescopes This he began on August 17, 1920. On December 7, 192S, he organized the Telescope Makers of Springfield.

One pleasant duty that Porter discovered at Jones and Lamson was to make nearly 100 ornamental "garden" telescopes with 6-inch f4 mirrors. These his employer sold to the carriage trade at $400 each. The mirrors were figured by Porter's 18-year-old pupil Wilbur Perry, since then Chief Technician of the Ruling Engine Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University.

Porter's quarter-century of relations with the readers of this magazine began in 1925. I still have the letters in which he guided my early efforts at telescope making. The pitch was too soft; boil it. The pinhole was smaller than necessary. "And now get busy grinding."

One day early in 1928 George Ellery Hale mentioned to me over a New York luncheon table the possibility of building a large telescope, and listened to a description of the genius in Vermont who might help build it. Would he consent to see this genius?

A hasty telegram put Porter on the night train to New York and the next noon Hale and Porter and I lunched at the same table. I watched Porter's charm, knowledge and versatility go to work. From his facile fingers to the back of a menu fell those little sketches that came so effortlessly-his own ideas for big telescopes. After three hours Dr. Hale pocketed the menu and withdrew. Porter returned to Vermont and all summer pondered the mystery that seemed to be in the air. Autumn came and Hale sent J. A. Anderson and F. G. Pease to see Hartness, and to borrow Porter. Thus on November 26, 1928, Porter was able to write from the Twentieth Century Limited, on its way to Chicago, "The Porter family is headed for California." Months later Hale was to comment, "The most versatile man I have ever known."

What Porter did at Pasadena during his remaining two decades has been the subject of surmise, some of it incorrect. He was only embarrassed by those who, because they loved him, insisted that he had designed the 200-inch telescope and built it. No one man did either. The basic design was executed by engineers, and Porter last summer remarked with vehemence, "I am not an engineer."

Largely it came down to this: At each of the many stages in the long evolution of the design, reached after interminable group discussions, Porter would convert the blueprints of the variations chosen for study into three-dimensional pencil drawings, each the equivalent, to those who studied them, of an actual working model (sometimes he went to the shops and built models-he always yearned to get his hands on tools).

There is no way to ascertain how many mistakes would have been embodied in the 200-inch telescope had there been no Porter, a consummate artist who also understood the workings of what he was drawing. His work provided a close control on the telescope's development throughout.

When war came and the telescope was put in moth balls, Porter did exactly the same thing for defense. "My work," he wrote, "is mostly pencil sketches of gadgets that are hard to photograph. That's where I've got it over the man with the camera. I can cut an instrument all up show its insides, yet not destroy it." His drawings went to Washington, and elsewhere in Navy circles.

When the war was over he wrote, "I can look back with satisfaction over the high-pressure jobs of the past few years- drawings of rockets, fuses, launchers, the Jap paper balloon, atomic bomb, proving ground work at Inyokern, Goldstone, Pendleton, NDRC and M.I.T. projects. At Washington they call me 'the cutaway man.'" But Washington sometimes drove Porter too hard, so that the man of 74 who had suffered a coronary thrombosis at 64 was in bed again for weeks. Military men had stood over him waving deadlines and he had worked day and night. Yet after one such illness his old sense of humor prevailed. He wrote, "Was blessed with three good-looking nurses, but only the head nurse would let me hold her hand."

PORTER did innumerable jobs besides the one described. In 1932 he disappeared for months, living alone in a little tent on Palomar Mountain, making a contour map of the whole broad plateau and laying out the future building sites and roads. The theodolite he used was the same one he had had in the Arctic. Then he returned to Pasadena and made a land model of Palomar, now under glass at the California Institute of Technology. He was the architect for the dome of the 200-inch telescope and for the other domes. I lived in Porter's home five weeks last summer, yet I still learn occasionally of jobs he did and never mentioned. He had a hand in practically everything.

In 1944 he wrote, "I often wonder how privileged I am out here, at my age. Whenever I want something I go to the optical or machine shop and find everything at my disposal. If I get into a jam for a gadget there's always someone to say, 'Let me do it for you.'"

"He is such a nice fellow to have around," was the tribute his immediate boss, Dr. Anderson, wrote of him. At various times in 1945 Porter wrote: "I'm now enjoying life hugely. The sky seems bluer, the trees greener, and every prospect pleases." Or, "I made $50 in bed today, just pushing my pencil." (Outside work came to him and he did much of it in bed.) Or, "All I care for is comfort, pipe tobacco, and good fellowship."

Few knew about Porter's major interest in music; fewer still that he composed music as an amateur hobby. While living in Vermont he had read books on harmony and counterpoint, then composed and orchestrated a symphonic movement. When he heard it played by an orchestra he sensed "how amateurish it really was," but he kept on composing because It was fun.

"Beethoven towers over them all," he wrote in 1938. "Next choices, to me, are Rimski-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mozart. If you could see my bedroom you'd see what I think of Beethoven. His nine symphonies, all the quartets and sonatas are within reach from my bed and I get almost as much fun from reading them as hearing them; in fact I do 'hear' them. Yes, they haunt you, as you say, long after the record has stopped (I had purchased a phonograph). What do you suppose is going on among the atoms in your brain to produce this?"

"On one side of my bed," he continued, "is a five-octave dinky piano cluttered with the scores I work on. Then, after I've labored for weeks, I get a hunch my theme is only a holdover from something I've heard before."

The little piano actually overhung his bed on one side, which made it difficult to arrange the bedclothes. I have seen him crawl into bed wearing all his clothes except his hat. In recent years Porter spent 16 hours a day in bed to conserve his strength. At night he often woke up to whack out his pipe on a big stone Eskimo lamp, light up, and work on musical scores or read or write.

In 1939 he wrote, "When I go East I'll head straight for you and your phonograph-to Hell with glass grinding." For seclusion the phonograph and 42 albums of Beethoven's chamber music and sonatas were lugged to the cellar shop, two steamer chairs were placed beside the phonograph and for a total of 23 hours during three days Beethoven disks were fed in as Porter, who was hard of hearing, controlled the volume and pitch. His favorite was the andante of Opus 97, the Archduke trio. In 1946 he again wrote, "Let's have another cellar orgy-play every one of Beet's again."

IN 1947 he jotted, "I'm growing old. Feel it in my bones." When I saw him in 1948 he had shrunk until his clothes hung pathetically loose. Though the work he still found to do fatigued him, he kept at it. When he wrote, "If I'm the patron saint, you're my Boswell," he knew he had not far to go but he made no complaint.

Suppliers and Organizations

The Society for Amateur Scientists
5600 Post Road, #114-341
East Greenwich, RI 02818
Phone: 1-401-823-7800

Internet: http://www.sas.org/

At Surplus Shed, you'll find optical components such as lenses, prisms, mirrors, beamsplitters, achromats, optical flats, lens and mirror blanks, and unique optical pieces. In addition, there are borescopes, boresights, microscopes, telescopes, aerial cameras, filters, electronic test equipment, and other optical and electronic stuff. All available at a fraction of the original cost.

SURPLUS SHED
407 U.S. Route 222
Blandon, PA 19510 USA
Phone/fax : 610-926-9226
Phone/fax toll free: 877-7SURPLUS (877-778-7758)
E-Mail: surplushed@aol.com
Web Site: http://www.SurplusShed.com