Excerpt from The Ohio Journal of Science, Vol. 16: Continuation of the Ohio Naturalist, Official Organ of the Ohio State University Scientific Society and of the Ohio Academy of Science, 1915-16

Some four years before the above quotations were written, the author started to work up a course in Optics which should aim, not only to give to the student a knowledge of the funda mental theory of lenses, but should also apply those principles to the methods of optical design and thus enable him to compute the curves of the component lenses of a photographic objective. This has now been fairly well worked out and is given in the Arts college under the official titles Astronomy, 107, 108, 109 and The basis of this course is A System of Applied Optics, by H. Dennis T aylor, the inventor of the Cooke lens. This splendid volume develops, from the standpoint of geometric optics, a complete discussion of the formation of an image by a combination of any number of lenses, but does not apply the methods and formulae there developed to the actual design of a photographic objective. The writer of this paper was, therefore, compelled to work out this part of the theory for himself and, as he had always felt that all mathematics should ultimately end in arithmetic and that all arithmetic should ultimately end in doing something, he resolved at the outset that the course should end in laboratory work in the actual computation, grinding and polishing of lenses. As to how well this has succeeded, I will let the illustrations which accompany this article speak for themselves. Suffice it to say that the half tone cuts were made from five by seven enlargements from negatives, one and three quarters by two and one-eighth inches, taken with a lens designed and built at this observatory and working at an aperture of F six. A peculiar feature of this lens is that it is composed of four lenses all cut from the same piece of crown glass. This lens beautifully illustrates the importance of adding to the theoretical side of the course, the practical work in the laboratory in construction and testing as this lens, though in the main satisfactory, has one serious defect and a defect which is very instructive in that it shows that at a certain point in the design, the theory was weak and needed to be extended and enlarged. It should be stated that this theoretical investigation is now completed and ready to be put to the test of practice.

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