T. Cooke & Sons

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T. Cooke & Sons
legal form Corporation
founding 1837
resolution 1922
Seat York
Branch Machine and device construction

T. Cooke & Sons was a British manufacturer of machines and equipment and, from 1900, also an armaments manufacturer , which was founded by Thomas Cooke in 1837 and merged into Cooke, Troughton & Simms in 1922 . The company became well known for its optical telescopes ( refractors ).

history

T. Cooke & Sons was founded in 1837 by Thomas Cooke (1807–1868). Thomas Cooke, who had largely acquired the craft of making optics himself, borrowed a £ 100  loan from an uncle of his wife and moved into his first workshop in 50 Stonegate, York.

In 1844 the company moved to new premises at 12 Coney Street, York. A 7 "refractor for Charles Piazzi Smyth in Tenerife and a 9½" refractor for John Fletcher Miller (1816-1856) in Whitehaven were manufactured there. However, the new premises quickly reached their limits, so Cooke decided to build a factory. In 1855 England's first telescope factory, Buckingham Works, was opened in Bishophill , Yorkshire. Cooke also expanded the range there to include glasses, clocks, sundials , lathes , engraving machines and other optical and mechanical measuring devices . Around this time, his sons Charles Frederick (1837–1898) and Thomas (1839–1919) also joined the company, with the older of the two brothers specializing in mechanical construction and the younger in optics .

Newall Telescope (1869)

At the 1862 World's Fair in London , the engineer and amateur astronomer Robert Stirling Newall (1812–1889) saw two large lenses from the glass manufacturer Chance Brothers , a supplier to Cooke, and then commissioned Cooke to build a 25 ″ refractor. Until then, the largest refractor was 18½ ″ and was manufactured in 1862 by Alvan Clark & ​​Sons for the University of Mississippi . Construction of the refractor began in 1863 and finished in 1869, a year after Thomas Cooke died. The refractor was installed in Newall's private observatory, after his death in 1889 it was given to the Cambridge Observatory and in 1950 it was transferred to the astronomical station on Mount Pendeli , northeast of Athens, the National Observatory of Athens . In 1873 the 26 ″ refractor for the United States Naval Observatory by Alvan Clark & ​​Sons was completed and replaced the refractor from T. Cooke & Sons as the largest refractor in the world.

After the death of their father, his sons continued to run the company and in 1897 converted the company into a corporation (Ltd.). At the turn of the century, armaments were also added to the range and in 1914 a second factory was built in Bishophill for this reason. At that time the company employed around 400 people. The British engineering and defense company Vickers took over the majority of T. Cooke & Sons in 1915 and merged the company with the instrument manufacturer Troughton & Simms to form Cooke, Troughton & Simms in 1924, which became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vickers in 1924.

The Cooke name lives on in the camera lens manufacturer Cooke Optics . In 1893, the factory manager and chief developer of T. Cooke & Sons , Harold Dennis Taylor (1862-1943), applied for a patent for the Cooke triplet lens design. But since T. Cooke & Sons had no interest in the production, he licensed his invention to Taylor, Taylor & Hobson . Cooke Optics was founded as an independent company in 1998 after Taylor-Hobson sold its optical division.

  • Brass microscope, 1850

  • Engraving Machine, 1870

  • 10 ″ refractor, 1871

swell

literature

  • Henry C. King: The History of the Telescope . Charles Griffin & Company, High Wycombe 1955, Chapter XII.
  • At the Sign of the Orrery . The Origins of the Firm of Cooke, Troughton & Simms, Ltd. from material collected by E. Wilfred Taylore and J. Simms Wilson and brought up to date by PD Scott Maxwell. York (English, archive.org - around 1960).
  • Anita McConnell: Instrument Makers to the World . A History of Cooke, Troughton & Simms. William Sessions, York 1992, ISBN 1-85072-096-7 (English).
  • AD Andrews: Record of a Notable 19th Century Telescope . The 3¼-inch 'Doncaster' Refractor by T. Cooke & Sons of York. In: Irish Astronomical Journal . Volume 27, Issue 1, 2000, pp. 55–64 , bibcode : 2000IrAJ ... 27 ... 55A (English).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Doug Against: Thomas Cooke . The English Alvan Clark. In: Journal of the Antique Telescope Society . Volume 5, 1994, pp. 5–7 , bibcode : 1994JATSo ... 5 .... 5G (English).

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