Thomas Short

This article is about the Scottish optician Thomas Short. For the English clergyman, see Thomas Vowler Short .

Thomas Short (* 1711 ; † 1788 in Edinburgh ) was a Scottish optician from Leith . He founded the Short Observatory on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, which still exists today alongside the later observatory.

Short was the younger brother of the Edinburgh telescope maker and Royal Fellow James Short (1710–1768) and worked partly in his company (in Edinburgh and from 1736 in London). After his brother's death, he continued to run his London company for a few years. In 1776 he returned to Edinburgh and brought James' large twelve-legged reflector telescope with a focal length of 3.7 meters to exhibit telescopes in the Scottish capital and later to set up a commercial observatory.

Due to special circumstances, however, this project became Edinburgh's first university observatory . In 1736 the mathematician and geodesist Colin Maclaurin , who had worked at the University of Edinburgh from 1726 to 1746, raised money for an observatory at the Royal College. Due to the Jacobite uprising in 1745, the funds remained unused and have now been released by the city for the construction of the observatory on Calton Hill. The building was given the shape of a fortress tower by James Craig in 1776 ; Short worked and lived there until his death in 1788.

After that, the observatory was continued by his family and reverted to the city around 1805; later she went briefly as a public observatory and museum to Short's daughter Maria Theresa Short . In 1818 a second observatory was built on the hill with the Playfair Building.

Web links

• Information in the Gazetteer for Scotland (English)