Julia Fitz Howell

Henry Fitz, inventor and telescope maker, was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on December 31, 1808. Little is known of his mother, Susan Page Fitz, except that she was probably of Scottish ancestry. His father, Henry Fitz, Sr., was a hatter by trade and the youngest son of Mark Fitz, who for several years represented his city in the Massachusetts General Court.

Newburyport was then a prosperous and fast growing maritime community and the Fitzes, though not among its wealthy citizens, were a public spirited and reasonably prosperous family. As in other sections of New England, the War of 1812 made great changes in this pleasing picture. The town’s shipping and ship-building had been brought almost to a standstill and all its business suffered disastrously. After the war recovery was very slow. Since few needed or could afford new beaver hats, Henry Fitz in 1819 took his wife and three small children first to Albany, New York, where he worked at his trade for awhile, and later to New York City.

To young Henry, aged eleven, New York was an exciting and stimulating place and he watched all its activities with eager interest. The father found the city stimulating in a different way. An enthusiastic Universalist, he met in New York many persons with similar leanings. He soon established a religious weekly, The Gospel Herald, which he edited for several years. It is therefore not surprising that young Henry was set to learning the printer’s trade, but although he rapidly became skilled, he didn’t especially like the trade. What he most enjoyed about it was tinkering with the machinery of the shop. In this his mechanical ability soon became evident. When his father relinquished his editorship, Henry, then nineteen, gladly turned to different work.

He chose locksmithing, which he learned speedily and well in the shop of William Day of New York. The years 1830 to 1839 found him travelling between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans, following the activities of the building trades and trying by long hours and austere living to save money for a locksmith shop of his own. For the sake of both health and pocketbook, he never rode if he could walk, neither drank nor smoked, ate little meat, and lived chiefly on graham bread and water.

Evenings were spent in reading, study, and the pursuit of hobbies, chief of which was astronomy. His diaries and letters of this period show him buying telescopes and lenses and carrying them with him on his travels. He first made a telescope in 1838, a reflector, with which he delighted to show the stars and planets to his friends. The well-known Reverend Clapp of New Orleans referred to him in a public address as “the young locksmith who knew more about the heavenly bodies than anyone else in the United States.” Henry was pleased with this compliment, even while deprecating the enthusiasm which prompted it.

Although he saved money, his work did not bring him the financial or other rewards that he had hoped for. In spring of 1839 he appears to have worked as a speculum maker with Wolcott and others—one of them may have been his acquaintance John Johnson—and to have read of Daguerre’s work in photography. To learn more of these experiments, as well as to inquire into optics and optical glass, he sailed to Europe in August of that year, taking passage by steerage.

He returned to New York in November 1839 and in that month, according to the testimony of his son Harry, made a portrait with a camera invented by Wolcott. This camera portrait he believed to be the first ever made. In 1840, after more experimenting, he set up a studio in Baltimore, where his father was then living, and spent several years there “taking likenesses.” At the same time he continued to work with telescopes and lenses. His first refractors were built there, instruments he later referred to as crude affairs.

While in Baltimore he took a step which marks the beginning of the final phase of his career. In June 1844 he married Julia Ann Wells of Southold, Long Island, whom he had known for about a decade and with whom he had long corresponded. Julia was a woman of unusual ability and personality, less scientific than he but more literary and artistic, and no less intelligent. With her to encourage him, he continued his experiments in telescope building. A year after their marriage they moved to New York, where he was to spend the remainder of his life.

That summer he prepared a 6-inch refracting telescope for exhibition at the Fair of the American Institute, held annually in New York. This carefully constructed instrument, with its ingenious tripod and its achromatic objective—which he had made himself, correcting the curves by a process of his own invention—won the highest award of the Fair, a gold medal. It was the first of many such medals he was to earn. His telescope also received favorable notice from scientists and astronomers, among them Lewis M. Rutherfurd, a wealthy New Yorker and trustee of Columbia College. Rutherfurd immediately ordered a 4-inch refractor for his own observatory. His interest and example soon brought orders from others.

From this time on, Henry Fitz devoted most of his energies to building telescopes. Cameras were not altogether abandoned. He continued to make them and to instruct others in their use. He invented a camera lens that was patented posthumously. He was one of the founders of the American Photographical Society and remained interested in it all his life. But from 1845 on, cameras became secondary; he built them between telescope orders.

During the years that followed he constantly improved the quality of his lenses and the accuracy and speed with which he could “execute the true curves,” as he expressed it. He used better and better glass. In his early experiments he had taken what came to hand—ordinary tumbler bottoms, for instance. In his 1845 prize winner he combined Boston-made flint with French plate glass. But the Boston flint proved too veiny for any but small lenses and he soon was importing both crown and flint. He designed and built machines, run by foot power, on which he could train employees to do much of the labor of lens making, always reserving the final polishing for himself. He increased the size as well as the quality of his lenses. By 1856, he was making 12½-inch refractors, which according to Prof. Loomis, were as large as any that had then been made in Munich. He built later, still larger ones, of which one was a 16-inch instrument made for Mr. Van Duzee of Buffalo. It was his ambition to make a 24-inch one, but this project, for which he had made careful plans, he did not live to complete.

One of his early successes was a 3¾-inch telescope for the Government of Haiti. By a happy accident the objective for this instrument proved to be exceptionally fine and provided a standard which he tried to meet in all his work. The telescopes of European opticians became another measuring stick. It was a matter of both personal and patriotic pride to him that he, an American locksmith untrained in optics, had been able to invent his own process for making so complex and difficult a thing as an achromatic lens, and that he was able to manufacture telescopes to compete with those of European make. He sometimes contracted to make a telescope equal in performance to an imported one of similar size, usually at a lower price. The 6¾-inch telescope made in 1849 for Lt. J. M. Gilliss to use on an astronomical expedition to Chile passed such a test and greatly enhanced Henry Fitz’s reputation. Another that met such a test was the 13-inch instrument made for the Allegheny Association at Pittsburgh in 1861.

His telescopes were procured by private observatories not already mentioned, among them that of Van Arsdale, in Newark, and of Campbell, in New York. For Rutherfurd he made several, including a 9- and a 12-inch instrument. The latter is now at Columbia University. Among the telescopes made for colleges were a 12-inch one for Vassar and another for the University of Michigan. Besides these and other important instruments he made many of smaller size—4, 5, 6, and 8 inches.

Most of the time, he was handicapped by lack of capital with which to develop his business. The savings from locksmithing days he had, on his father’s advice, invested in Baltimore real estate, but found it difficult to raise cash on this property when he needed it. With the many orders that came in, this situation gradually improved, though he always continued to supervise all phases of the process and to work 12 to 16 hours a day himself. As soon as his eldest son, Harry, was old enough, he taught him all he knew. The boy proved an apt pupil and a great help. By 1863 Henry Fitz felt secure enough to give up renting, and had a house built for his family and business in 11th Street, not many blocks from his friend and patron, Mr. Rutherfurd. Plans for the future looked bright. However, the family had hardly moved into the new home when disaster befell. A heavy chandelier fell on the master of the house, causing injuries which in a few days proved fatal. Henry Fitz died on October 31, 1863, at the height of his career, leaving to carry on his work a widow and six children, the oldest a girl of eighteen, the youngest an infant.

His son Harry, not yet seventeen, was able satisfactorily to fulfill the outstanding contracts. In this he had the backing and advice of Mr. Rutherfurd. In fact, Harry continued the business, though on a smaller scale, for some twenty years. Eventually he became a teacher of drawing, pursuing this occupation for over forty years more.

As soon as possible the widow, Julia Ann Wells Fitz, sold the city house and bought a farm in Peconic, Long Island, near her birthplace, where she managed to raise her family. All the children showed marked ability. Louise, the only daughter, married Silas Overton of Peconic, and used her talents in home and community. The second son, Benjamin, became a noted painter before his early death in 1890. Robert’s reputation as a fine mechanic was county-wide. Charles was a prominent business and civic leader in Suffolk County. George became a physician and inventor and was for a time Professor at Harvard. All married, and there are now living in the United States about fifty descendants of Henry Fitz, telescope maker.

A number of his instruments, though made a century ago, are still in use.