The 60-inch reflector, the first modern giant.

George Willys Ritchey, son of a pioneer farmer and cabinet maker, joined
George Ellery Hale's "telescope team" at Yerkes in 1897. The 40" refractor
was almost complete, and Ritchey and Hale planned their next step, a giant
reflector. Reflectors had been out of fashion for over 50 years, and nobody
knew how to make a large, accurate, glass mirror. 

As a test project, Ritchey completed a 24" f/5 which was a spectacular
success. It surpassed all existing telescopes in its ability to produce
photographs of faint nebulosity. About this time St.Gobain glass works, near
Paris, announced that they were willing to attempt a large diameter glass
blank. As a birthday present to his son, Hale's father ordered a 60" disk. 
(What a father!)

The disk was delivered in due course. It was 60 inches in diameter, 8 inches
thick, and weighed over a ton. Ritchey designed and built the grinding and
polishing machines and set to work. The mirror was begun in the Yerkes
optical shop, and finished in Pasadena in 1908. 

The telescope, mounted on a huge cast-iron fork, went into service in
December, 1908. It was an unqualified success. Edward Emerson Barnard
described his first view through it: "The stars looked like jewels on black
velvet. The sky was rich and dark, and every star was a glowing, living point
of light..." The first photographic plates revealed star images only 1.03" in
diameter after 11 hours of exposure. They soon reached stars of the 20th
magnitude!

But this telescope was not the final accomplishment of the "telescope team."
For before it was completed plans were made for a larger instrument. The
100-inch mirror blank arrived in Pasadena in the same week that the 60-inch
saw its first star on Mount Wilson.