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Thomas Grubb (4 August 1800 – 19 September 1878)
Thomas Grubb
Sir Howard Grubb (28 July 1844 – 16 September 1931)
Sir Howard Grubb
by Walter Stoneman
bromide print, 1917
NPG x167994
Thomas Grubb, born in Portlaw, Co. Waterford, was the son of William Grubb Junior and his second wife, Eleanor Fayle, prosperous Quaker farmers. He became a mechanical engineer and his Grubb Telescope Company, founded in Dublin in 1833, built some of the largest and most famous telescopes of the Victorian Era. The Portobello factory also featured a public observatory.
He was a close friend with Thomas Romney Robinson, Director of Armagh Observatory. They both assisted Lord Rosse in building the Leviathan of Parsonstown, a reflecting telescope with a 6-foot aperture and 52-foot-long tube which was the largest telescope in the world by aperture size for over 70 years. They also worked together on a number of telescope designs, notably the 15-inch reflector in 1835 which sits in East (1827) Dome of Armagh Observatory.
He had married Sarah Palmer, and their youngest son, Sir Howard Grubb, took over the family business when Thomas retired in 1868. One of Thomas’s last commissions and one of Howard’s first was also one of the most prominent: Robinson and Thomas Grubb successfully pushed for their design – tested with the 15-inch telescope in Armagh – to be adopted for the Great Melbourne Telescope. It was installed in the Melbourne Observatory in Australia in 1869, where it became the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere and one of the largest existing telescopes in the world, behind only the Leviathan of Parsonstown – with the additional benefit that it was fully steerable, unlike the Leviathan. It was in use until 2003, when it was almost completely destroyed by a major fire.
Other notable Grubb telescopes include the 1882 10-inch refractor at Armagh Observatory which Director Dreyer used to confirm observations for his New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars (the NGC for short), the “Großer Refraktor” in Vienna (1880 – briefly the largest refractor in the world), a 28-inch refractor for the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and others.
Lawrence Parsons, 4th Earl of Rosse acquired – among his other pursuits – the Grubb Telescope Company in 1925 and renamed it into Grubb Parsons (or, in full: ‘Sir Howard Grubb, Parsons and Co. Ltd.’), based in Newcastle upon Tyne. It traded until 1985 and produced many notable historical and modern telescopes, including a 36-inch reflector at Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, and components for the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands.
