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Even after that, the art was supposed to be a secret in the hands of a Swiss named Guinand, and his family. Looking over the field, the Clarks concluded that the only firm that could be relied on to furnish the glass was that of Chance & Co., of Birmingham, England.

'Were it not for my courage and enterprise, I cried, 'this phenomenon would have remained a secret of the Nature that gave birth to it. She yields her treasures to such only as fear not. "I had read in a book of Huyghens, Guinand, Newton, Herschel the great high-priests of science who had striven through patient years to read the hieroglyphics of the heavens. 'The wise imbeciles, I thought.

Somewhat about the time that Herschel set about polishing his first speculum, Pierre Louis Guinand, a Swiss artisan, living near Chaux-de-Fonds, in the canton of Neuchâtel, began to grind spectacles for his own use, and was thence led on to the rude construction of telescopes by fixing lenses in pasteboard tubes. Failure only stimulated him to enlarge their scale.

It is now believed that this secret, if one it was, consisted principally in the constant stirring of the molten glass during the process of manufacture. However this may be, it is a curious historical fact that the most successful makers of these great disks of glass have either been of the family of Guinand, or successors, in the management of the family firm.

The first actual inventor and constructor of an achromatic telescope was Chester Moor Hall, who was not in trade, and did not patent it. Towards the close of the eighteenth century a Swiss named Guinand at last succeeded in producing larger flint-glass discs free from striae.

In the time of Dollond it was found scarcely possible to make good disks of flint-glass more than three or four inches in diameter. Early in the present century, Guinand, of Switzerland, invented a process by which disks of much larger size could be produced.