Long before its Tennessee twin was familiar to anyone save connoisseurs of mountain music and residents, Oak Ridge in Massachusetts was a well-known place. for there, on a hill overlooking the town of Harvard, stands the biggest of the University's chain of Observatories, boasting the largest reflector telescope cast of the Mississippi River. Begun in 1932, the station now has 13 buildings, centered in a 50-acre tract, and instruments ranging in size from the "patrol cameras" to the giant 61-inch reflector.

This huge telescope is housed in the largest building at Oak Ridge, a dome-shaped shell with rotating walls. Electric power, stepped up by generators, operates the instrument and moves the walls along their built in track. Since all the operations can be directed by a set of pushbuttons attached to a lengthy cable, a single person can control all the machinery, including the moving observer scaffold, from anywhere in the room. Two or three times a year, the 1600-pound lens gets a cleaning, and is re-silvered. Because of its size it cannot be aluminum coated--there is no tank in this part of the country big enough to do the job.

There are other telescopes, almost as large, each in its own red brick building. Most, like the 61-inch lens, are used for taking pictures, seldom for direct viewing. The newest of these is the Jewett Memorial telescope, which was completed just after the war; its whole building revolves at the push of a button. With all this modern electric equipment around them, however, observers still freeze throughout the winter. Since the sensitive lenses cannot take quick temperature changes, and have to stay in the open all night for use, the buildings are never heated; students must supply themselves with fur-lined gloves and woolen caps on cold winter nights.

The station is higher than much of the surrounding countryside, and is protected from cold and wind only by the many birch and pine trees on the tract. Russel Anderson, superintendent of the station, points out that, without these trees, Oak Ridge would not be suitable for the Observatory at all.

Besides its many telescopes, the station also has one of the few seismographs in this area. Its building is of red brick like all the others, but the foundation lies 13 feet in the solid bed rock ledge below the station. To avoid the slightest crack or deformation, workmen dug the foundation by hand, and poured all the concrete at one time. In the above-ground rooms, students and professors watch several machines which have needles drawing red lines on continuous rolls of graphed paper. These machines report each variation, no matter how slight, in the seismograph below ground. Visitors are only allowed to peer through a small glass window into the red-lit room two flights down. There they can see, beneath sinister-looking cheesecloth covered frames, the delicate equipment that records every movement within the earth, from an earthquake in Peru to a construction blast in Westchester. So far it hasn't recorded any atomic blasts, though--too small a disturbance.