Drawing on his experience as historian of astronomy, practicing astrophysicist, and director of Lick Observatory, Donald Osterbrock uncovers a chapter in the history of astronomy by providing the story of the Yerkes Observatory. "An excellent description of the ups and downs of a major observatory."—Jack Meadows, Nature "Historians are much indebted to Osterbrock for this new contribution to the fascinating story of twentieth-century American astronomy."—Adriaan Blaauw, Journal for the History of Astronomy "An important reference about one of the key American observatories of this century."—Woodruff T. Sullivan III, Physics Today

"Aden B. Meinel and wife Marjorie P. Meinel stood at the confluence of several overarching technological developments of the 20th century: postwar aerial surveillance by spy planes and satellites, solar energy, the evolution of telescope design, interdisciplinary optics, and photonics. In 1945 he was a Navy Ensign ordered to find the secret tunnels in Nazi Germany where the V-2 rockets menacing Great Britain and Belgium were being manufactured. After receiving both his B.A. degree and Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley within three years, Aden was invited to join the scientific staff at Yerkes Observatory/University of Chicago. While there he was selected by the National Science Foundation to manage the development of a new national observatory on Kitt Peak, Arizona, and served as its first Director. In the early 1960s he founded the Optical Sciences Center at the University of Arizona, which later metamorphosed into the College of Optical Sciences with the doctoral program in interdisciplinary optics. It was here that he also designed the first Multiple Mirror Telescope and with wife Marjorie pioneered the feasibility of solar energy power on a commercial scale. Aden's knowledge and expertise in optics made him invaluable in research on cameras for spy satellites and spy planes overflying the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia. After retirement the Meinels worked for NASA/JPL on the precursor of the James Webb Space Telescope and on the exoplanet program. They also served on the team that corrected spherical aberration in the Hubble Space Telescope"--

Robber Baron is the first biography of the streetcar magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905), who stands alongside J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie as one of the most colorful and controversial public figures in Gilded Age America. John Franch draws upon every available source to tell the story of the man who was the mastermind behind Chicago’s Loop Elevated and the London Underground, the namesake of the University of Chicago’s observatory, and the inspiration for Frank Cowperwood, the ruthless protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire: The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic. Despite various philanthropic efforts, Yerkes and his unscrupulous tactics were despised by the press and public, and he left Chicago a bitter man. While Yerkes’s enduring public works testify to his success and desire to leave a lasting impression on his world, Robber Baron also uncovers the cost of this boundless ambition.

When championing the commercial buildings and homes that made the Windy City famous, one can’t help but mention the brilliant names of their architects—Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. But few people are aware of Henry Ives Cobb (1859–1931), the man responsible for an extraordinarily rich chapter in the city’s turn-of-the-century building boom, and fewer still realize Cobb’s lasting importance as a designer of the private and public institutions that continue to enrich Chicago’s exceptional architectural heritage. Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is the first book about this distinguished architect and the magnificent buildings he created, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Athletic Association, the Fisheries Building for the 1893 World’s Fair, and the Chicago Federal Building. Cobb filled a huge institutional void with his inventive Romanesque and Gothic buildings—something that the other architect-giants, occupied largely with residential and commercial work, did not do. Edward W. Wolner argues that these constructions and the enterprises they housed—including the first buildings and master plan for the University of Chicago—signaled that the city had come of age, that its leaders were finally pursuing the highest ambitions in the realms of culture and intellect. Assembling a cast of colorful characters from a free-wheeling age gone by, and including over 140 images of Cobb’s most creative buildings, Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is a rare achievement: a dynamic portrait of an architect whose institutional designs decisively changed the city’s identity during its most critical phase of development.

Although less well known outside the field than Edwin Hubble, Walter Baade was arguably the most influential observational astronomer of the twentieth century. Written by a fellow astronomer deeply familiar with Baade and his work, this is the first biography of this major figure in American astronomy. In it, Donald Osterbrock suggests that Baade's greatest contribution to astrophysics was not, as is often contended, his revision of Hubble's distance and age scales for the universe. Rather, it was his discovery of two distinct stellar populations: old and young stars. This discovery opened wide the previously marginal fields of stellar and galactic evolution--research areas that would be among the most fertile and exciting in all of astrophysics for decades to come. Baade was born, educated, and gained his early research experience in Germany. He came to the United States in 1931 as a staff member of Mount Wilson Observatory, which housed the world's largest telescope. There, he pioneered research on supernovae. With the 100-inch telescope, he studied globular clusters and the structure of the Milky Way, every step leading him closer to the population concept he discovered during the wartime years, when the skies of southern California were briefly darkened. Most Mount Wilson astronomers were working on weapons-development crash programs devoted to bringing Baade's native country to its knees, while he, formally an enemy alien in their midst, was confined to Los Angeles County but had almost unlimited use of the most powerful telescope in the world. After his great discovery, Baade continued his research with the new 200-inch telescope at Palomar. Always respected and well liked, he became even more famous among astronomers as they shifted their research to the fields he had opened. Publicity-shy and seemingly unconcerned with publication, however, Baade's celebrity remained largely within the field. This accomplished biography at last introduces Baade--and his important work--to a wider public, including the newest generation of skywatchers.