Who was John Brashear?

John Brashear was once a household name in Pittsburgh.

With no more than a grade-school education, John Brashear came to Pittsburgh’s Southside in 1861 and began working as a millwright in the steel mills. This was just at the start of the American Civil War. John was fascinated with the stars and planets. During the trolley rides to and from his work at the steel mills, he taught himself mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy from old textbooks given to him by friends and teachers. John and his wife Phoebe set up a telescope lens-making shop in a small shed outside their tiny Southside home at 6 Holt Street. Despite several early lens-making catastrophes, they learned quickly from their failures. Soon, they even learned to improve on the lens-making techniques of others. Within several years, they began making some of the world’s best optical instruments. The Brashears also earned such a reputation for high integrity, friendliness, and ingenuity that they gained the friendship of many of the Pittsburgh's powerful industrialists. The list of their wealthy friends included Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, Charles M. Schwab, George Westinghouse, William Thaw, and Henry Phipps. William Thaw helped the Brashears start the John A. Brashear Company, which became world-renowned for their instruments.

• The Brashears’ instruments were of such high precision and quality, they were sought after by observatories all over the world. Some are still in use today.
• The Brashear company fabricated the precision optics used in the famous Michelson-Morley experiments in physics, whose results led to Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
• John Brashear was selected by Andrew Carnegie to serve on his Board of Directors tasked with creating the Carnegie Institute and the Carnegie Technical Schools, institutions that would eventually become part of today's Carnegie Mellon University.
• The story of John and Phoebe Brashear is also a touching love story. When John moved to the Southside of Pittsburgh in 1861, he met a young Sunday school teacher named Phoebe Stewart. They fell in love and vowed to marry, despite the strong disapproval of her father. They eloped and moved across the river to the north side of Pittsburgh, which was then called Allegheny City. Phoebe was just as fascinated by astronomy and telescope-making as John, and the young couple quickly became a powerful scientific team. Theirs was a life-long story of mutual love and devotion, and today they reside together for eternity in a crypt inside their beloved Allegheny Observatory.