Robert E. Cox
American optical engineer
Robert Edward Cox (March 12, 1917 – December 16, 1989) was an American optical engineer and a popularizer of amateur telescope making. He conducted the popular "Gleanings for ATMs" (Amateur Telescope Makers) column in Sky and Telescope magazine for 21 years.
Career
Cox worked briefly at Perkin Elmer in 1939. Shortly thereafter he was inducted into the Army Air Corps and served for two years in the South Pacific as a weather specialist. After the war, Cox accepted part-time positions as photographic technician at Harvard Observatory and as staff member at Sky and Telescope. He also became associate editor of Weatherwise magazine.
In 1949, Cox became science curator at the Stamford Museum and Nature Center in Connecticut, operating its Spitz planetarium projector and developing science activities for the public. In 1953 he began work at Boston University's Optical Research Laboratories, making the prototype optics for military aerial cameras designed by James G. Baker. In 1957, Cox returned to making commercial optics at the A. D. Jones Optical Works.
In 1960, Cox joined the McDonnell Aircraft Co.
The public source identifies “Robert E. Cox” as american optical engineer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Robert, American and optical.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7343753. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1989, 1939 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert E. Cox” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.