Grubb Parsons
historic manufacturer of telescopes
Grubb Parsons (legally 'Sir Howard Grubb, Parsons and Co. Ltd.') was a historic manufacturer of telescopes, active in the 19th and 20th centuries. They built numerous large research telescopes, including several that were (at the time of construction) the largest in the world of their type.
It was founded in 1833 by Thomas Grubb as the Grubb Telescope Company, located in Dublin. Control of the company passed to his son Howard Grubb in the 1860s. They produced dozens of telescopes, including some of the largest of the 19th century, such as the 48-inch (1.2 m) Great Melbourne Telescope (a reflecting telescope) in 1868, a 27-inch (0.69 m) refractor for the Vienna Observatory in 1878, and the Greenwich 28 inch refractor in 1893. Leading up to and during the First World War (1914-18) the company produced periscopes for submarines and moved to St Albans in 1918.
In 1925 the company was purchased by Charles Algernon Parsons, renamed Grubb Parsons, and moved to Newcastle upon Tyne. In the 20th century they produced large research telescopes including the Isaac Newton Telescope (1965), Anglo-Australian Telescope (1965) and UK Infrared Telescope (1979). Their final project was the William Herschel Telescope in 1985, after which the company shut down.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2289932. VIAF identifies the subject as 122387774. The Library of Congress control number is no2009094669. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1833, 1868, 1878 and 1893.
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This entry incorporates text from “Grubb Parsons” 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.