The Oldest Telescope in New Zealand

How a retired astronomer in France, a forgotten box in a Dunedin storeroom, and a gleaming 18th-century telescope came together to rewrite a small piece of New Zealand’s astronomical history.

Every so often, the universe sends a slight surprise by email.

On 2 November 2016, a message arrived at Tūhura Otago Museum with the subject line: “Oldest telescope in New Zealand.” It came from Dr William Tobin, a retired astronomy professor living in Vannes, France.

Tobin explained that he was preparing a review for Southern Stars, the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand. His piece concerned the Wolf Collection, a trove of historic telescopes held in the United States. To illustrate the reach of 18th-century craftsmanship, he had been tracing the surviving instruments made by James Short (1710 – 1768), the Scottish optician whose exquisitely polished mirrors set a new standard for astronomical observation.

At that point, Tobin believed the oldest telescope in the country was the Short reflector on display at Wellington’s Space Place – a handsome instrument from 1758 that had once belonged to broadcaster Peter Read. “I had been assuming,” he wrote, “that one or other of the Wellington or Te Papa telescopes was the oldest in New Zealand.”

Then came the twist.

“Error! It looks like the Otago Museum holds an older telescope – another Short, dating from 1736 and the time when he was still in Edinburgh.”

While checking an academic catalogue, Tobin had stumbled across a brief reference to a telescope marked 1736 41/91 – a code showing it was built by Short in Edinburgh, before his move to London. If the instrument survived, it would be the oldest known telescope in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

At the time, none of us at the Museum knew such an object was in our stores. I forwarded the message to our collections team and thought little more of it – until, a few days later, a large cardboard box appeared in my office. Across the top, in faded felt-tip, someone had written “Very old telescope.”

I couldn’t stop laughing when this box arrived on my desk…..

Inside lay a disassembled Gregorian reflector: a set of brass tubes, a focus rod, and a mirror that looked faintly coppery. The serial number on its casing read 41/93. I sent photographs to William, wondering if this could be the one.

Content of the box labelled “very old telescope”

He replied within hours, delighted.

“That’s great news! The Otago Short from 1736 must be a very serious candidate for being the oldest telescope in NZ.”

Over the next few weeks, our email correspondence became a kind of trans-hemispheric collaboration – me in Dunedin with the telescope on my desk, William in France, drawing graphs, scanning catalogues, using a lifetime’s knowledge to solve the mystery. He plotted Short’s production numbers to confirm the chronology and compared our serial code with others held in Scotland. His conclusion: the Otago instrument had a focal length of around nine inches, with a mirror roughly 60 millimetres across – the 93rd telescope Short ever made, and the 41st of that particular size.

Graph shared by Tobin showing where the Otago Telescope fit into the Short catalogue

He noted that ours shared features with telescopes in the National Museum of Scotland, Glasgow Museums, and the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. Each, he said, was slightly different – “workshop” rather than “factory” production, every detail shaped by hand. And, in a typically practical aside, he offered display advice:

“If you want to put the telescope on a stand, don’t make a replica of the original. Make a pillar out of some clearly modern material – perspex, perhaps.”

That was William all over: meticulous, generous, and faintly amused by the vagaries of history.

As the telescope’s story unfolded, another name emerged – John Campbell Begg (1876 – 1965), from whose estate the instrument came to the Museum. Begg was the “Begg” of Dunedin’s Beverly Begg Observatory: a farmer, physicist, philosopher, and soldier who, after serving in France during the First World War, helped establish the observatory and donated its first telescope. His Short reflector had travelled an astonishing route – from Edinburgh in 1736 to a Southland farm, then to Dunedin’s night skies and eventually a museum storeroom – before William Tobin rediscovered it through a chance query from France.

William Tobin's Election Video

It would have been enough for most people to end their story there, but William was not most people. In 2019, at the age of 73, he stood as an independent candidate against Boris Johnson in the UK general election, campaigning for expatriate voting rights. His slogan was both logical and delightfully absurd: “Don’t vote for Tobin; let Tobin vote.” He received five votes – an outcome that would have pleased his sense of irony.

When William passed away in 2022, we lost an astronomer of rare curiosity.

Whenever I walk past that polished telescope in its display case, I think about the artisans who shaped its mirrors, the amateur astronomer who cherished it, and the retired professor who, from his desk in Brittany, helped us locate New Zealand’s oldest window on the stars.