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DOC
In 1898, Edgar TILLYER graduated from high school and was ready to go onto college. Lorenzo and Rozena were financially well off enough that they could send their son to the State College of New Jersey, Rutgers.
He was very successful there especially in math and applied physics even though he probably questioned every assertion his professors made. Edgar soon knew that he had to go on to graduate school to develop his talents. He set his sights on John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Lorenzo, however, when he heard that his son wanted to continue his education in graduate school, shook his head and said that he just could not afford to send him.
Edgar Derry TILLYER holding
his college diploma,
1902
Edgar never gave up on anything so he looked for ways to finance his further education in Baltimore. Late in 1901 or early in 1902 when finances looked like a formidable barrier to Edgar's immediate future education, he saw an opportunity to get what he was looking for. He heard about a competitive examination that was to be given to college seniors with the first place prize to be an appointment at the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington, D.C. as a computer.
Edgar saw this as his way to get a job to get the money to pay his tuition and be close to the school he wanted. He also saw this as a way to gain valuable experience. On 24 March 1902, Edgar spent the day on the train from New Jersey to New York City where the exam was to be given. After spending the night in Grand Central Station, Edgar made his way to the testing site. For the next two days he competed with brilliant young men from Yale, Harvard and all the other eastern universities on this comprehensive examination.
Edgar was the highest scorer on the set of exams and won the event. As a result of this impressive accomplishment, he was appointed by the Secretary of the Navy to be an assistant computer at the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington, D.C.29
This office complied an annual almanac which predicted daily positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and certain stars. This was done to help sailors locate their exact position while at sea. 30
When he graduated from Rutgers in June 1902 with a Bachelor's of Science degree, Edgar was offered scholarships at both Yale and Columbia Universities. Edgar stated that although he appreciated the honor, his intention was to pursue his postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins University while working in the Nautical Almanac office in Washington.31
However, he went to George Washington University (rather the John Hopkins because of the distances involved) and earned his Master's of Sciences degree in 1904 in Differential equations and functional theory.32 At the same time, he was working at the Nautical Almanac Office where he was employed from 1902 to 1905.
When asked about that job in the Almanac Office, Doc reflected back saying, "I learned to compute there - which is what the ordinary individual doesn't know how to do. Most people are afraid of it."33
In 1905, Edgar was awarded a Master's of Science degree from Rutgers University.34
During these years he would return to Dover as often as he could to be with his parents and to visit the LYND family. Besides wanting to be with Roy LYND, his best friend, he was developing a fondness for one of Roy's sisters, Florence Louise. Florence was known as "Floss" by her family to distinguish her from another close family friend with the same name. Floss was born in Brooklyn in January 1884.35 She had long, dark hair and shiny dark brown eyes. Edgar had flashing blue eyes and dark hair.36
William LaRue and Ella Louise (DENNIS) LYND.
Florence's parents were William LaRue and Ella Louise (DENNIS) LYND. William was a large, portly man about 6' 2" and liked to have a lot of fun. He liked fishing and sports of all types and he was well read and active in his church. William LYND was mayor of Dover in 1914 to 1916 and was on the Dover Board of Education in the 1910s and 1920s. He formed a real estate business with two friends and it flourished. The later became the manager of the Richardson and Boynton Furnace and Range Works in Dover.37
Ella, on the other hand, was a petite lady, being less than 5 feet tall. She also was well-read, up-to-date on current affairs and felt that it was important for women as well as the men to stay informed. She taught her six daughters to be the same. Ella was "a perfect lady with a sharp sense of humor." She was a member of the Dover Memorial Presbyterian Church, the Woman's Missionary Society, and the Dover's Woman's Club. Ella also helped run a cemetery.38
On June 20, 1905, Edgar, who was twenty-four, married Florence Louise, who was twenty-two at that time. Their marriage took place at the Imperial Presbyterian Church in Dover in front of their parents and friends. Edgar called himself an astronomer on the marriage certificate. They moved to Washington, D.C. after the marriage.39
Soon after this marriage, Edgar went to work for the United States Naval Observatory in Washington where he stayed until 1911.
The United States Naval Observatory has the responsibilities in the areas of navigation, time and fundamental celestial reference systems. Because of these duties, it is one of the few institutions in the world to undertake astrometry. Astrometry is defined as the determination, through continual observations, of the positions and motions of the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and principal stars. The data collected form the basis of the Nautical Almanac time. At the Washington, D.C. site, transit circles, specially designed telescopes that make observations only as an object crosses the meridian, are used to measure accurate positions of celestial bodies. The master clock establishes standard time for the United States.40
It was here that Edgar's genius, talent for invention, insight and the ability to make solutions to complicated problems seem simple began to flourish. In 1907, he developed a system for reversing prisms for "meridian circle observations." This system saved the observatory time in making readings, eliminated the human errors that occurred regularly, and provided more consistent data while at the same time simplifying the whole process. Also, in 1907, he improved the clock vault temperature control resulting in a more accurate Standard Time for the United States.41 42
In late 1909, Edgar presented a paper, "The Clock Vault of the U.S. Naval Observatory," at the tenth annual meeting the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. This paper described the innovations that he made to the clock vault.43 As a result of this presentation, Edgar was elected into the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society in 1910. This was an honor and Lorenzo, Edgar's father, was so impressed that he wrote about in his the Hightstown Gazette on 22 September 1910:
"For the benefit of those who might be interested - we would say that the clock vault . . . is a vault or room within another room and is heated by warming the air between the two rooms with a hot water system heated by gas burners. But the great difficulty heretofore has been to keep the temperature of the interior of the vault constant. To overcome the difficulty of a continual comparative wide variation of the temperature, Mr. TILLYER designed a thermometer which would register a hundredth of a degree and would turn off and on four tiny four-candle power electric lights as the temperature would rise and fall. When the temperature falls a fraction of a degree the lights are automatically turned on and in a few moments the temperature is again raised to the normal point by the heat radiated from them when they are automatically turned off again by the raise of the thermometer or thermostat, thus keeping the temperature the year round with but a slight variation from a hundredth of a degree of constant. It was through this work . . . that Mr. TILLYER was elected an honorary member of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America"44
Other things that Edgar did there were equally as inventive and impressive. He computed the curves for a combination of lenses which were fused. The final lens was 10" in diameter and part of a new, powerful photographic telescope located at the Naval Observatory.45 This one lens alone required 600 days to compute and reduce to a formula.46
At home at this time, Richard ("Dick") Lynd, Edgar and Florence TILLYER's first child, was born on 5 August 1907 in Washington. When Rozena heard the name the young couple had given to their first son, she became furious, demanding that it be changed. Florence had always liked the name "Richard" and was hurt and puzzled. Edgar saw nothing wrong with the name. He apparently did not know or thought nothing of that fact that Lorenzo's father had been named "Richard" and was a scoundrel as far as the family was concerned. Rozena had forbidden anyone to use that name in her presence and now it was being used to name her first grandson. She was irate. 47 48
Incidentally, it was at this point that Rozena starting calling Florence "Flossie" in a disparaging and contemptuous manner.49
Edgar, probably to spite his intimidating mother, decided that his first son would remain Richard.
Richard TILLYER, the "scoundrel" who was Edgar's grandfather, had married Mary Jane MARTIN in December 1853 in New Jersey and they had eight children. He was successful as an engineer or designer and had been involved in the construction of the Flat Iron Building in New York City. He abandoned the family in New York and ran off with another woman. His wife then drifted around the area with Lorenzo and his five younger brothers and two younger sisters eventually settling in New Jersey where Mary Jane worked in Day's Candy and Ice Cream Store in Morristown.50
Louise Kathleen, Edgar and Florence's second child, was born on 14 December 1910, in Washington, D.C.
In 1911, when he was 30 years old, Edgar changed jobs and went to work for the Bureau of Standards in Washington.
The National Bureau of Standards was established to provide a basis for measurement standards in the United States. It worked to ensure accurate physical measurements and reliable data throughout the government and in the scientific, industrial, educational and commercial communities.51
Edgar was placed in charge of image-forming instruments at the Bureau. He redesigned submarine periscopes, increasing their vision and field of illumination more than 15 times. It was during this period that he originated the first specifications to standardize periscopes and gun sights used by the Navy. The Army was impressed with his work and hired him as a consultant to help them in their standardization process, as well. 52 At the Bureau of Standards, Edgar worked out many difficult problems of refraction and reflection of light.53 He was so highly regarded by the military that he was appointed as the arbitrator in disputes between the Army and Navy and between these services and outside manufacturers on all optical instruments disputes.54
Edgar TILLYER soon recognized his affinity for optics and lens computations. He realized that with the current state of the art and current scientific knowledge, eye glass lenses could not be made with the proper correction over the entire surface of the lens from the middle to the very edge. The fact that ophthalmic lenses varied in power from the center to the margin had been recognized as early as 1808 by workers in the field. Eminent scholars and physicists had worked on the problem with various degrees of success. To that point in history, however, but no one had conquered the problem of making the complete and proper individual correction over the entire surface of the lens.55 This intrigued Edgar TILLYER and his subconscious mind sought an answer for the problem.
In the meantime, Lorenzo and Rozena sold the Hightstown Gazette in 1912 and moved south. The reason for this is confusing. In Lorenzo's obituary, written by Rozena, it says that Lorenzo TILLYER had a serious operation in 1912. So serious was this operation that he and Rozena were forced to sell the Hightstown Gazette and the Hightstown house to move "south" to recuperate. In an article written in 1912 in his newspaper, Lorenzo explains the move south because ". . . the cold winter weather does not agree with Mrs. TILLYER." 56 They probably went either to Maryland to be close to Edgar and his family or to Florida (as some family traditions state).57 They returned to Hightstown and built a new house there in 1913.58
Also in 1912, on Christmas Eve, Edgar was watching Florence and his young children trim the tree. As his wife reached high on the tree to hang some tinsel, she accidentally knocked a colorful glass ornament off its hanger. It slid through the branches and hit the floor with a pop like the bursting of a light bulb. Edgar stood up to scold this careless woman but the reflection of a bright light off a shard of broken glass caught his eye. Edgar, always the visionary scientist, picked up the glass sliver and studied its curves and the way it reflected the light rays. It was at this point that the idea of using a curved spectacle lens to solve the uneven lens correction idea started working its way through Edgar's mind. This idea would eventually become the WELLSWORTH-TILLYER lens.59
It was at this point also that Floss noticed an unpleasant side of Edgar. He was becoming ever more jealous of his wife's activities and restrictive of her movements. His treatment of her became more physical and terrifying. In the latter part of 1913, before she found out that she was pregnant again, she decided that she could not go on in this relationship and asked Edgar for a divorce. Divorce was a very rare thing in those days and a potential divorcee knew that her reputation as a woman of low morals would almost be automatically assumed. Also, she would have a difficult time supporting herself and her children. This was a big and a difficult decision for a woman to make at that time. Her family knew of and shared her despair. When she finally decided to go ahead and ask for a divorce from Edgar, her father, William LaRue LYND said that she could come home and live with them. He said that he was on the Board of Directors of so many companies that he was sure he could find her a job.
When she told Edgar she wanted to leave, he said "Go! But the children stay with me." He knew that Floss's dedication to her children would keep her there. He was correct. Florence's love for her children made it impossible for her to leave.60
To make this period in the TILLYER family history even more tumultuous, Florence found out that she was pregnant. She was now tied even tighter into this marriage. Edgar William (Bill) was born on 22 April 1914 at 3042 Dent St., in Georgetown at the time. On the birth certificate, the father's occupation was a physicist.61
Florence's father, wrote the following, rather strange, letter to her on the day of Bill's birth:
Dover April 22/14
My dear Daughter,
Ruth just telephoned to me the good news.
We are all pleased and happy to hear that you weathered the storm successfully.
You should be a very proud mother with your family.
Richard and Louise are only older editions of this new baby and he is bound to be more or less as they are. This always follows in familys. All of your little ones will be like you as you are like your lovely little mother.
He may or may not develope into a world beater but he is bound to be a straight decent boy and man if he is brought up as you cannot help teaching him right. It is your nature.
The modern method of bringing up babies is not to love and cuddle them.
This applies to all except our babies and besides this maternal stimulant is the way of food they are so constructed that a great deal of cuddling and caressing is necessary to their welfare. Without my suggestion it is a safe bet that this splendid specimen will get it plenty. Take good care of yourself for you are now more important than ever before. Not only for your family but your country expects you to rear all these little ones. Regards and congratulations to Edgar.
If your little mother exhibits my undue pride and conceit you will excuse her for she is built that way.
Papa 62
The letter made no reference to the family's strife.
It was also about this time that Louise contracted measles. She recovered uneventfully but two weeks later she became very ill probably with a heart infection. She was so sick that she was not expected to live.63
When Floss was confined in the home by the jealous husband and the necessity to watch over a seven-year-old boy, care for a very sick little girl and cuddle a newborn infant, she would spend time staring out the window at a park across the street. Often she saw Teddie ROOSEVELT ride his horse in that park. Floss felt the President ROOSEVELT handled his horses cruelly and would often speak of those cruel incidents almost as a metaphor of her predicament. 64
On 29 June 1914, Florence received a sad letter from her mother. The Richardson and Boynton Furnace and Range Works where William was the superintendent burned to the ground forcing more than 1000 workers out of a job. Ella LYND wrote to Florence:
My dear Floss:
My news today is very sad. This morning at half past seven we heard the alarm of fire and the telephone both at the same time it turned out to be the Foundry. Papa dressed and hurried away and we all followed as fast as we could and found disaster profound such a fire I never saw one building after another No. 4 was saved the office and the brick building but all the other buildings were burned to the ground nothing could save them they had not enough water if we could have had water enough in the beginning. We could have saved them. Papa is almost crazy over it. We staid over there until twelve by that time all the damage to other buildings was over. Papa is still over there all the men are they are inventorying for the insurance excuse this letter Floss I wanted to let you know but cannot collect my thoughts will write as soon as I know more.
Very Lovingly, Mamma 65
William LYND was a member of the Dover volunteer fire department and was involved the actual fighting of the fire himself.66 In the midst of this hopeless battle, he paused and looked around at the group of stunned spectators and at the developing disaster. His daughter, Marjorie, watched this weary man standing in the middle of the rubble of the factory as tears streamed down his cheek.67
Headaches, which would haunt Florence for the rest of her life, began to develop during this period.
In 1915, while still at the Bureau of Standards, Edgar saw the need for an association of people in the optical profession so that ideas and information could be exchanged. So he, along with his associates in the optical profession such as E. BAUSCH of BAUSCH and LOMB Optical Company; P. G. NUTTING and L. A. JONES, both of Eastman Kodak Company; and three others, formed the Optical Society of America.68
In another part of the optical world, George W. WELLS was frustrated with the current system of grinding lenses insisting that it was wrong. WELLS was the owner of the Wellsworth Optical Company (as the American Optical Company was known as then) in "the hills of Southern Massachusetts." He had been declaring this frustration for 20 years before Edgar's 1912 Christmas Eve epiphany with the curved lens.69
Eye glass lenses are pieces of glass whose surface has been made so that the light passing through it is bent. These alterations are carefully designed so that the distortion of the rays of light created by the lens negates the distortions of the faulty eye of the person wearing the lens. The method used to shape the glass lens is literally by grinding and polishing. Specially prepared optical glass, free from all impurities which could cause distortions or discoloration, is used in the lenses. A lens blank is first rough ground using a diamond abrasive on a grinding wheel to shape it to its approximate final dimensions. Fine grinding, or lapping, is then done with a carborundum or emery abrasive. Polishing, the final step, after the grinding, may take hours to complete.70 The correct specifications describing the exact shape the lens must be ground to comes from the prescription of the optometrist or doctor.
Referring to the existing method of creating lens, WELLS observed in the early 1900's, he predicted ". . . it will take a mathematician of the highest order, with a practical knowledge of lens grinding to correct it."71
In 1916, George WELLS heard that Edgar had been toying with a new idea in lens grinding in his spare time and had, in fact, amassed eleven huge volumes of equations, charts and other strange hieroglyphic-like characters. Mr. WELLS immediately recruited Edgar to the Wellsworth Optical Company to run the research laboratory and implored him to move to Southbridge, Massachusetts.72
The opportunity to conduct his own research in his own laboratory was irresistible to Edgar. So in 1916, when Edgar was thirty-five years old, he moved to Southbridge and went to work for the American Optical Company (AO). This was the world's largest supplier of lenses to the ophthalmic profession at that time and was situating itself to become a leader in optical research and development.
Edgar TILLYER went ahead of his family to Southbridge where he
rented a small house on Everett Street.73
Soon, 
however, he
purchased a new house at 4 Maple Street (which was later
renumbered to 20 Maple Street). Maple Street was quiet and serene
with newly planted trees and a small grassy front lawn. It was a
restricted area where noone could move in without the approval of
the home owners association. There were only ten houses on the
cul-de-sac street and they were all occupied by minor executives
of the AO.74 At the end of Maple
Street were railroad tracks. These tracks later became an
attraction to the children and grandchildren who would furtively
slip pennies on the tracks. This had to be done secretly to hide
it from Edgar's wrath.
Home of E. D. TILLYER Maple Street
Southbridge, Massachusetts.
The home was a two-story house which had a marvelous pantry off the kitchen. In this kitchen sat a refrigerator with its cooling apparatus perched on the top. Florence seemed to spend all of her time in there except when Edgar made his famous fried onion and potato delight on Saturday nights. Next to the kitchen was a small storage area which held all the lines and dishes from long ago New Jersey meals.
The cellar was dark and creepy to the young ones. It had an earthen floor and smelled musty and damp. There was the dining room next to the kitchen. Off the dining room was Edgar's greenhouse.
The living room also seemed dark and seemed
always to be lighted with electric lights. The drapes were dark
and the furniture pieces were in dark reds and browns. This room
contained Edgar's chair and footstool, Florence's chair, a
rocking chair, couch, and large beautiful radio and record
player. 
The hallway, where the front door was, lead to stairs up to the second floor. There were four bedrooms upstairs and one bathroom which contained an upright sunlamp which Edgar used faithfully.75
This house was a short walk from downtown Southbridge and in the other direction and about the same distance was the AO's massive complex of red brick buildings built along the banks the rapidly flowing Quinebaug River.76
Edgar Derry and FlorenceLouise (LYND) TILLYER
Joel Cheny WELLS (son of George WELLS), founder of the Research Laboratory77 and the AO gave Edgar every resource available to outfit the research laboratory including the permission to hire his own staff.78 One of the first members of Edgar's staff was Dr. A. Estelle GLANCY who was at that time a "remarkable astronomer."79
It was about this time that the Wellsworth Scientific and Research Laboratories officially changed its name to the American Optical Company Research and Development Laboratories.
While Edgar hired and created a staff of assistants, his family moved from Washington to Southbridge on their own. Florence traveled from Washington, D.C. to Worcester, Massachusetts, by train with her small troupe of young children. They finished the trip, traveling the twenty miles from Worcester to Southbridge by trolley. 80
While Florence set up her household, Edgar spent most of his time at his laboratory. He still was obsessed with improving the eyeglass grinding at the time which allowed accurately corrected vision through the center of the lens only. The vision through the edges of these ground lenses was distorted and inaccurate. Edgar's self-imposed assignment was to find a way to create a lens that would provide even, accurate corrected vision through all parts of the lens not just the center.81 82
Doc was an avid reader and researcher.
Here he works in the A.O. laboratory.
Edgar Derry TILLYER made an immediate impact on the optical field taking the ideas of the curved glass of the broken Christmas ornament he had studied and applying them to eye glass lens design. With Dr. GLANCY producing the required calculations,83 Doc discovered a way to use a curved lens for uniform eye defect correction. In 1917, he filed a patent for this process using the common base curve for a wide range of eye glass prescriptions allowing a practical base curve choice for mass production. This process was called the TILLYER Principle.84 This was a giant step in the right direction toward getting an accurate lens correction over the entire face of the spectacle lens but much more remained to be done.
Designing ophthalmic lenses is unique because the human eye is constantly in motion behind the lens. This movement must be considered in the design of lenses. The design of precision lenses, such as lenses for cameras, microscopes, etc., are seldom concerned with transmitting images away from the optical center85 known as the optical axis. The optical axis is a straight, perpendicular line that runs through both the eye glass lens and the lens of the eye. When a person, who is wearing glasses, looks away from the center of the lens, he is said to look "off-axis."86 Central line of sight is seldom through the optical center (axis) of eyeglass lenses. "Off-axis" correction is a distinctively ophthalmic problem and had not been solved in 1917. Another factor that must be considered is the changing position of the front surface of the eye which is different for each person. Nearsighted people (myopic) have longer eyes than the farsighted (hyperopic). These distances from the front of the eye to the back of the lens vary with each person. These two complicating factors gave Edgar and his staff of researchers a continual challenge.87 88
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Tim TILLYER