As part of my search for a missing US Navy balloonist, I’ve been working my way though a long list of research leads. One of these was to find out if Thomas Greenhow William (“Tex”) Settle’s papers were left anywhere (the Settle Collection at the Smithsonian was donated by J. Gordon Vaeth in 2006, and is more like Vaeth’s shrine to his old boss). So imagine my surprise…
Tex Settle (1895-1980)
Celebrated US Navy balloonist Tex Settle was born on November 4, 1895, retired as an Admiral in 1957, and finally died on April 28, 1980. He was CNATE at NAS Lakehurst from 1946 to 1947: Admiral Charles E. ‘Rosy’ Rosendahl, Settle’s predecessor, said (in his book “SNAFU”) that Settle was basically the only person to whom he would hand NAS Lakehurst’s reins.
Settle was someone who was not only well-educated but also meticulous (if admittedly a bit terse). So it seems extraordinarily likely to me that his papers would both exist and be in a well-organised (and indeed archive-friendly state). So where are they? Perhaps his family might still have them…
Fay Brackett Settle
Fay Brackett was born in Somerville, Middlesex, Massachusetts on 14 Aug 1900 to James Frederick Brackett (1871-1937) and Alice Palmer Fay (1873-1934). She married Tex Settle around 1930, and died at Arlington, 6 Oct 1989: the only relation of hers I’ve found was her brother Frederick Brackett (who, in 1934, the Boston Globe said lived in “the Heights”).
She and Tex Settle had one son…
Thomas Brackett Settle (1930-2020)
For telescope historians (such as myself), the name Tom Settle should ring a very loud bell indeed. Tom Settle wrote extensively on the early modern history of science, with a particular focus on Galileo. As I understand it, after being a Professor Emeritus at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn (now part of NYU) he retired to Florence, and was closely associated with the IMSS (now the Museo Galileo).
In fact, if you have searched for topics in and around the history of science, there’s a high chance you will have encountered “The History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine” website he curated for some years.
What was even more surprising for me was that, following my 2008 Juan Roget popular article (I wouldn’t really call it a ‘paper’) on the possible Catalonian history of the telescope, Settle wrote a paper on the exact same topic:
‘The invention of the telescope. The studies of dr. Josep M. Simon de Guilleuma’, Actes de la III Jornada d’Historia de l’Astronomia i de la Meteorologia, Vic, 17 d’octubre de 2009.
(Note that this is available on academia.edu via Google Scholar – I read it just now, it’s a nice article.)
I haven’t so far managed to trace any living family member for Tom Settle, but if anyone is able to dig anything up, please let me know!
Tex Settle’s Estate
I did manage to find a July 2020 auction listing for a “Collection of books relating to Admiral Thomas ‘Tex’ Settle’s flights as a balloonist” (which didn’t sell), along with another for three watercolours of Istanbul by Nikolai Saraphanoff (which did sell), where both listing mentioned that they were from Tex Settle’s estate, and then another, another, some ducks, a horse, some bookends, some books, etc.
The implication would seem to be that these were items from a house clearance put up for auction following (Tex Settle’s son) Tom Settle’s death (also in 2020), and hence that the rest of Tex Settle’s papers may possibly now be on the move too. So: where are they, and who has them? Or… have they all just been thrown away as having no obvious value at auction?
Thanks for this post, Nick. Reading Settle’s paper (thanks for that link), I noticed that he made no mention of the portable telescope or ‘spyglass’ used in seventeenth-century ships so went looking for more background for those.
Anyone else interested will find a nice set of photos in a pdf put online by the University of Arizona’s College of Optical Sciences
John E. Greivenkamp and David L. Steed, ‘The History of
Telescopes and Binoculars’ [pdf]
Co-incidences coming thick and fast, Settle’s paper says…
“The question is, then, how was it that Johann Lipperhey was able to create a telescope, a telescope by Willach’s criterion, in the fall of that year. The answer is that Lipperhey found that by placing a holed diaphragm, a circular piece of paper with a hole in its middle about one centimeter or centimeter and a half wide, in association with the convex lens of the “far seeing tube”, the lack of sufficient resolution of the image was greatly diminished; in plain words, the resolution became greater than that of the naked eye.”
an within a couple of days a correspondent mentioned ‘Alhazen’ – who lived in Cairo and whose work on optics would eventually trickle down to western Europe and become central to its studies of optics. And as it happens it was Alhazen who..
“arrived at his conclusion via experimentation using lenses, mirrors and what he called his al-bait al-muzlim, or in Latin, camera obscura, which translates simply as “dark room.” Noting that light entering a darkened room through a pinhole cast an inverted image of the outside world onto the opposite wall ..” focusing the light-rays into a sharper image.
So. sure – a ‘far-seeing’ tube was known before the early 1400s, but I’d need to see a lot more historical evidence to convince me that a telescope of any kind is to be seen in Voynich manuscript, including in the Voynich map, where (pace Rich and Katie), what its ‘Angel of the Rose’ holds in its bird-like wing is more likely meant for a rolled scroll – a letter or chart perhaps, who knows?.
Nick:
Did I get it right (I’m not confident I read every post on Roswell here) that the only (indirect) source for a manned balloon accident in summer 1947 is Craig Ryan’s book from 1995 citing an interview with B.D. Gildenberg who started working in Alamogordo not before 1951? What makes me wonder is that the timetable in Gildenberg’s article “Case Closed, Reflections on the 1997 Air Force Roswell Report” (Sceptical Inquirer May/June 1998) shows as the first manned balloon accident Dan Fulgham’s head injury in May 1959. If Gildenberg had reliable knowledge of an accident in 1947 and had mentioned it in an interview with Ryan around 1995, then why didn’t he mention it in his article from 1998? Are there other sources than the citation from an interview in Craig Ryan’s book?
I am a relative of Thomas G.W. “Tex” Settle. He was a much younger half-brother of my great-grandmother, Carrie Carson (Settle) Kemper. Tex Settle was a son of Joseph A. Settle’s second wife, while my great-grandmother was a daughter of Joseph A. Settle’s first wife. It is a great sadness to me that I never met Tex Settle, although I know that one of my uncles (who lived in Manassas, Virginia) often visited with Tex Settle in the Washington, DC area. I have done a fair amount of genealogical work in the past couple of years and am fascinated by the life of Tex Settle. Kind regards, Janet Fortney