Contents

John Wall (inventor)

For other people named John Wall, see John Wall (disambiguation).

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "John Wall" inventor – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

John Wall
John Wall
Born	1932 Crayford, Kent, England)
Died	January 27 2018 Coventry, Warwickshire
Occupation	Engineer
Engineering career
Significant design	Crayford focuser
Significant advance	dialyte based refracting telescopes

John Wall (born 1932 in Crayford, Kent, died January 27 2018^[1]) was an English design engineer, amateur astronomer, amateur telescope maker and member of the British Astronomical Association. He used to live in Coventry England.

Biography

Wall's aptitude for engineering won him an apprenticeship with Vickers Armstrong at the age of sixteen in the town of Crayford where he was born. He served in the army with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in early 1950s and there became interested in telescopes and astronomy. He went on to become a design engineer at Vickers and, while working there in 1969, came up with the idea for an accurate mechanically simple eyepiece mount for amateur telescopes, the Crayford focuser. He is also known for designing dialyte based refracting telescopes, coming up with the Zerochromat retrofocally corrected refractor, including a folded 30-inch f/12 version he built in 1999. Wall died on 27 January, 2018.

Inventions

• 
  Drawings for the Crayford focuser
• 
  30-inch dialyte refracting telescope

References

• John Wall bio.
• When Wall met Wise^{[permanent dead link]}

External links

• A New Refractor Concept: "The Wall Hypochromatic Refractor"
• The John Wall 30-inch refractor.
• The Crayford eyepiece mounting by John Wall - Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 81 (2), 118, February 1971
• Crayford focusers
• Crayford Eyepiece Mount
• astronomics.com's description of how the Crayford Focuser works
• Toshimi Taki's description of how to build a cheap Crayford Focuser^{[permanent dead link]}