“Within a little over a week after the completion of the instrument and when we had seen through it only once or twice, the two south cables pulled out of their sockets and the floor fell through fifty feet to the ground and was destroyed. It was a terrible wreck. This was on the morning of May 29, 1897, at 6.30 o’clock. Mr. Ellerman and I had been working all night observing with the telescope. When we quit at daylight we left the floor at its highest point for the convenience of some workmen who were to be at work on the tube in the morning. When the floor fell there was not a soul in the building, and no one was injured. A couple of hours either way, and death in all probability would have come to one or the other of us. Only a few nights before this accident the president of the University of Chicago and thirty or more trustees and prominent men of the university had seen through the telescope, and the floor had been up and down with them on it. If it had fallen then a heavy loss of life would have been almost certain. A few days before that, Mr. Clark, who made the great glass, had unpacked the forty-inch disks on the floor at its highest point, and had put them in the cell which he finally bolted to the end of the telescope. If the floor had fallen then, the great lens would have been destroyed, with the probability that no one would be able to make another, for Mr. Clark died within a few days after he returned to Cambridge. It was providential, then, that the floor fell when it did; for the fault in the attachment of the cables made it certain that it must soon have fallen. “But this is not the end of the story. When the floor fell, it lurched against the great iron pier of the telescope and must have given it a violent blow. There was some fear that the great glass might have been injured by the shock. It was nearly a hundred feet up in the air and could not be reached to see if it was unharmed. By climbing up on the dome (which is one hundred and ten feet high) and looking down at the glass, it was seen to be apparently uninjured. Still, the test could only be made by examining the stars through it, which was not possible until the floor was replaced by a new one. Four months were occupied in taking out the wreck and putting in the new floor.