his small salary. Meanwhile, his shrewd business investments caused his fortune to multiply considerably. In 1896 Professor Perkins donated the funds necessary to build the first of two observatories to bear his name. It is located on West William Street in Delaware, Ohio right next to Hiram and Caroline's former residence. This original “Perkins Astronomical Observatory” later had its name changed to “the Student Observatory” when the second Perkins Observatory was built a quarter century later. Perkins's marriage never produced children. His older sister never married. Therefore, toward the end of his life Perkins realized he had no living relatives to whom to leave his fortune. Retiring in 1907, Professor Perkins applied himself to the creation of “an astronomical observatory of importance.” It was his desire that this second observatory be a place where cutting-edge research could be conducted. It took 15 years to find an appropriate location and secure the necessary funding (Perkins himself provided about $250,000, the equivalent of roughly $3.8 million dollars in 2019, of the approximately $350,000 budget). Construction began in 1923 with the frail 90-year-old professor as Guest of Honor at the groundbreaking ceremony. Within a year, however, both Hiram and Caroline Perkins had died. Neither saw the completion of the new observatory. The building features a reproduction of Robert Le Lorrain's (the original article in 'Popular Astronomy' misidentified him as Robert de Lorain) "Apollo Watering the Horses of the Sun" over the front entrance and a frieze of antique marble panels around the building bears the names of seventeen astronomers: The building and telescope mount were completed in less than two years. The work was done by the Warner and Swasey Company of Cleveland, Ohio. (Warner and Swasey also built other observatories and telescopes, including Yerkes Observatory near Chicago, Theodore Jacobsen Observatory in Seattle, Washington, McCormick Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and (of course) the Warner and Swasey Observatory in Cleveland, Ohio.) The building included a lecture room, library, office space, walk-in vault, small bedroom for visiting astronomers, and spacious work rooms and metal fabrication shops. However, Professor Perkins had stipulated that the telescope mirror be cast in the United States. At this time no U.S. companies had experience in casting such a large mirror, so the National Bureau of Standards agreed to take on the project. It can be argued that casting of this mirror launched the optical glass industry in the United States.