of 276 individually adjustable panels with a surface accuracy of better than 50 µm. It would be an altitude-azimuth mounted Cassegrain telescope with a tertiary mirror to direct the incoming radiation onto a number of different receivers. The antenna and mountings were to be protected from the elements by a co-rotating carousel with a transparent membrane stretched across the carousel aperture. Building work started in 1983 and went well. In 1984, the telescope was shipped from England to Hawaii. After the original shipper broke down at the last minute, the telescope was given to a commercial captain who was supposed to deliver it directly to Hawaii. Instead, the captain sailed to Holland to pick up a shipment of explosives, then was delayed at the Panama Canal, allegedly because special clearance was needed to transport the explosives through the canal. The captain then delivered the explosives to Ecuador before finally reaching Hawaii. Waiting just outside of territorial waters, the captain demanded that the late delivery charges -- now almost equal to that of the shipping charges -- be waived, and threatened to throw the telescope overboard if his demand was not met. The telescope team was able to get a court order to give up the board, and the ship was subsequently boarded and the captain arrested at gunpoint by the Coast Guard. The telescope saw first light in 1987. The name for the final facility was changed to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. The telescope itself was operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC), from Hilo, Hawaii. From 1987 until March 2013 this the telescope was funded by a partnership of the United Kingdom (55 per cent), Canada (25 per cent), and the Netherlands (20 per cent). In 2013 the Netherlands withdrew, and until 2015 the shares became UK 75 per cent, Canada 25 per cent. In March 2015, the UK and Canada handed over ownership of the JCMT to the East Asian Observatory, which is funded by Japan, China, Taiwan and South-Korea, together with a consortium of Universities from the United Kingdom and Canada. Instrumentation The JCMT has two kinds of instruments—broadband continuum receivers and heterodyne detection spectral line receivers. Continuum emission is a tracer of star formation in other galaxies and gives astronomers clues to the presence, distance, and evolution history of galaxies other than our own. Within our own galaxy dust emission is associated with stellar nurseries