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Wasting no time, Lick quickly put his incisive business acumen to work. He shrewdly used his gold to purchase real estate in San Francisco, then just a scrubby town with scarcely a thousand inhabitants. When residents started heading to the hills to make their fortune in the California gold rush, Lick was there to provide them with a stake by buying up their town land at bargain prices. He also bought a gristmill, greatly expanding it, and built California's first great luxury hotel, the opulent Lick House, which occupied an entire city block (and was later destroyed in the fire that tore through San Francisco after its horrific 1906 earthquake).

James Lick

(Mary Lea Shane Archives of the Lick Observatory, University

Library, University of California-Santa Cruz)

Lick never married but still built a homestead at the south end of San Jose, where he lovingly cultivated rare plants and shrubs from around the world. The community considered him an eccentric miser; he dressed like a tramp and at times slept on a bare mattress laid out atop a piano crate. As a youth, he had gotten a girl pregnant, but her father, a prosperous miller, refused his offer to marry her, judging Lick too poor and socially inferior. The miller could hardly have imagined how astronomy, decades later, would benefit from this snobbish rebuff. Without a legitimate heir, Lick, in his old age, began to think of using some of his tremendous wealth (he had accumulated nearly $4 million, around $100 million in today's dollars) to erect a gargantuan monument to himself. For Lick it was a chance at immortality. He particularly favored the idea of constructing a giant marble pyramid on the corner of Fourth and Market streets in downtown San Francisco, a structure that would have surpassed Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza in size.

But a few auspicious encounters revised this vainglorious plan. Lick had once spent a few days with a visiting amateur astronomer and lecturer, George Madeira, who captivated him with talks about astronomy's latest discoveries. They met again a few years later for some telescope viewing when Madeira allegedly asserted, “If I had your wealth, Mr. Lick, I would construct the largest telescope possible to construct.” Around the same time Joseph Henry, then head of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the Smithsonian, was visiting San Francisco and arranged a meeting with Lick to discuss how wealthy men could use their money to cultivate science. The following year, 1872, the Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz gave a widely reported lecture at the California Academy of Sciences, where Agassiz echoed Henry's refrain.

All these lessons struck a chord. Lick soon astonished the California Academy when he granted the institute, without prior notice, the gift of a downtown lot to build a museum and more expansive headquarters. Academy president George Davidson, a geodetic surveyor and astronomer, promptly called on Lick to thank him, initiating a friendship. When Lick was later felled by a stroke and confined to a two-room suite at his hotel for nearly a year, Davidson regularly visited, engaging Lick with chats about the rings of Saturn, the belts of Jupiter, and other astronomical topics. Lick soon abandoned his scheme to build a pyramid and decided instead to erect a telescope “superior to and more powerful than any telescope yet made,” right on his favored city spot, the corner of Fourth and Market.

An in-town telescope was never built (fortunately), largely due to Davidson's intervention. As both an amateur astronomer and a geodeist, a profession that took him to towering mountain sites, he had long been convinced that astronomy would best be served by taking its instruments to the highest elevations possible, where a telescope's resolution would improve immensely in the clear, more rarefied atmosphere. Isaac Newton first pointed this out in the eighteenth century. “For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in a perpetual