May 2002

The Life and Times of J. W. Fecker

By

Clarence Anderson

Target shooters and varmint hunters, educated riflemen in general, know that the fame of our old friend, J. W. Fecker, derives from his development of the modern target-scope. This term rightly applies not to such externally-adjustable, but general purpose, scopes as the Stevens and Winchester models of the early 1900's, but rather to those high-powered instruments of superior quality intended expressly for competition, or precision, long-range hunting (of beast or man).

Very true as far as it goes, this image of Fecker, but little more than a footnote, in fact, to the "other" Fecker story. So who, if more than a riflescope innovator, was James Walter Fecker? Merely one of the most eminent, internationally respected, optical engineers of the first half of the 20^th Century, designer of the second largest astronomical telescope on the world at that time, and manufacturer, in his own workshops, of the third largest, along with many others of "major caliber." Excepting a few eccentrics (like this writer) who continue to shoot vintage target rifles, Fecker target scopes are now largely retired from range and field; his giant astronomical telescopes, however, and many smaller ones, continue in the 21^st Century to search the night sky.

A career, of some sort, in the optics trade might have been predicted from Fecker's family history. His maternal grandfather is reported to have been a lens-maker in Germany, and his father, Gottlieb, designed and patented in 1902 the first prismatic binoculars to be adopted by the U.S. Navy. (Gottlieb's employer since 1895, the machine-tool firm of Warner & Swasey, of Cleveland, won the hotly contested contract to supply the entire fleet with these precedent-setting glasses.)

Born in 1891, J. W. Fecker grew up in Cleveland and earned a B. S. degree in physics from Cleveland's Case School of Applied Science in 1912. Astronomy and optical engineering were accorded special attention at this institute, because its founder (together with his friends Warner and Swasey) happened to be a serious amateur astronomer. Not entirely surprising, therefore, is the direction of J.W.'s subsequent career. What is surprising, in light of his father's important position at Warner & Swasey, is that no record has thus far emerged of J.W.'s own employment with that firm.

Early Fecker catalogs refer unspecifically to his "15 years of experience," before launching his own company, "in manufacturing a long line of fire control instruments for the U.S. Army and Navy"experience which does indeed suggest other Ordinance Dept. commissions awarded to W. & S. (builder, for example, of the Army's unsuccessful prismatic sight for the 1903 Springfield). However, telescopic sight expert C. S. Landis reported that Fecker's last employment immediately prior to founding his Cleveland Enterprise in 1922 had been with optics giant Baush & Lomb in Rochester. An explanation for this apparent anomaly may lie in the peculiar circumstance that W. & S., although manufacturing rifle and spotting scopes, as well as astronomical instruments, actually "outsourced" all the lenses and prisms requiredsome of them, in all probability, from B. & L., which had long supplied the majority of American telescope makers.

Fecker's earliest advertisement in Arms and the Man (bimonthly predecessor of American Rifleman), appearing in the Aug. 1, 1922 issue, did not make immediately clear what, specifically, he was prepared to offer. Rather, it suggested he was willing to build telescopic sights, equipped with lenses of his own manufacture, to the customer's individual years). A few issues later, readers of his small ad were presented with the briefest of descriptions of a new riflescope: ¾ inch clear-aperture objective lens, 18 ½ in. length, 6- and 10-power. Advertisements appearing shortly thereafter noted that fittings would be supplied to permit use of his new scope in all contemporary mounts: a V-pronged clamp-ring for use with V-notched Stevens or Winchester front mounts, or (at presumably much higher cost) a "Pope-style" rib for Pope and certain Stevens mounts.

Perhaps deliberately, these early ads drew no special attention to the new instrument's most novel operating characteristic: a sliding erector lens for distance focusing, as opposed to the adjustable objective lens so long familiar to users of Malcolm, Stevens, Winchester, and after 1929, Lyman, scopes. Conditioned, as most users would have been, to "conventional" focusing, the Fecker mid-tube "bulge" may have looked something like a toad in a snake's bellyout of place. Aesthetics aside, Fecker's unconventional focusing adjustment, because it is so much easier to manipulate from a shooting position, is usually found to be very convenient by users lacking the reach of a chimp. Moreover, Fecker catalogs asserted that his method insured "increased stability of the optical system"a claim others, particularly John Unertl, would no doubt dispute. (A dispute, my investigation suggests, of the "six-of-one, half-dozen of the other" variety; the more critical variable is precision of assembly of the moving parts.)

Fecker's focusing, or parallax, adjustment, it should be noted, differed from competitors in that it was calibrated in yards, but simply in numerals. Each Fecker scope was individually focused at the factory for several different ranges, and the resulting numerical settings recorded with the serial number on the instructions sheet which accompanied each instrument. Such papers were of course easily lost, but on the other hand, the range calibrations of other makes are rarely more than rough approximations which the user must refine by trial and error, recording the exact settings for his individual scope on yet another bit of paper; another case of "six-of-one."

If Fecker's earliest advertising left a good deal to the imagination (we must assume additional data was supplied upon request), the same cannot be said for the brilliant series of optics dissertations contributed by Fecker to Arms, and later, the Rifleman, beginning with the issue of May 1, 1922. I've identified fifteen of them (which may not be all), each intensely technical, and yet each the most lucid exposition of that particular aspect of riflescope design or construction to come to my attention. (And considering the Rifleman policy of reprinting prior articles in separate publications, it's odd further use was never made of this remarkable resource.)

Curiously, "A Precise Method of Focusing Telescopic Sights," Fecker's initial submission, makes no mention at all of the unique "Fecker system" of adjustment, which by then, just three months before his first advertisement appeared, must already have been "on the drawing board," if not in production. Of course, given the notorious delays characteristic of magazine publishing, this article might well have been submitted many months before Fecker drew up his final design.

What might be construed as the shooting-world's "official" recognition of the new Fecker scope came in the form of a half-page description in the Rifleman of March 15, 1923. This unsigned review was extremely positive in its appraisal, but of course, with the feelings of other advertisers to consider, invidious comparisons were not brought forth.

However, a gunwriter of the stature of E. C. Crossman (probably even more influential, at the time, than Whelen) could afford to be far less circumspect in his opinion: "Without questionthe finest target telescope and mounts in existence is the Fecker 1-1/8" instrument." This "half-hearted" endorsement appeared in Crossman's immensely influential Small Bore Rifle Shooting, the "bible" of the sport, published in Jan. of 1927, and reflects his enthusiasm not only for Fecker's optics, but for his "Precision Mounts" of 1925. Whelen himself, well-known for his oft-expressed admiration of Winchester's A5 scope, conceded in the May, 1929, Rifleman, "This is the most perfect target telescope I have ever seen." Yet another respected proponent of telescopic sighting, C. S. Landis, writing in .22 Caliber Rifle Shooting (1932), concurred: "This is the finest rifle telescope made in this country, or anywhere." Such accolades could be multiplied, but in deference to my editor, I will forbear. Suffice it to say that, even before Fecker's own innovative mounts appeared, the new scope had created an immediate sensation among those who could afford to own one. (In 1926, Winchester's newest Model 52 sold for $36, a ¾" Fecker for $30, and the 1-1/8" modelessential for top competitorsfor $50.)

As previously indicated, Fecker scopes produced prior to around 1924 had to be adapted to the mountings of other makers, an unavoidable expedient that Fecker no doubt found galling. (The same expedient, incidentally, to which John Unertl also resorted when, after years in the employ of Fecker, he set up his own shop.) It cannot be overemphasized that no externally adjustable riflescope can be better, functionally, than its mountsthe two are absolutely co-equal in importance. And with his characteristic thoroughness, Fecker described how truly accurate micrometer mounts should be manufactured in the May 1, 1925 Rifleman: "Telescope Mount Troubles."

By the time this piece appeared in print, Fecker had for almost a year been offering a set of mounts that largely satisfied the stringent requirements set forth in his article. Given the ubiquity, today, of aluminum alloys, it is psychologically impossible, three-quarters of a century later, to appreciate how impressively modern and "scientific" Fecker's gleaming Duralumin mounts would have appeared to shooters conditioned to rust-blued steel. Later to be called his "Standard Mounts," they were so superior to everything else on the market as to deserve truly the boast, "a class of their own." But even this achievement was soon surpassed by an improvement Fecker called his "Precision Mount," which he began to advertise in the same May issue of 1925.

This improved model (the rear mount only, as the front was unchanged) was protected by U. S. Patent No.1770451, filed in 1925, but not granted (perhaps suggesting legal complications) until 1930. Although assigned to Fecker, the inventor was actually Donald A. Baker, whose relationship to Fecker is unknown to me. Baker's assertions of novelty included the use of a straight-edge interposed between tube and adjustment screw (to minimize the influence of one adjustment on the other), a friction "click" device built into each thimble, and a mechanism for more accurately and securely clamping the mount to its base. These innovations, or slight variations on them, eventually became industry standards.

The pivotal event in Fecker's life and career occurred in June of 1926: his acquisition of the historic John A. Brashear Optics Co., of Pittsburgh. This turning-point was announced with apparent pride in a special notice for the June 15^th Rifleman. Founded in 1881, the Brashear works was world-famous for the manufacture of astronomical telescopes, although it supplied commercial optical goods to other instrument makers, notably Warner & Swazey. It was described (rightly or wrongly) in a 1928 Pittsburgh newspaper article as "the only one of its kind in the world." Another bit of Pittsburgh journalistic puffery from the year asserted that "since Mr. Fecker was four years old he had known the famous old astronomer (Brashear)," that his father Gottlieb had long been "an associate of Dr. Brashear," and that during the Great War, J. W. himself had visited the factory "at least weekly." Newspaper accounts of this sort are of course notoriously unreliable, but at least serve to verify that the Feckers' relationship with Brashear had been established long before the relocation from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. The immediate circumstance precipitating Fecker's "change of life" in 1926 seems to have been the death of Brashear's successor, McDowell.

Although few shooters would have been in a position to appreciate the significance of this event, optics experts and industry insiders of the like of Crossman, Landis, and Whelen, should have recognized that rather more than a mere change of factory location had taken place. No gunwriter of the period, however, seems to have taken particular note of it, and none of the many reviews of Fecker scopes written from the 1920's through the 1950's remarked the international scientific fame of the maker. A good many of Fecker's Rifleman ads in the early 1930's listed "astronomical telescopes" along with other optical products, such as spotting scopes, as did his earliest catalogs, but this disclosure seems to have provoked little curiosity among the cadre of gunwriters.

Scopes manufactured in Cleveland were so marked, as were the early-production mounts. Inexplicably, considering Fecker's attention to detail, scopes produced afterwards in Pittsburgh were never thus identified. All Fecker scopes, however, bear serial numbers; a small thing, seemingly, but suggestive of a respect for workmanship not exhibited by the optics of Stevens and Winchester. (When rights to the A5 were acquired by the Lyman Co., serial numbering commenced immediatelyan "attitudinal" change that has always much impressed me.)

It will probably come as no surprise that Fecker's serial number records have done the way of those Malcolm, Sidel, and possible even Unertl. No. 825 bears the Cleveland marking, so was not manufactured after 1926; no. 1404, displaying no address, must be post''26; no. 6053 can be correlated with a date of mid-1937; and no. 10393, with the year 1950. This crude timetable, I'm ashamed to say, is the best I can provide at presentany reader who can associate a serial number with a known date is urged to share that data with the author.

Given Fecker's long relationship with his newly acquired factory, it seems reasonable to assume a relatively trouble-free transition. The Pittsburgh Gazette of March 13, 1927, describes the "old Brashear place" as a hive of activity, recently outfitted by the new owner to increase its manufacturing capabilities, and reveals that Fecker had found the time to design the second largest telescope in the world (the 72" Vancouver instrument) while still in Cleveland! In Feb. of 1928, Fecker's "corps of assistants," including "chief optician" Fred Hageman, began work on what was to become the largest mirror ever manufactured on "Observatory Hill" (his Perrysville Ave. grounds). When completed near the end of 1931, this 69 inch, 2-ton, mirror was the second largest telescope in the U.S., and third largest in the world. Along succession of smaller, but nevertheless "world class," lenses and mirrors could be enumerated, but it is enough to say that among professional astronomers, Fecker's name commanded the highest international respect. (And "back-yard size," but still relatively costly, Fecker telescopes would have been the dream of thousands of amateur star-gazers.)

Meanwhile, back on the target range, more powerful Fecker riflescopes were being designed for competitive shooters, and for aficionados of the demanding new sport of long-range varmint sniping. It was Fecker's good fortune (or was it good intelligence?) to enter the scope market just a year before official NRA sanction energized outdoor Small Bore competition, which had begun, already, to supplant the moribund Gallery event in shooter participation. Then, at the beginning of 1931, commercial production of rifles and cartridges for the .22 Hornet sparked an explosion of popular interest in high-velocity varmint cartridges and extreme-range "pest" shooting. To exploit the capabilities of such high-performance cartridges, high-performance optics were demanded, and until 1934, Fecker alone could supply them.

Fecker's supremacy was finally challenged in 1934, by Lyman's new 1-1/8" objective Targetspot, in 8- and 10-power. This soon-to-be-famous model was an impressive advance over the two "antique" instruments Lyman had inherited from Stevens and Winchester, but handicapped by mounts much inferior to those of Fecker, and not the equal, optically, of Fecker's 1-1/2", 16-power, model of 1932. This threat from Middlefield was real enough, but not so grave, ultimately, as a personnel loss sustained at the same critical time: in 1934, John Unertl, hired by Fecker shortly after he emigrated from Germany to America, in 1928,"jumped ship" to set up his own family-operated shop in Pittsburgh. This modest beginning might, at the time, have seemed less worrisome to the laird of Observatory Hill than developments at Lyman, but events would eventually prove otherwise.

Unertl's departure was only part of the "brain-drain" to be afflicting Fecker about this time. Possibly more galling to Fecker was the "treason" of "chief optician" Hageman, and his very able son Wray, both lured away by Lyman to design an improved internally-adjustable hunting scope. (Efforts that in 1937 culminated in the legendary "Alaskan".) This hemorrhage of talent occurred at a time when many major scientific commissions seemed to be coming Fecker's way, such as a 61" telescope for Harvard, and a planetarium for the American Museum of Natural History, so it would be enlightening to know who, amidst all this bustle, was attending to riflescope development. The internal structure of Fecker's diversified domain, his division of labor for the design of products so radically different in form and function, remains ambiguous; the senior Hageman, for example, is reported to have been involved in designing the giant Perkins mirror, but worked as well on riflescopes.

His optical technicians, it would thus appear, were not "pigeonholed" by Fecker. Related to this consideration is the more basic and more interesting question of why a physicist and optical engineer, Fecker himself, with an astronomical interest dating from childhood, should choose to stake his first "claim to fame" in the rather esoteric market of telescopic sights. Intuition insists that Fecker's interest therein must have been as much personal as professional. Nevertheless, although I've scrutinized his many technical writings for some hint of a serious personal involvement I target shooting or hunting, the evidence, alas, just is not there. His tone throughout these meticulous discussions is consistently detached, professional, and entirely free of the personal digressions that enliven the work of Crossman, Landis, and most popular "gunwriters." Technical and rather dry as these pieces are, however, they reveal an intimate, detailed, familiarity with the problems and practice of match shootingas, for example, when he refers to the eye-strain generated by recording scores while squinting through one's scope. Reading this material conveys no suspicion that the author is merely theorizing upon what has been described to him by others.

Coverage by the Rifleman of the Eastern Division Small Bore matches at Sea Girt, N.J., and the Nationals at Camp Perry, regularly included brief allusions to the presence of Fecker: "the first-aid-to-scopes expert," (S.G., 1924); "the noted telescope maker, admitted to be the leader in this field," (S.G., 1925). Vivid testimony to Fecker's personal enthusiasm for Sea Girtbirthplace of the Small Bore eventis provided by the special prize of a $100 spotting scope he pledged to award "annually and perpetually," commencing with the inaugural competition in 1923.

This pledge presumably expired when the Eastern matches were moved away from Sea Girt in 1934, but even before that transition, the growing responsibility of managing his flourishing optics enterprise had begun to erode Fecker's "range time." In 1928, he attended Sea Girt, but "could not spare the time to visit Perry this year." The following year must have been even busier: "conspicuous by his absence (at S.G.) was J.W. Fecker, working on a new telescope for Harvard." He returned to Sea Girt in 1930, but after 1932, his name seems to vanish from the roster of celebrities at both events. Sporadically reported in subsequent years is the presence on "Commercial Row" of a Fecker representative, the unenviable duty of whom would have been to compete with energetic John Unertl.

In the later years, as is well known, Unertl became a veritable fixture at Camp Perry, and other cross-roads of the shooting-world, such as NRA conventions. His professional interests narrowly focused, in dramatic contrast to the diversified concerns of Fecker, Unertl could well afford to make time for these events. Though Fecker may have been represented by his technicians, this was hardly the same, for customers, as meeting the maker himself.

Unertl's initial target scope model, which he began advertising in the Rifleman of Nov., 1934, featured a 1-1/4" objective, thus fitting neatly between Fecker's famous 1-1/8" model of 1926, and his 1-1/2" model of 1932. Fecker might have taken some satisfaction in the necessity of Unertl to equip his own product with Fecker mounts, indisputably the best, for the time being, available.

Adding to this competition from his former employee, the Lyman company in 1937 introduced what it is probably fair to call the most famous target-scope of all time, the Super Targetspot, along with the Junior Targetspot, both in excellent new 3-point mounts. (Famous, it might be noted, as much for longevity, as quality.) By this time, also, R. A. Litschert had begun converting A5's, and other low-power scopes, into higher magnification target instruments, and would soon be offering his own line of target models. Fecker, in short, had completely lost his monopoly of a dozen years.

International events, however, were about to provide Fecker, and every other optics manufacturer, with a cornucopia of defense-work. For the Fecker company, there were government contracts for a variety of optical testing and measuring instruments, but not, inexplicably, for a military-issue riflescopea "sniperscope." The prestige (and profit) of securing a Marine Corps order for between five and six thousand 8X scopes went to John Unertl's relatively small company, despite the paradoxical fact that the Corps' rifle teams had been provided with the best Fecker scopes since the early 1920's. Considerations other than price or performance often decide the awarding of such contracts, as is well known, so one is left to wonder if "extraneous" factors influenced the Corps' choice. Perhaps the explanation is simply that Fecker, at the time of this contract, had "bigger fish to fry"; the firm's entry in the 1949 Shooter's Bible notes that Fecker scopes were previously unavailable because "all production was taken up by war work."

Fecker's personal involvement in the company he founded scarcely outlasted the war: he died Nov. 11, 1945, of an unspecified cause, "after a week's illness, at the age of 54," according to a very brief obituary in the Jan., 1946, Rifleman. (Noted, however, was that he had constructed "some of the world's largest telescopic lenses and mirrors.") His passing appears to have severed his family's three-generation optics tradition; he was survived by two daughters, along with his wife, and buried, presumably in a family plot, in Brooklyn, N.Y.

An August, 1946, Rifleman advertisement revealed that the J. W. Fecker Company had been incorporated. The Riflescope division appeared, at first, to flourish in the surging post-war economy, with the venerable 1-1/8" model now "upgraded" to 1-1/4", and the 1-1/2" to 1-5/8". Strangely, for an operation with the technology to turn out astronomical lenses as large as twelve inches, Fecker's new management obviously considered it necessary to match Unertl's top-of-the-line two-inch instrument. Along with all others in the industry, post-war Fecker energetically promoted the lens-coating technology perfected during the war years, not only offering anti-reflection coatings on all new optics, but actively soliciting for the business of retro-coating pre-war optics.

These improvements notwithstanding, by 1951 Roy Dunlap would write in his contribution to the revised edition of Crossman's Book of the Springfield that Unertl "today sells as many or more target scopes than either Lyman or Fecker." The explanation, Dunlap suggests, for Unertl's growth (and by implication, for Fecker's waning popularity) is that "John Unertl has always tried to give the shooters what they wanted, and offers services and special items to satisfy nearly any desire." Since any differences in the optical properties of Fecker and Unertl scopes of equivalent quality would probably have to be detected by laboratory instruments, it seems to me not unreasonable or ungenerous to attribute a good deal of Unertl's success to the cumulative effect of his years of socializing not only with shooters, but with those, like Dunlap, who wrote what shooters were reading. No slight to Unertl is in the least implied, but human nature, we might as well acknowledge, is human nature.

Fecker, Inc., was running attractive, quarter-page ads in every issue of the Rifleman through July, 1956, after which, abruptly, without explanation, all advertising ceased. If any notice of change of ownership, cessation of business, etc., was thereafter posted in the Rifleman (at the time, remember, the shooting world's accepted medium of communication), I have not been able to find it.

A change of ownership was, in fact, exactly what had taken place, although the new owner, American Optical Co., of what became the "Fecker Division", did not concern itself with advising former customers of this transition. The new owner clearly had NO interest in scopes or shooting, sad o say, nor much, probably, even in the great astronomical instruments that had won international acclaim for Fecker in the pre-war years. It was, rather, the advanced optical and electronic systems Fecker engineers were then developing for such Cold War priorities as aircraft and missile tracking that had stimulated the purchase. Current manufacturer of the Super Targetspot, Gil Parsons of Parsons Optical Co., who was working as an A. O. optician about two years after this takeover, thus bringing the story forward to 1958, remembers the last, rather pathetic, act in the Fecker target-scope saga: boxes of miscellaneous scope and mount parts were delivered to his plant, and all present invited to take their pickwhich he, at lest proceeded to do with gusto. Thus ended the Fecker target-scope storynot with a bang, but a whimper.

But not, surprisingly, the J. W. Fecker name and corporate identity, which has survived several corporate mergers, and exists today as a division of the Contraves Co., still located in Pittsburgh. Aerospace tracking and guidance gadgetry, some of it employing lenses or mirrors that would be recognizable to Fecker today, is supplied to such buyers as NASA, the U.S. military, and astronomical observatories. Make a point, however, not to ask them to repair your vintage Fecker scope!