The Scoop on Palomar

In 1954 the trading card company Topps issued a series of cards called Scoops. The series featured 156 cards with artwork on the front and on the back was a newspaper headline from an event in history. The events covered a very wide range of topics such as Magellan's round the world trip, the Chicago Fire, the destruction of Pompeii, Lewis and Clark, and various events from World War II. There were numerous science events in the mix such as the bouncing of a radar beam off of the Moon and the dedication of the world's largest telescope.


Like a lot of things from this era that were aimed at kids, the fact checking wasn't the best.


Click on the image to embiggen and you'll see that they made the common mistake of referring to "Mt. Palomar" when the name is actually Palomar Mountain, but then again almost nobody gets that right even today. Their big mistake was saying that the telescope was named after Dr. Emery Hale. That is at least sort of close to George Ellery Hale.

This card was the last in the series and took me a while to tack one down that was both in good condition and at a decent price.