Tower Optical Company, Inc. is a small, Norwalk

Norwalk, Connecticut

Norwalk is a city in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the population of the city is 85,603, making Norwalk sixth in population in Connecticut, and third in Fairfield County...

, Connecticut

Connecticut

Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

-based company which has manufactured a binocular

Binoculars

Binoculars, field glasses or binocular telescopes are a pair of identical or mirror-symmetrical telescopes mounted side-by-side and aligned to point accurately in the same direction, allowing the viewer to use both eyes when viewing distant objects...

 tower viewer

Tower viewer

A tower viewer is a telescope or binoculars permanently mounted on a stalk. The device magnifies objects seen through its lenses, allowing users to see farther and more clearly than they could with the naked eye or with less powerful viewing devices...

 used at major tourist sites in the United States and Canada since 1932. The company's large, silver-colored devices are used at Niagara Falls

Niagara Falls

The Niagara Falls, located on the Niagara River draining Lake Erie into Lake Ontario, is the collective name for the Horseshoe Falls and the adjacent American Falls along with the comparatively small Bridal Veil Falls, which combined form the highest flow rate of any waterfalls in the world and has...

, the Empire State Building

Empire State Building

The Empire State Building is a 102-story landmark skyscraper and American cultural icon in New York City at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet , and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 ft high. Its name is derived...

 and other locations.

Only about 35 of the viewers are manufactured each year, but several thousand are maintained by the company. Tower Optical has various arrangements with owners of the sites where the devices are located. Where the viewers are free, they are leased; at other locations, revenue is shared between the company and the site owner. Each machine can hold up to 2,000 quarters. The binocular machine has essentially kept its distinctive, tubby shape since it was first manufactured, a deliberate strategy "to preserve its identity", according to Bonnie Rising, the third-generation owner of the family business. When coin-operated, the machines can be timed for roughly 1.5 to 2.5 minutes.

Operations

A foundry in Pennsylvania manufactures the parts used for Tower's viewers, about 35 of which are assembled each year in its two-story building in East Norwalk

East Norwalk

East Norwalk is a neighborhood located in Norwalk, Connecticut.The neighborhood is a culturally diverse, mostly middle-class section of the city, inhabited by many different ethnicities such as Greeks, Italians, Hispanics, African Americans, and long time "Connecticut Yankee" residents...

. The company maintains several thousand of the devices, sometimes removing some in the fall, rebuilding them and returning them in the spring.

A typical viewer is housed in a chrome-plated, bronze-cast shell mounted on a cast iron yoke and pedestal. The inside of the machine is bronze and stainless steel. The binoculars can be raised 45 degrees up, 22 degrees down and swung entirely left or right by 360 degrees. The device and its pedestal typically stand 63 inches high and weigh 300 pounds.

The company limits its distribution of the machines to the United States and Canada for easier management.

As of 2004, the devices were in use in San Francisco at Vista Point at the Golden Gate Bridge

Golden Gate Bridge

The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the opening of the San Francisco Bay into the Pacific Ocean. As part of both U.S. Route 101 and California State Route 1, the structure links the city of San Francisco, on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, to...

 and at Coit Tower

Coit Tower

Coit Tower is a tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The tower, in the city's Pioneer Park, was built in 1933 at the request of Lillie Hitchcock Coit to beautify the city of San Francisco; Coit bequeathed one-third of her estate to the city "to be expended in an...

. That year, the City of Sausalito, California

Sausalito, California

Sausalito is a San Francisco Bay Area city, in Marin County, California, United States. Sausalito is south-southeast of San Rafael, at an elevation of 13 feet . The population was 7,061 as of the 2010 census. The community is situated near the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, and prior to...

 was considering installing five of the machines on its bay waterfront as a fund-raising move. Former Mayor J. R. Roberts, a member of a citizens committee which suggested the installation, said the machines typically cost a user 50 cents, with the city collecting half of the revenue if it took on the responsibility of collecting the coins, or 30 percent if Tower arranged for collection. Each machine was expected to earn somewhere between $1,200 and $10,000 per year. The price and length of viewing time could be customized, he said. Paul Albritton, then mayor of Sausalito, said, "In some areas, telescopes earn a few hundred dollars a month and in other places a few thousand dollars a month."

History

The company was founded by Towers S. Hamilton in 1933 in his Norwalk machine shop. He bought the shop from its owner-founders, Arthur Casey, Earl Bunnell, and John Hanrahan, soon after Hamilton started machining the parts for the viewers. His son, Towers W. Hamilton, later became the owner. His wife, Gladys (Kip) Hamilton, worked with him in the business for many years and on his death in 1989, she took over the company. She died in 2006, and at some point she passed the business on to her daughter, Bonnie Rising, who still owned the company as of 2010, when she had six employees, including her son, Gregory, and her husband, Douglas, who help run the business. Bonnie Rising said in 2010 that she expected her son to take over the business someday.

Local institutions and organizations have given the company recognition for its "iconic" devices. By 2002, the company had donated one of its viewers to the nearby Norwalk Museum in South Norwalk. In 2008, the business was the subject of a lecture, "An American Icon: Norwalk's Tower Optical Company," given to the Norwalk Historical Society.

In 2004 and 2005, the company worked with an artist as part of a project in which 10 companies teamed up with "in residence" artists "to see how technology, be it vintage or cutting-edge, can inform art in the 21st century", as a New York Times article described it. Artist Michael Oatman accompanied workers making 5 a.m. repair runs to tourist locations and "videotaped people as they fantasized about what they would most like to see with the binoculars", according to the newspaper. An exhibition, titled, Factory Direct: New Haven, about the project took place at Artspace in New Haven. Tower Optical also made a lightweight viewer for Oatman to install temporarily at tourist sites.

By 2010, business had declined because of an ongoing recession, but, in July, Rising said a turnaround seemed to be taking place.