Invention of The Telescope
See also: History of the telescopeHans Lippershey is generally credited with the earliest recorded design for an optical telescope (a refracting telescope) in 1608, although it is unclear if he invented it. His work with optical devices grew out of his work as a spectacle maker, an industry that had started in Venice and Florence in the thirteenth century, and later expanded to the Netherlands and Germany. Lippershey may have made this discovery on his own although there are many stories as to how he came by his invention.
One version has Lippershey observing two children playing with lenses in his shop and commenting how they could make a far away weather-vane seem closer when looking at it through two lenses. Other stories have Lippershey's apprentice coming up with the idea or have Lippershey copying someone else's discovery. Lippershey's original instrument consisted of either two convex lenses with an inverted image or a convex objective and a concave eyepiece lens so it would have an upright image. This "Dutch perspective glass" (the name "telescope" would not be coined until three years later by Giovanni Demisiani) had a three-times (or 3X) magnification.
Lippershey applied to the States-General of the Netherlands on October 2, 1608, for a patent for his instrument "for seeing things far away as if they were nearby", beating another Dutch instrument-maker's patent, Jacob Metius, by a few weeks. Lippershey failed to receive a patent since the same claim for invention had also been made by other spectacle-makers but he was handsomely rewarded by the Dutch government for copies of his design.
Lippershey's application for a patent was mentioned at the end of a diplomatic report on an embassy to Holland from the Kingdom of Siam sent by the Siamese king Ekathotsarot: Ambassades du Roy de Siam envoyé à l'Excellence du Prince Maurice, arrivé à La Haye le 10 Septemb. 1608 (Embassy of the King of Siam sent to his Excellency Prince Maurice, arrived on September 10, 1608). This report was issued in October 1608 and distributed across Europe, leading to experiments by other scientists, such as the Italian Paolo Sarpi, who received the report in November, the Englishman Thomas Harriot, who was using a six-powered telescope by the summer of 1609, and Galileo Galilei, who soon improved the device, using mirrors.
The lunar crater Lippershey and the minor planet 31338 Lipperhey are named after him.
Read more about this topic: Hans Lippershey
Famous quotes containing the words invention of, invention and/or telescope:
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)
“A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humour, and the whole cyclopedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)