Lyceum & Book Club - Week 23 - Scientific Instruments
- Apr 14, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 24, 2022
Lecture: Who invented the telescope?
Notes from Space.com:
The telescope is one of humankind's most important inventions. The simple device that made far away things look near gave observers a new perspective. When curious men pointed the spyglass toward the sky, our view of Earth and our place in the universe changed forever.
But the identity of the ingenious mind who invented the telescope remains a mystery. Although the invention changed humankind's perspective of the universe forever, It was probably inevitable that as glassmaking and lens-grinding techniques improved in the late 1500s, someone would hold up two lenses and discover what they could do.
The first person to apply for a patent for a telescope was Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey (or Lipperhey). In 1608, Lippershey laid claim to a device that could magnify objects three times. His telescope had a concave eyepiece aligned with a convex objective lens. One story goes that he got the idea for his design after observing two children in his shop holding up two lenses that made a distant weather vane appear close. Others claimed at the time that he stole the design from another eyeglass maker, Zacharias Jansen.
Jansen and Lippershey lived in the same town and both worked on making optical instruments. Scholars generally argue, however, that there is no real evidence that Lippershey did not develop his telescope independently.
Lippershey, therefore, gets the credit for the telescope, because of the patent application, while Jansen is credited with inventing the compound microscope.
Both appear to have contributed to the development of both instruments.
Adding the confusion, yet another Dutchman, Jacob Metius, applied for a patent for a telescope a few weeks after Lippershey. The government of the Netherlands turned down both applications because of the counterclaims. Also, officials said the device was easy to reproduce, making it difficult to patent. In the end, Metius got a small reward, but the government paid Lippershey a handsome fee to make copies of his telescope.
Enter Galileo
In 1609, Galileo Galilei heard about the "Dutch perspective glasses" and within days had designed one of his own — without ever seeing one. He made some improvements — his could magnify objects 20 times — and presented his device to the Venetian Senate. The Senate, in turn, set him up for life as a lecturer at the University of Padua and doubled his salary, according to Stillman Drake in his book "Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography" (Courier Dover Publications, 2003).
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Article to Read:
Interesting engineer - History of the Telescope
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Watch Videos:
Videos:
From Kepler to Webb: The History of the Telescope - SciShow - 4.23 min
Telescopes - Crash course Astronomy #6 - 11.49 min
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Read Article:
Read in Class:
The Microscope by Kumin (about Anton van Leeuwenhoek)
note: Zacharias Janssen is credited with inventing the microscope. For millennia, the smallest thing humans could see was about as wide as a human hair. When the microscope was invented around 1590, suddenly we saw a new world of living things in our water, in our food and under our nose.
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Book To Read:
Continue Reading "Women in the Line of Fire"
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