Who Invented the Telescope?
Author: Jarrod Roby The telescope is the basic instrument of Astronomy but do you know who actually invented the device? Or maybe you think you already know who invented it. Well, what would you say if I told you that you’re probably wrong? After all, it was galileo galilei who invented it, right? You might be surprised by the answer to that question. Although Galileo Galilei was a great astronomer, he didn’t invent the telescope. If not Galileo, then who? A man named Hans Lipperhey invented the telescope. He was born in Wesel, Germany and made his home in Middleburg, part of the Zeeland province in the Netherlands. He was married there in 1594, and became a citizen in 1602. He was a spectacle-maker by trade. The Italians developed new glass-making techniques which were introduced to the Netherlands in the 1590’s. These new techniques helped to bring about new ideas and innovations in the glass-making community and people started to experiment with different ways to combine lenses. Whe
17th-century engraving of Frankfurt Fair. Does a failed transaction here in 1608 hide a clue to the Spanish origins of the telescope? (History Today Archive) Four centuries ago this year, stories issued from the Netherlands describing the invention of a twin-lens device for seeing at a distance – the telescope. Though it began its life as no more than a low-power spyglass, it quickly evolved into a high-magnification precision optical instrument, capable even of viewing Jupiter’s moons. The idea for a telescope did not come out of the blue: rumours of both refractive and reflective optical devices to achieve distant vision had circulated for hundreds of years, often in dubious magical contexts. For example, Europe had recently been set abuzz by Johannes Cambilhom’s sensational pamphlet Discoverie of the Most Secret and Subtile Practises of the Jesuites (1608), which described the Society of Jesus’ ‘bawdy adventures with innocent girls, its vast stores of buried treasure, its arsenals o
