400 Years of the Telescope!
by adminOn or about October 2nd, 1608, Hans Lipperhey, a spectacle maker living in the Netherlands, announced his new invention: The telescope. Legends have abounded as to how it was developed: Hans was trying to inspect one lens with another, children were playing with his lenses and discovered the effect. In any case, Hans had developed a simple, 4x telescope.
Contrary to popular belief, Galileo did not invent the telescope, but vastly improved the model in 1609 and was the first to point it at the stars & planets.
Lipperhey’s invention would eventually be known as a Galilean telescopes. This is a style of refractor telescope where a negative lens is used as an eyepiece. This is in contrast to modern telescopes which use positive lenses for both the objective and the eyepiece. This had the advantage of erecting the image (unlike modern telescopes which have an upside-down image if not erected), but they lose a lot of field of view in the bargain. The edges of the viewing field of a Galilean telescope are also very distorted.
Lippershey’s invention was used primarily to view seaborn vessels while they were still well out of port. By seeing what ship was coming in, businessmen could take advantage of the markets knowing what would be in supply and what would not be available.
In 1609, Galileo read about Lippershey’s invention and made his own 8-power version. Later in the year he developed a 20 power version. He also turned his invention on the skies rather than the seas. Galileo observed the Moon, the Rings of Saturn, and the largest Moons around Jupiter, therafter known as the Galilean Moons. Perhaps most important to him was his observation of the phases of Venus. This could not happen in the accepted GeoCentric (Earth Centered) model of the Universe, but it would work in a Heliocentric model of the Universe. Others before Galileo had theorized a Heliocentric universe, but Galileo had proof. The rest of the story, you should all know.
Lipperhey seems to have never profited from his invention. Others claimed to have invented the telescope at the same time (and there are good arguements that an Arabic Optic scientist may have invented something like it a few centuries earlier), but Lipperhey actually applied for a patent. Unfortunately, the Netherlands patent system declared that his device was too easily designed to be patented. As a result, copies of the instrument were almost immediately available throughout Europe. If Lipperhey made money from his invention, it was by using it in business.
Celebrate the 400th anniversary of the invention of the telescope in October!
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[…] based some 400 years after Galileo made his own version of the first telescope (which we’ve blogged about being invented in 1608. Galileo was, as we all know, the first one to point his telescope at the heavens. Or at least the […]