CHAPTER IX
THE SPYGLASS OR TELESCOPE
The Boy Who Discovered the Telescope.—Spectacles have been made and used for nearly a thousand years and the art of making lenses is very much older.
A little over three hundred years ago there lived in Amsterdam, Holland, a spectacle maker named Lipperhey, and it is said of him that he made good lenses.
There was apprenticed to this lens grinder a Dutch boy, and I am sorry I cannot tell you his name, for he was a boy who did things; but his name is not recorded, which is a shame, for if it had not been for this boy Galileo might never have had a telescope.
One day while the boss was out this Dutch boy was standing before a window of the shop and he held a lens before his eye with one hand and another lens before the first lens with his other hand, as shown in [Fig. 148]. Imagine his surprise when the church he was looking at seemed to move much nearer to him, that is to say, the image of the church was greatly enlarged.
The boy had made a wonderful discovery—he had discovered the telescope. When his master returned the boy showed him what he had done and it was not long before the great Galileo had a telescope and was startling the world by his wonderful discoveries of the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, the spots on the Sun and a hundred other wonders of the sky.
A telescope is an arrangement of lenses in a tube for making the image of a distant object larger on the retina of the eye, or, as in the case of the fixed stars, for making them brighter.
Fig. 148.—Lipperhey’s Boy Discovers the Telescope.
The word telescope comes from two Greek words, the first, tele, which means afar, and the second, scope, which means to see, so that telescope means just what we should expect it to mean and that is to see afar.