Within a year Galileo heard that an instrument was in use in Holland by which it was possible to see distant objects as if near at hand. Skilled in optics as he was, the reinvention was a task neither long nor difficult for him. One of his first instruments magnified but three times; still it made a great sensation in Venice where he exhibited the little tube to the authorities of that city, in which he first invented it.
Galileo's telescope was of the simplest type, with but two lenses; the one a double convex lens with which an image of the distant object is formed, the other a double concave lens, much smaller which was the eye-lens for examining the image. It is this simple form of Galilean telescope that is still used in opera glasses and field glasses, because of the shorter tube necessary.
Galileo carried on the construction of telescopes, all the time improving their quality and enlarging their power until he built one that magnified thirty times. What the diameter of the object glass was we do not know, perhaps two inches or possibly a little more. Glass of a quality good enough to make a telescope of cannot have been abundant or even obtainable except with great difficulty in those early days.
Other discoveries by this first of celestial observers were the spots on the sun, the larger mountains of the moon, the separate stars of which the Milky Way is composed, and, greatest wonder of all, the anomalous "handles" (ansæ, he called them) of Saturn, which we now know as the planet's ring, the most wonderful of all the bodies in the sky.
Since Galileo's time, only three centuries past, the progress in size and improvement in quality of the telescope have been marvelous. And this advance would not have been possible except for, first, the discoveries still kept in large part secret by the makers of optical glass which have enabled them to make disks of the largest size; second, the consummate skill of modern opticians in fashioning these disks into perfect lenses; and third, the progress in the mechanical arts and engineering, by which telescope tubes of many tons' weight are mounted or poised so delicately that the thrust of a finger readily swerves them from one point of the heavens to another.
As the telescope is the most important of all astronomical instruments, it is necessary to understand its construction and adjustment and how the astronomer uses it. Telescopes are optical instruments, and nothing but optical parts would be requisite in making them, if only the optical conditions of their perfect working could be obtained without other mechanical accessories.
In original principle, all telescopes are as simple as Galileo's; first, an object glass to form the image of the distant object; second the eyepiece usually made of two lenses, but really a microscope, to magnify that image, and working in the same way that any microscope magnifies an object close at hand; and third, a tube to hold all the necessary lenses in the true relative positions.
The 100-Inch Hooker Telescope, Largest Reflector in the World, on Mt. Wilson. (Photo, Mt. Wilson Solar Observatory.)