Fig. 14.—De Bercé’s sketch of Cassegrain’s Telescope.
It is quite likely that appreciation of this, and the grave doubts of both Newton and Huygens as to obtaining a proper parabolic curve checked further developments. About the beginning of the year 1672 M. Cassegrain communicated to M. de Bercé a design for a reflecting telescope, which eventually found its way into the Philosophical Transactions of May in that year, after previous publication in the Journal des Sçavans. Figure 14 shows de Bercé’s rough original sketch. It differed from Gregory’s construction in that the latter’s elliptical concave mirror placed outside the main focus, was replaced by a convex mirror placed inside focus. The image was therefore inverted.
The inventor is referred to in histories of science as “Cassegrain, a Frenchman.” He was in fact Sieur Guillaume Cassegrain, sculptor in the service of Louis Quatorze, modeller and founder of many statues. In 1666 he was paid 1200 livres for executing a bust of the King modelled by Bertin, and later made many replicas from the antique for the decoration of His Majesty’s gardens at Versailles. He disappeared from the royal records in 1684 and probably died within a year or two of that date.
At the period here concerned he apparently, like de Bercé, was of Chartres. Familiar with working bronzes and with the art of the founder, he was a very likely person to have executed specula. Although there is no certainty that he actually made a telescope, a contemporary reference in the Journal des Sçavans speaks of his invention as a “petite lunette d’approche,” and one does not usually suggest the dimensions of a thing non-existent. How long he had been working upon it prior to the period about the beginning of 1672 when he disclosed the device to de Bercé is unknown.
Probably Newton’s invention was the earlier, but the two were independent, and it was somewhat ungenerous of Newton to criticise Cassegrain, as he did, for using spherical mirrors, on the strength of de Bercé’s very superficial description, when he himself considered the parabolic needless.
However, nothing further was done, and the devices of Gregory, Newton and Cassegrain went together into the discard for some fifty years.
These early experiments gave singularly little information about material for mirrors and methods of working it, so little that those who followed, even up to Lord Rosse, had to work the problems out for themselves. We know from his original paper that Newton used bell-metal, whitened by the addition of arsenic, following the lore of the alchemists.
These speculative worthies used to alloy copper with arsenic, thinking that by giving it a whitish cast they had reached a sort of half way point on the road to silver. Very silly at first thought, but before the days of chemical analysis, when the essential properties of the metals were unknown, the way of the scientific experimenter was hard.
What the “steely matter, imployed in London” of which Newton speaks in an early paper was, we do not know—very likely one of the hard alloys much richer in tin than is ordinary bell-metal. Nor do we know to what variety of speculum metal Huygens refers in his correspondence with Newton.
As to methods of working it Newton only disclosed his scheme of pitch-polishing some thirty years after this period, while it is a matter of previous record, that Huygens had been in the habit of polishing his true tools on pitch from some date unknown. Probably neither of them originated the practice. Opticians are a peculiarly secretive folk and shop methods are likely to be kept for a long time before they leak out or are rediscovered.