The Telescope

by Louis Bell

He apparently did not submit an instrument, was politely told to perfect his invention before his petition was further considered, and thereafter disappears from the scene, whatever his merits. If he had actually noted telescopic vision he had neither appreciated its enormous importance nor laid the facts before others who might have done so.

The only other contemporary for whom claims have been made is Zacharius Jansen, also a spectacle maker of Middelburg, to whom Pierre Borel, on entirely second hand information, ascribed the discovery of the telescope. But Borel wrote nearly fifty years later, after all the principals were dead, and the evidence he collected from the precarious memories of venerable witnesses is very conflicting and points to about 1610 as the date when Jansen was making telescopes—like many other spectacle makers.[1]

Borel also gave credence to a tale that Metius, seeking Jansen, strayed into Lippershey’s shop and by his inquiries gave the shrewd proprietor his first hint of the telescope, but set the date at 1610. A variation of this tale of the mysterious stranger, due to Hieronymus Sirturus, contains the interesting intimation that he may have been of supernatural origin—not further specified. There are also the reports, common among the ignorant or envious, that Lippershey’s discovery was accidental, even perhaps made by his children or apprentice.

Just how it actually was made we do not know, but there is no reason to suppose that it was not in the commonplace way of experimenting with and testing lenses that he had produced, perhaps those made to meet a vicious case of myopia in one of his patrons.

When the discovery was made is somewhat clearer. Plainly it antedated Oct. 2, and in Lippershey’s petition is a definite statement that an instrument had already been tested by some, at least, of the members of the States-General. A somewhat vague and gossipy note in the Mercure Française intimates that one was presented to Prince Maurice “about September of the past year” (1608) and that it was shown to the Council of State and to others.

Allowing a reasonable time between Lippershey’s discovery and the actual production of an example suitable for exhibition to the authorities, it seems likely that the invention dates back certainly into the summer of 1608, perhaps even earlier.

At all events there is every indication that the news of it spread like wild-fire. Unless Lippershey were unusually careful in keeping his secret, and there are traditions that he was not, the sensational discovery would have been quickly known in the little town and every spectacle maker whose ears it reached would have been busy with it.

If the dates given by Simon Marius in his Mundus Jovialis be correct, a Belgian with an air of mystery and a glass of which one of the lenses was cracked, turned up at the Frankfort fair in the autumn of 1608 and at last allowed Fuchs, a nobleman of Bimbach, to look through the instrument. Fuchs noted that it magnified “several” times, but fell out with the Belgian over the price, and returning, took up the matter with Marius, fathomed the construction, tried it with glasses from spectacles, attempted to get a convex lens of longer focus from a Nuremburg maker, who had no suitable tools, and the following summer got a fairly good glass from Belgium where such were already becoming common.

With this Marius eventually picked up three satellites of Jupiter—the fourth awaited the arrival of a superior telescope from Venice. Early in 1609 telescopes “about a foot long” were certainly for sale in Paris, a Frenchman had offered one in Milan by May of that year, a couple of months later one was in use by Harriot in England, an example had reached Cardinal Borghese, and specimens are said to have reached Padua. Fig. 2 from the “Mundus Jovialis,” shows Marius with his “Perspicilium,” the first published picture of the new instrument. Early in 1610 telescopes were being made in England, but if the few reports of performance, even at this date, are trustworthy, the “Dutch trunk” of that period was of very indifferent quality and power, far from being an astronomical instrument.