HISTORY OF TELESCOPES

When you were still a kid, were you asked that tricky question “which comes first, the egg or the chicken”? Did you have a clue?

The history of telescope is not as clear as the images that can be viewed from its aperture. But definitely, the telescope is the buy product of man’s childlike nature - to explore his world, find adventure, and seek greener pastures. In fact, most of man’s inventions were products either of his necessity or his curiosity.

The discovery of the telescope can be likened to that kiddie quiz game, and whoever discovered the telescope first may no longer be ascertained, but this fact remains: it is one of the greatest inventions of all time!

Could it have started with the lens?

As early as 1300, people were already using spectacles. Glass disks were also produced for windows of homes and buildings, most especially churches. Spectacle making was a lauded profession and spectacle shops abound in most parts of Italy.

In one of those shops, Hans Lippershey had two boys playing with his lens, putting them together and peering through them to see the church down the road. The boys discovered that the church appeared bigger and seemed nearer. Lippershey started mounting lenses together and named his discovery the “looker”.

Lippershey offered his invention to the Dutch Army but his offer was declined on the ground that many others claimed of inventing the Looker first.

King Henry IV got his Looker as a gift and was amazed at his own discovery. The following year, the Looker was known by many other names such as “Dutch Trunks”, “cylinders” and “perspectives”.

The Influence of Galileo

Word about the Looker reached Galileo when a stranger tried to sell the instrument to the government and Paolo Serpi, a scientific adviser of the Italian government was summoned to examine it. The stranger and his instrument apparently left and could no longer be traced, so Serpi described the instrument to Galileo who “rediscovered” it.

Galileo’s triumphant discovery of the night sky with his instrument challenged the minds of many skeptics. He disclosed that the moon had craters, Jupiter had four moons and the Milky Way was a wide expanse of millions of stars. Galileo offered proof that Copernicus was right all along, the sun is the center of the universe as opposed to earlier belief that everything revolved around the Earth.

To honor this unprecedented discovery, Federico Cesi threw a banquet in Galileo’s honor. One of the guests named the instrument the “telescope” a derivative from an ancient Greek word.

And so, it came to pass for generations after that and even today, as the telescope – that long tubular equipment you use to view the stars.