WHO INVENTED THE TELESCOPE?

The first telescope was created by the Dutch spectacle-maker Hans Lippershey in 1608. It was a simple design that could only magnify objects a small number of times, but the idea spread like wildfire through Europe. The Italian inventor Galileo Galilei was the first person to use the telescope to study the movement of the stars and planets, one year later.

The first person to apply for a patent for a telescope was a Dutch eyeglass maker named Hans Lippershey (or Lippersey). In 1608, Lippershey laid claim to a device that could magnify objects three times. His telescope had a concave eyepiece aligned with a convex objective lens. One story goes that he got the idea for his design after observing two children in his shop holding up two lenses that made a distant weather vane appear close. Others charged at the time that he stole the design from another eyeglass maker, Zacharias Jansen.

Jansen and Lippershey lived in the same town and both worked on making optical instruments. Scholars generally argue, however, that there is no real evidence that Lippershey did not develop his telescope independently. Lippershey, therefore, gets the credit for the telescope, because of the patent application, while Jansen is credited with inventing the compound microscope. Both appear to have contributed to the development of both instruments.

Galileo was the first to point a telescope skyward. He was able to make out mountains and craters on the moon, as well as a ribbon of diffuse light arching across the sky — the Milky Way. He also discovered the rings of Saturn, sunspots and four of Jupiter’s moons.

Picture Credit : Google