ABSTRACT
Early History It is far from clear who actually invented the telescope. At least four people seem to have done so independently, near the beginning of the seventeenth century. The first patent was granted in Holland to a German-born spectacle maker called Hans Lipperhey, though it seems that the possibility of using two lenses to obtain a magnified image of a distant object had been noticed much earlier. Like so many other groundbreaking scientific advances, it just seems that the time was right. What is certain is that the first person to turn a telescope to the heavens and make fundamental discoveries that confirmed Copernicus’s heliocentric theories was Galileo. His telescope, apparently designed in ignorance of Lipperhey’s methods, was to use a long-focus positive lens coupled with a short-focus negative lens, in a configuration that is still used in low-power opera glasses (Figure 17.1). He managed to achieve a magnification of 30 times. With this instrument he was able to observe the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.
