Galileo Galilei was years, maybe a century, ahead of his time. As Adam Gopnik (2013, 106) writes of Galileo in 1609:

One night in December, he turned it [a telescope he built] on the moon, and saw what no man of his time had seen before. Or, rather, since there were Dutch gadgets in many hands by then, and many eyes, he understood what he was seeing as no man of his time had before . . .