Galileo will go down in history as the first human being to point a telescope at the sky . He learned of its existence through a French scientist named Jacques Bovedere who, in turn, had heard that an optician from Holland had built it .
Hans Lippershey , a highly skilled lens polisher who lived in Middelburg, is traditionally regarded as the inventor of the telescope. According to an old story, surely apocryphal, we owe the idea to one of his sons who one day, playing in his father’s shop, took two lenses and aligned them, and looking through them he realized that distant objects seemed closest.
Truth or legend, the truth is that on October 2, 1608, Lippershey presented the documents for the granting of the patent before the General States of the Netherlands. The design consisted of a tube with two lenses, one fixed (the objective) and the other mobile (the eyepiece) intended for focusing, and it had a magnification power of X3. He called the invention his kijker , which is Dutch for ‘spectator’. A few weeks later another Dutchman, Jacob Metius, filed his own patent . The Dutch government, seeing that the priority of this invention could not be easily settled, did not grant it to either of them, even though Metius presented a declaration by the famous René Descartes in which he affirmed that he was the true inventor. We do not know what happened in the following months but Metius withdrew his patent and did not allow anyone to see his telescope. The anger must have been very great because in his will he ordered that all his tools and designs be destroyed so that no one would benefit from them.
But the matter does not end here. Zacharias Janssen , another Dutch eyeglass maker and coin counterfeiter who lived in the same town as Lippershey, also entered the fray claiming his share of the pie. To further blur the story, his son, Johannes, testified under oath that Lippershey had stolen his father’s 1590 design from him .
In the end the one who got the slice was Lippershey: he made some modifications to his original invention – among them developing a binocular model, the binoculars – and the Dutch government paid him 900 guilders for his invention.
Curiously, the name ‘telescope’ was not coined by any of its inventors, but by the Greek Giovanni Demisiani , theologian, chemist and mathematician of Cardinal Gonzaga, bishop of Matua and Tarazona. The baptism was celebrated at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome on April 25, 1611, when Galileo presented his improved version of the telescope at the celebration of his appointment as a new member.
Be that as it may, the truth is that the idea of the telescope had been around the heads of many for a long time. Already in the thirteenth century the philosopher Roger Bacon had written that through an appropriate combination of lenses and mirrors “from an incredible distance we will be able to read the smallest letters… and the Sun, the Moon and the planets will be made to descend within reach of the hand” . However, there was a technological impediment: the polishing of the lenses. It was the appearance of more perfected methods that allowed its appearance.
Of course, the appearance of the telescope itself did not change the world. The decisive moment, which would indelibly mark his influence on history, was a day in 1609, when Galileo Galilei pointed his newly built telescope at the sky : he discovered stars in that milky night band that is the Milky Way, mountains on the Moon , the four satellites of Jupiter and spots on the, until then, immaculate Sun. His first astronomical discoveries were published in a small work titled Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger) .
