The early evolution of the telescope

Check your comprehension

~Has the laser reached the end of its development?

~ If something follows a pattern, have similar events already happened?

~ These inventors never dreamed the applications would be so wi de _ _ _ _ _ _.

Read the text about the early evolution of the telescope. Which of the two features typical of the history of science does it illustrate?

by Philip Morrison

The American Philosophical Society proved/revealed Galileo was not one quick to rush into print. Eighteen years a professor in Padua, he had published only two books, one an instruction manual for a geometrical instrument he had invented and sold out of his own private workshop, the other a witty polemic against a Padovan student who had sought to rip off that very instruction book! But from the time Galileo first heard of the spyglass of "a certain Fleming" until his book The Starry Messenger opened the Copernican universe to our extended senses, just 10 months elapsed. He was onto a good thing and he published it first, in March of 1610.

There were probably three men who had telescopes by early in October of 1608. At the autumn fair in Frankfurt that year a Dutchman was offering one for a high price. And it was not a novel idea to look through such an instrument at the stars. The first printed account from the Hague mentions that the glass showed new stars in the Pleiades, months before any telescope came to Paris, Milan, Venice or Naples. But Galileo worked hard and well, he had the help of a master craftsman in his own shop, he had access to selected lots of the best Venice glass, he ground scores of lenses and chose the best of them, he grasped the importance of a steady mount and he invented an aperture stop to correct the faults of his high-powered lenses. There is no doubt that his was a magnificent and purposeful development, even though it was not an invention; he described the new cosmos, beating out Thomas Harriot, Simon Marius, Christoph Scheiner and the wonderful Paris amateur Nicolas de Peirese, all of whom were gazing at the sky through telescopes at about the same time.

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