Phoenicians cooking on sand discovered glass around 3500 BCE, but it took about 5,000 years more for glass to be shaped into a lens for the first telescope. Even cavemen must have noticed how water refracts, or bends, the image of objects below the surface, but this probably seemed specific to liquid and not to sunlight's angle on the water's surface. Crude lenses have been found in Crete and Asia Minor that date from around 2000 BCE, but these weren't clear enough to see through. Euclid wrote about reflection and refraction of light in the 3rd century BCE, and the Roman writer Seneca mentioned how Aristophanes demonstrated that a globe full of water could be used to magnify things. So some of the theory that would be the basis of telescopes was known as early as classic Greece times. With these well-known people publishing such results and theories, why did no one think of inventing a telescope? Perhaps such an instrument was produced, but its use was so amazing that it appeared to be evil, and its maker was hounded or killed. As ridiculous as that sounds, this is what actually happened to Roger Bacon (c1220-c1292). Bacon wrote about magnification and even applied its use to observing the sky. He wrote that by using lenses, "the Sun, Moon, and Stars may be made to descend hither in appearance . . . which persons unacquainted with such things would refuse to believe." For this he was labeled a magician and imprisoned. It wasn't until the Renaissance, when so many new and seemingly miraculous discoveries were being made, that people were ready for such a marvelous invention as the telescope. What also made it easier to accept was the general use of spectacles by that time. Spectacles or eyeglasses were only invented sometime in the 13th century. Just who invented them is not known, but a curved glass's ability to magnify its surroundings was probably discovered by mistake. Once fashioned so that both eyes could look through two lenses at once, spectacles became instantly popular, a great benefit to those with aging eyesight or those nearsighted from birth. A spectacle maker probably assembled the first telescope. Hans Lippershey (c1570-c1619) of Holland is often credited with the invention, but he almost certainly was not the first to make one. Lippershey was, however, the first to make the new device widely known. The story usually told is that Lippershey was handling some lenses in his shop when he happened to look through two differently shaped ones at the same time. He was holding them up toward the light of the open doorway, when he was startled to see a distant church tower seem to jump to the door of his shop. He was amazed to see even the weathervane on the church spire clearly. Lippershey's first idea was to use this curious effect to attract customers. He set up a display with the two lenses, so people who came to his shop could look through them and see how the church appeared to be so close. Lippershey eventually enclosed the two lenses in a tube to make what he called a kijkglas or "look glass." While that story may be partly or wholly fiction, Lippershey did apply for a patent for his telescope and sent one as a gift to the ruling prince of the Netherlands, Mauritz of Nassau. Lippershey was eventually denied a patent, because, he was told, "too many people have knowledge of this invention." This was indeed true, since toy telescopes were already for sale in Paris, and other spectacle makers were also claiming they invented the telescope. Perhaps Lippershey did invent the telescope independently of others - that would not be an unusual occurrence. Whatever the case, it was the news of Lippershey's invention that reached Galileo Galilei in Italy and intrigued him enough to attempt to make his own telescope. Galileo's version of Lippershey's "far looker," as he heard it called, also wasn't invented specifically for sky watching. Galileo, like Lippershey, saw an opportunity to make money with this new invention. Both these men realized the enormous military advantage of such a tool. As Lippershey gave a telescope to his prince, Galileo fashioned his own tube and presented it to his ruler, the doge Leonardo Donà of Venice. During the early months of showing off his telescope, Galileo exclusively demonstrated how distant objects on land appeared closer. [picture of Galileo's telescope] It was inevitable, though, that one night the moon would catch his attention, and Galileo would think of pointing his telescope at its bright disk. From that moment, Galileo went on to discover new "lands" in the sky above. The craggy features of the moon surprised him, the increased number of stars he saw amazed him, but his most astounding discovery was when he realized four moons were orbiting Jupiter! Galileo published this incredible find, and the news rocked the world, because at that time people believed that everything in the sky orbited the Earth. Galileo went on to see many more wonders with what was now called a telescope. The telescope gave such a drastically different view of the sky that some people's most cherished beliefs were threatened. Galileo's reports on things like sunspots, for example, got him into trouble with the traditionalists of his time. No one before could really see what was in the sky, not clearly, and so much of what was believed about the universe was based on philosophy and religious ideas . Galileo started the trend to actually observe and measure objects in the sky, for he showed that the worlds above seemed to obey the same physical laws known to work on Earth. For example, he calculated the height of mountains on the moon after observing their shadows move on the lunar surface. This was a revolutionary idea, to think that an ordinary person could know something about a distant world just by writing down what is seen and then applying basic mathematics to the problem. [Excerpt of Starry Messenger, Galileo's drawings?]
