Through the Telescope

THE TELESCOPE—HISTORICAL

The claim of priority in the invention of this wonderful instrument, which has so enlarged our ideas of the scale and variety of the universe, has been warmly asserted on behalf of a number of individuals. Holland maintains the rights of Jansen, Lippershey, and Metius; while our own country produces evidence that Roger Bacon had, in the thirteenth century, 'arrived at theoretical proof of the possibility of constructing a telescope and a microscope' and that Leonard Digges 'had a method of discovering, by perspective glasses set at due angles, all objects pretty far distant that the sun shone on, which lay in the country round about.'

All these claims, however, whether well or ill founded, are very little to the point. The man to whom the human race owes a debt of gratitude in connection with any great invention is not necessarily he who, perhaps by mere accident, may stumble on the principle of it, but he who takes up 


the raw material of the invention and shows the full powers and possibilities which are latent in it. In the present case there is one such man to whom, beyond all question, we owe the telescope as a practical astronomical instrument, and that man is Galileo Galilei. He himself admits that it was only after hearing, in 1609, that a Dutchman had succeeded in making such an instrument, that he set himself to investigate the matter, and produced telescopes ranging from one magnifying but three diameters up to the one with a power of thirty-three with which he made his famous discoveries; but this fact cannot deprive the great Italian of the credit which is undoubtedly his due. Others may have anticipated him in theory, or even to a small extent in practice, but Galileo first gave to the world the telescope as an instrument of real value in research.

The telescope with which he made his great discoveries was constructed on a principle which, except in the case of binoculars, is now discarded. It consisted of a double convex lens converging the rays of light from a distant object, and of a double concave lens, intercepting the convergent rays before they reach a focus, and rendering them parallel again (Fig. 1). His largest instrument, as already mentioned, had a power of only thirty-three diameters, and the field of view was very small. A more powerful one can now be obtained for a few shillings, or constructed, one might almost say, for a few pence; yet, as Proctor has observed: 'If we 


regard the absolute importance of the discoveries effected by different telescopes, few, perhaps, will rank higher than the little tube now lying in the Tribune of Galileo at Florence.'