Invention of the spyglass, 1608

Commentary
Invention of the spyglass, 1608

Who invented the telescope? The question is as old as the instrument itself.  ‘There is no nation’, the first historian of the subject wrote in 1656, ‘which has not claimed for itself the remarkable invention …: indeed, the French, Spanish, English, Italians and Hollanders have all maintained that they did this.’ Yet the origins of the device can be traced with confidence to a network of spectacle-makers in the Dutch town of Middelburg.

The firm documentary record begins on 2 October 1608, when Hans Lippershey (1570 –1619) of Wesel, a master lens grinder and spectacle-maker practicing in Middelburg, asked the Dutch States General to patent an instrument ‘for seeing things far away as if they were nearby’. According to one story, the real inventors were two children who, while playing in his shop, noticed that a distant weather vane seemed much close when viewer two lenses. Lippershay was rewarded, but his patent was refused on the grounds that it would be impossible to keep the principle of the device secret. In fact, later that month, a second Middelburg lens-grinder, Jacob Adriaenszoon or Metius (after 1571–1628) filed a patent request of his own; and a third Middelburg spectacle-maker, Zacharias Janssen (1588-1630), was promoted as the true inventor of the device sometime later.

Lippershey was invited to demonstrate the device to Prince Maurice of Nassau, and the chances of keeping the device secret were not enhanced by the description of the demonstration broadcast in a French newsletter of that year:

A few days before the departure of Spinola from The Hague a spectacle-maker from Middelburg, a humble man, very religious & pious, offered His Excellency certain glasses as a present, by which one is able to trace & observe clearly objects at a distance of three or four miles, as if there is a distance as little as one hundred footsteps. From the tower of The Hague with the said glasses one can observe clearly the clock on the tower of Delft, & the windows of the Church of Leiden, despite the fact that one of the said towns is at a distance of one & a half hours & the other one at three & a half hours walking distance. The States-General were already well informed about this & sent them to His Excellency to show, adding that with these glasses one could observe the impostures of the enemy. Spinola also saw them with & great astonishment & told Prince Hendrik; from this moment on I will not be safe anymore, because you can observe me from afar. Whereupon the said Prince answered: we will prohibit our people to shoot at you. The craftsman who has manufactured the said glasses has received three hundred écu & he will receive more on condition that he will tell nobody about the said proficiency, which he promised with most pleasure as he doesn’t want the enemy will be able to use this, The said glasses are very useful at sieges & in similar affairs, because one can distinguish from a mile’s distance & beyond several objects very well, as if they are very near & even the stars which normally are not visible for us, because of the scanty proportion & feeble sight of our eyes, can be seen with this instrument.

Within a few months attempts were being made to replicate the device from one end of Europe to the other. Of these attempts, the one which most radically improved it was undertaken by the professor of mathematics in Padua, Galileo Galilei. 

Further resourwces on Cabinet. A series on Galileo's use of the telescope for astronomical observations is available here.

Additional resources. A brief video by the Museo Galileo rehearses the basic narrative of invention and dispersion (see also the accompanying text and images).

Further reading. Albert van Helden, The Invention of the Telescope, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 67, no. 4 (1977), summarised in the entry on ‘The Telescope’ in van Helden, The Galileo Project. Huib J. Zuidervaart, ‘The “True Inventor” of the Telescope. A Survey of 400 Years of Debate, in The Origins of the Telescope, ed. Albert van Helden, Sven Dupré, Rob van Gent, and Huib Zuidervaart (Amsterdam: KNAW Press, 2010), 2-44 (from which the opening quotation derives).

Sources

Image 1. Johan de Brune (1588-1658), Emblemata of Zinne-werck : vorghestelt, in beelden, ghedichten, en breeder uijt-legginghen, tot uijt-druckinghe, en verbeteringhe van verscheijden feijlen onser eeuwe (Middelburg, 1624), p. 333. Image source: Wikimedia. The 1661 reprint of the full work is available on archive.org. This print was engraved and printed by Adriaen van de Venne in Middelburg, not far from the original optical workshop of Hans Lipperhey. By 1624, the spyglass was in regular use especially for military purposes.

Image 2. Portrait of Hans Lippershay, by Jacob van Meurs (1618-1680), from Pierre Borel, De vero telescopii inventore (1655). Source: Wikimedia (public domain). Lippsershay is described as the 'second inventor' of the telescope, because Borel's thesis is that the first inventor was Zacharias Janssen.

Opening quotation. Zuidervaart, ‘The “True Inventor” of the Telescope’, p. 2.

Extended quotation. Embassies of the King of Siam sent to his excellency Prince Maurits, arrived in The Hague on 10 September 1608 : an early 17th century newsletter, reporting both the visit of the first Siamese diplomatic mission to Europe and the first documented demonstration of a telescope worldwide, ed. and trans. Henk Zoomers and Huib J Zuidervaart (Wassenaar: Louwman Collection of Historic Telescopes, 2008), pp. 48-9.

Credit. Howard Hotson (February 2019)