Who really invented the telescope?

No, it wasn't Galileo. Govert Schilling untangles the tale of astronomy's greatest creation, and recounts what happened next

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On 29 July 2021, more than four centuries after the invention of the telescope, the man who initiated a revolution in astronomy was finally honoured with a life-sized bronze statue. In the herb garden of the Middelburg Abbey, in the very southwest of the Netherlands, he sits on a bench, holding a small tube to his eye, gazing at the sky.

No, it's not Galileo Galilei, although some popular books still suggest that the Italian astronomer was the one to build the first spyglass. And no, it's not the father of two boys who were playing with lenses and accidentally discovered the magnifying effect of their combination - that's a romantic, but completely apocryphal, 18th-century story.

So, who really invented the telescope?

A better question might be: why wasn't it invented much earlier? After all, lenses - in the form of transparent rock crystals - were already known to the Greeks and Romans. The Arabs (in particular, 11th-century Ibn al-Haytham, better known as Alhazen) studied optics, inspiring English polymath Roger Bacon (1219-1292). Spectacles appeared on the scene at the end of the 13th century. Indeed, some believe that scientific all-rounder Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) already discovered the principle of the telescope.

"Seeing things far away"

However, it wasn't before the start of the 17th century that Hans Lipperhey (or Lippershey) (1570-1619), a spectacle maker in Middelburg, build his first device for “seeing things far away as if they were nearby" - a simple cardboard tube with a convex lens at one end and a concave eyepiece at the other, yielding a magnification of about three times.