Credited to The Netherlands. The inventor is not known with certainty. Jacob Metius of Alkmaar applied for a patent weeks after Lipperhey, and Zacharias Janssen of Middelburg was later also named as inventor. Lipperhey has the earliest written record, and most historians credit him.
How it began
Hans Lipperhey was a spectacle maker in Middelburg, in Zeeland. In late September 1608 he gave the earliest known public demonstration of a telescope to Prince Maurits of Nassau in The Hague, during a peace conference. On October 2, 1608, he applied to the States General of the Netherlands for a 30-year patent on an instrument for seeing things far away as if they were nearby. This application is the first written record of a telescope.
How it works
The instrument was a tube with a lens at each end. Light from a distant object is gathered by the front lens and viewed through the eyepiece, so that the object appears enlarged. It is not known exactly which arrangement Lipperhey described, but since Galileo's instrument a year later used a concave eyepiece, which gives an upright image, his probably did too. Its magnification was about three times. The word telescope was coined only three years later.
How it spread
News traveled quickly. A diplomatic report on a Siamese embassy to The Hague, issued in October 1608, mentioned the invention and circulated across Europe. Paolo Sarpi in Venice received it in November, Thomas Harriot in England was using a six-power telescope by the summer of 1609, and Galileo Galilei built improved versions. In 1656 Pierre Borel published a book on the true inventor of the telescope that credited both Lipperhey and Zacharias Janssen.
Who pushed back
Lipperhey did not get his patent. A few weeks after his application Jacob Metius of Alkmaar submitted a similar one, and on October 14 an unidentified young man offered a telescope to the councillors of Zeeland. The States General judged that the device was too easy to copy to be kept secret and that others claimed it as well. They refused the patent but commissioned Lipperhey to make six binocular instruments for 900 guilders, a very large sum.
What lasted
Turned toward the sky, the instrument opened a new period in astronomy within two years of the demonstration in The Hague. Refracting telescopes were refined for centuries afterward. A crater on the Moon, the minor planet 31338 Lipperhey and an exoplanet are named after the spectacle maker. Despite the confusion over rival claims, most historians now attribute the invention to Lipperhey, whose demonstration set events in motion.
