History of Telescopes

June 22nd, 2008 by

Alan

It seems the technology for telescopes started back in 2560 BC. Artisans in ancient Egypt
polished rocks, glass, and semi-precious stones to make eyes for the sarcophagi.

What follows is some major points in the history of how telescopes came to be today:

In 470 BC, Mozi, a Chinese philosopher, focused the sun's rays by using concave mirrors
In 4 BC, Seneca the Younger used water to magnify letters and words
In 23, Pliny the Elder discovered doctors using a crystal ball with the sun's rays beaming
through it to cauterize wounds
In the ninth century, telescopes were possibly made from Visby lenses, a Middle Eastern glass
In 1520, Leonard Digges, an English mathematician, invented two telescopes Reflecting and
Refracting
In 1608, A Dutch lensmaker, Hans Lippershey, applied for a patent on a design for a telescope
In 1609, Galileo improved on Lippershey's design and renamed it perspicillum - An Italian word
for telescope
In 1616, Niccolo Zucchi invented a reflecting telescope
In 1663, James Gregory, a Scottish mathematician, produces a telescope with a parabolic primary
mirror and an elliptical secondary mirror
In 1668, Isaac Newton designed a telescope using a parabolic primary mirror and a flat diagonal
secondary mirror
In 1733, Chester Moore Hall created the achromatic lens
In 1880, Ernst Abbe invented the first orthoscopic eyepiece
In 1910, The Ritchey-Chretien telescope that is used in many of the large astronomical telescopes
is invented by George Ritchey and Henri Chretien
In 1930, The Schmidt camera is created by Bernhard Schmidt
In 1937, Grote Reber developed a telescope for wavelengths ranging from radio to Xrays
In 1944, The Maksutov telescope is designed by Dmitri Maksutov
In 1962, The UK launched an orbiting solar telescope
In 1990, the Hubble Telescope was launched into space
In 2013, the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched and take the place of the Hubble