Galileo Didn't Invent The Telescope... Sorry

Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to TestTube Plus again today. I am Trace. This is episode two of five on telescopes. Yesterday, we talked about how telescopes work and kind of the basics of what they are. But today, we're going to talk about who invented them and when. We're also going to talk later this week about crazy types of telescopes and what those things have discovered out there in the universe. So make sure you subscribe so you can get all of those episodes. If you don't want to wait that long, go find us on iTunes. You can get an audio podcast of this whole series. Either way, who invented the telescope? When I say telescope, the first thing that pops in your head is Galileo, right? Galileo, guy who used a telescope, got accused of heresy. It was all sorts of crazy stuff going on back in the early 1600s. Galileo didn't invent the telescope. He just used it and got famous because of it. The first recorded mention of a telescope that we know of today was actually in a letter dated September 25 of 1608. And it references someone who, quote, claims to have a certain device by means of which all things at a very great distance can be seen as if they were nearby by looking through glasses, which he claims to be a new invention, end quote. Now, before this letter, there may have existed telescopes. We don't have actual physical discussion about it or any telescopes to speak of from that time. But we do know for sure that there were glass lenses. There were mirrors before 1608. So people could have put those together to create a telescope. Roger Bacon was a friar and scientist. He lived in the 13th century. And he did a lot of work with optics, with lenses, and with light. Some say that it's possible he could have done experiments using two lenses to magnify objects. That's essentially a simple telescope. He wrote about an idea that seems similar to a telescope back in the 13th century. Quote, for we can so shape transparent bodies and arrange them in such a way with respect to our sight and objects of vision that the rays will be reflected and bent in any direction we desire and under any angle we may see the object near or at a distance, end quote. But that, of course, isn't proof that he invented a telescope. It could have just been a late night. Maybe he was just writing about it. Optics have been used for centuries for all sorts of different things. Some say Emperor Nero used a magnifier made out of emerald to watch gladiator fights. Eyeglasses date back to the 1200s. The Nimrud lens dates back to between 710 and 750 BC, which is a polished, round, crystal lens with one convex side. And people aren't actually sure what its purpose was. But a curator from the British Museum thinks that it could have been an early crude magnifying glass. So lenses have been around for thousands of years, which means it's possible telescopes came around way before September 25 of 1608. But we did have proof from then. Someone tried to patent the telescope in 1608. So even though they tried to patent it, the idea might not have been actually that new since the parts were around. But getting back to that, 1608. A Dutch spectacle maker named Hans Lippershey applied for a patent for a telescope about a week after that letter was sent. It's not clear in the research for this episode if that letter that we talked about was referring to Hans or for someone else who was looking for a patent. But there's evidence that on October 2, really, really close in time to that letter, someone applied for a patent. Lippershey was denied that patent because a Dutch committee felt the invention was too easy to replicate. However, the government did then pay him to make a bunch of telescopes for them. And in fact, it was so easy to replicate because there's also evidence two other Dutch spectacle makers made their own telescopes within weeks of Hans' patent request. But like a lot of different things, credit is given to Hans because he was the first in recorded history to describe that telescope. So if the telescope was invented by a Dutch eyeglass maker or a medieval monk, either way, it was Galileo who kind of brought it into pop culture, right? He had heard about Hans Lippershey's invention. And he was inspired. And he made his own. And he improved on it a little bit. Lippershey's claimed to magnify objects about three times, which is kind of more like a spyglass, like the pirates use in movies and stuff. It could have been used for military purposes. But Galileo in 1609, he made one that was way more powerful. And he did it without ever seeing the Dutch-made telescopes. He only heard about them and was like, I don't know how to do that because Galileo was awesome. Either way, his telescopes could magnify by 10 times. And then he improved on his own design and got 20 and 30 times magnification. So that's pretty huge. It was a refracting telescope. So if you were around earlier, you know what that means. And it has a glass lens fixed on the end of a hollow tube. His 400-year-old surviving telescopes, they can actually be seen if you go to Florence, Italy. They are in a museum. He took that and he pointed it at the sky. And the first thing he discovered was that the moon at the time thought to be a smooth, perfect object. Was not at all smooth. It was rough with mountains and craters and all sorts of stuff on there. In 1610, he turned toward Jupiter and he discovered the moons of Jupiter moving around out there. And he also wrote about sunspots and Saturn's rings and Venus and all sorts of cool stuff. And he published it in a book called the Starry Messenger. And then he got in deep trouble with the church because they were all like, no way, bro. We already described all those things. God made them perfect. That's a whole other story. We don't have to get into that. From here, telescopes only get better, of course. Parts of Galileo's design had imperfections in seeing some faraway objects. Things got discolored or blurry or distorted because of the way the lenses were made. And the telescopes over time became sharper and bigger and they could see farther away and people kept improving on them. And Johannes Kepler started studying and writing about telescope technology, eventually laying out how to improve Galileo's design. Galileo was using one concave lens and one convex lens, but Kepler was all like, nah, use two convex lens and things would be more clear. It didn't make more magnification, but it did give you a larger field of view when using the telescope. So instead of just seeing a little chunk of the moon, you could see the whole moon. And that would allow you to study a lot more stuff, although the image was inverted. So they hadn't figured out that whole put a mirror thing up there. That's just the way it goes when you want to see more space and use those two lenses. During the 17th and 18th century, different forms of this refracting telescope were made. Some were longer. They had different mounts, different sized tubes, different sized lenses. But it was the invention of the reflecting telescope that was really the next big thing in the telescope technology. Isaac Newton built the first reflecting telescope. But it wasn't perfect, as the first ones often aren't. But it did fix a problem of a colorful halo surrounding pictures in refracting telescopes. But it was still pretty blurry, the reflecting ones. Over the decades and centuries, more and more innovations have been made, and telescopes have gotten way, way better. And all of this transformed us today into having these massive mirrors that were made so precisely and so clearly. And we can have telescopes that are super accurate. In 1932, however, somebody changed the telescope game again by using a different band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Up to this moment, we were using our eyeballs to look at planets and look out into the universe. Eyeballs are not the best way to do this. Telescopes have to use visible light, because that's what we use, right? That's what our eyes use. But in 1932, they built the first radio telescope, which picks up a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so therefore shows us different things. Eventually, we got the infrared telescope, and the X-ray telescope, and the gamma ray telescope, and all sorts of other cool stuff. But for more on that, you'll have to come back tomorrow. TestTubePlus does a whole bunch of episodes about one topic, so make sure you subscribe so you get all of those. Let us know down in the comments how you feel about Galileo's spot in Jupiter, huh? Isn't that pretty cool? You think he got in a lot of trouble for that? Yeah, you know he did. Tell us what you think about all that down in the comments. Make sure you keep coming back here to TestTubePlus. You can find us over on Twitter. We're at TestTube. You can find me at Trace Dominguez. Thanks for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.