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In the credulous twaddle of an essay on the Lost Arts one may generally find the telescope ascribed to far antiquity. In place of evidence there is vague allusion of classical times or wild flights of fancy like one which argued from the Scriptural statement that Satan took up Christ into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth, that the Devil had a telescope—bad optics and worse theology.

In point of fact there is not any indication that either in classical times, or in the black thousand years of hopeless ignorance that followed the fall of Roman civilization, was there any knowledge of optical instruments worth mentioning.

The peoples that tended their flocks by night in the East alone kept alive the knowledge of astronomy, and very gradually, with the revival of learning, came the spirit of experiment that led to the invention of aids to man’s natural powers.

The lineage of the telescope runs unmistakably back to spectacles, and these have an honorable history extending over more than six centuries to the early and fruitful days of the Renaissance.

That their origin was in Italy near the end of the thirteenth century admits of little doubt. A Florentine manuscript letter of 1289 refers to “Those glasses they call spectacles, lately invented, to the great advantage of poor old men when their sight grows weak,” and in 1305 Giordano da Rivalto refers to them as dating back about twenty years.

Finally, in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence lay buried Salvino d’Amarto degli Armati, (obiit 1317) under an epitaph, now disappeared, ascribing to him the invention of spectacles. W. B. Carpenter, F. R. S., states that the inventor tried to keep the valuable secret to himself, but it was discovered and published before his death. At all events the discovery moved swiftly. By the early fourteenth century it had spread to the Low Countries where it was destined to lead to great results, and presently was common knowledge over all civilized Europe.

It was three hundred years, however, between spectacles and the combination of spectacle lenses into a telescope, a lapse of time which to some investigators has seemed altogether mysterious. The ophthalmological facts lead to a simple explanation. The first spectacles were for the relief of presbyopia, the common and lamentable affection of advancing years, and for this purpose convex lenses of very moderate power sufficed, nor was material variation in power necessary. Glasses having a uniform focus of a foot and a half or thereabouts would serve every practical purpose, but would be no material for telescopes.

Myopia was little known, its acquired form being rare in a period of general illiteracy, and glasses for its correction, especially as regards its higher degrees, probably came slowly and were in very small demand, so that the chance of an optical craftsman having in hand the ordinary convex lenses and those of strong negative curvature was altogether remote. Indeed it was only in 1575 that Maurolycus published a clear description of myopia and hypermetropia with the appropriate treatment by the use of concave and convex lenses. Until both of these, in quite various powers, were available, there was small chance of hitting upon an instrument that required their use in a highly special combination.

At all events there is no definite trace of the discovery of telescopic vision until 1608 and the inventor of record is unquestionably one Jan Lippershey, a spectacle maker of Middelburg in Zeeland, a native of Wesel. On Oct. 2, 1608 the States-General took under consideration a petition which had been presented by Lippershey for a 30-year patent to the exclusive right of manufacture of an instrument for seeing at a distance, or for a suitable pension, under the condition that he should make the instrument only for his country’s service.

The States General pricked up its ears and promptly appointed on Oct. 4 a committee to test the new instrument from a tower of Prince Maurice’s palace, allotting 900 florins for the purchase of the invention should it prove good. On the 6th the committee reported favorably and the Assembly agreed to give Lippershey 900 florins for his instrument, but desired that it be arranged for use with both eyes.

Lippershey therefore pushed forward to the binocular form and two months later, Dec. 9, he announced his success. On the 15th the new instrument was examined and pronounced good, and the Assembly ordered two more binoculars, of rock crystal, at the same price. They denied a patent on the ground that the invention was known to others, but paid Lippershey liberally as a sort of retainer to secure his exclusive services to the State. In fact even the French Ambassador, wishing to obtain an instrument from him for his King, had to secure the necessary authorization from the States-General.

Bull. de la Soc. Astron. de France. Fig. 1.—Jan Lippershey, Inventor of the Telescope.

It is here pertinent to enquire what manner of optic tube Lippershey showed to back up his petition, and how it had come to public knowledge. As nearly as we may know these first telescopes were about a foot and a half long, as noted by Huygens, and probably an inch and a half or less in aperture, being constructed of an ordinary convex lens such as was used in spectacles for the aged, and of a concave glass suitable for a bad case of short sightedness, the only kind in that day likely to receive attention.

It probably magnified no more than three or four diameters and was most likely in a substantial tube of firmly rolled, glued, and varnished paper, originally without provision for focussing, since with an eye lens of rather low power the need of adjustment would not be acute.

As to the invention being generally known, the only definite attempt to dispute priority was made by James Metius of Alkmaar, who, learning of Lippershey’s petition, on Oct. 17, 1608, filed a similar one, alleging that through study and labor extending over a couple of years he, having accidentally hit upon the idea, had so far carried it out that his instrument made distant objects as distinct as the one lately offered to the States by a citizen and spectacle maker of Middelburg.

He apparently did not submit an instrument, was politely told to perfect his invention before his petition was further considered, and thereafter disappears from the scene, whatever his merits. If he had actually noted telescopic vision he had neither appreciated its enormous importance nor laid the facts before others who might have done so.

The only other contemporary for whom claims have been made is Zacharius Jansen, also a spectacle maker of Middelburg, to whom Pierre Borel, on entirely second hand information, ascribed the discovery of the telescope. But Borel wrote nearly fifty years later, after all the principals were dead, and the evidence he collected from the precarious memories of venerable witnesses is very conflicting and points to about 1610 as the date when Jansen was making telescopes—like many other spectacle makers.[1]

Borel also gave credence to a tale that Metius, seeking Jansen, strayed into Lippershey’s shop and by his inquiries gave the shrewd proprietor his first hint of the telescope, but set the date at 1610. A variation of this tale of the mysterious stranger, due to Hieronymus Sirturus, contains the interesting intimation that he may have been of supernatural origin—not further specified. There are also the reports, common among the ignorant or envious, that Lippershey’s discovery was accidental, even perhaps made by his children or apprentice.

Just how it actually was made we do not know, but there is no reason to suppose that it was not in the commonplace way of experimenting with and testing lenses that he had produced, perhaps those made to meet a vicious case of myopia in one of his patrons.

When the discovery was made is somewhat clearer. Plainly it antedated Oct. 2, and in Lippershey’s petition is a definite statement that an instrument had already been tested by some, at least, of the members of the States-General. A somewhat vague and gossipy note in the Mercure Française intimates that one was presented to Prince Maurice “about September of the past year” (1608) and that it was shown to the Council of State and to others.

Allowing a reasonable time between Lippershey’s discovery and the actual production of an example suitable for exhibition to the authorities, it seems likely that the invention dates back certainly into the summer of 1608, perhaps even earlier.

At all events there is every indication that the news of it spread like wild-fire. Unless Lippershey were unusually careful in keeping his secret, and there are traditions that he was not, the sensational discovery would have been quickly known in the little town and every spectacle maker whose ears it reached would have been busy with it.

If the dates given by Simon Marius in his Mundus Jovialis be correct, a Belgian with an air of mystery and a glass of which one of the lenses was cracked, turned up at the Frankfort fair in the autumn of 1608 and at last allowed Fuchs, a nobleman of Bimbach, to look through the instrument. Fuchs noted that it magnified “several” times, but fell out with the Belgian over the price, and returning, took up the matter with Marius, fathomed the construction, tried it with glasses from spectacles, attempted to get a convex lens of longer focus from a Nuremburg maker, who had no suitable tools, and the following summer got a fairly good glass from Belgium where such were already becoming common.

With this Marius eventually picked up three satellites of Jupiter—the fourth awaited the arrival of a superior telescope from Venice. Early in 1609 telescopes “about a foot long” were certainly for sale in Paris, a Frenchman had offered one in Milan by May of that year, a couple of months later one was in use by Harriot in England, an example had reached Cardinal Borghese, and specimens are said to have reached Padua. Fig. 2 from the “Mundus Jovialis,” shows Marius with his “Perspicilium,” the first published picture of the new instrument. Early in 1610 telescopes were being made in England, but if the few reports of performance, even at this date, are trustworthy, the “Dutch trunk” of that period was of very indifferent quality and power, far from being an astronomical instrument.

The Observatory. Fig. 2.—Simon Marius and his Telescope.

One cannot lay aside this preliminary phase of the evolution of the telescope without reference to the alleged descriptions of telescopic apparatus by Roger Bacon, (c. 1270), Giambattista della Porta (1558), and Leonard Digges (1571), details of which may be found in Grant’s History of Physical Astronomy and many other works.

Of these the first on careful reading conveys strongly the conviction that the author had a pretty clear idea of refraction from the standpoint of visual angle, yet without giving any evidence of practical acquaintance with actual apparatus for doing the things which he suggests.

Given a suitable supply of lenses, it is reasonably certain that Bacon was clever enough to have devised both telescope and microscope, but there is no evidence that he did so, although his manifold activities kept him constantly in public view. It does not seem unlikely, however, that his suggestions in manuscripts, quite available at the time, may have led to the contemporaneous invention of spectacles.

Porta’s comments sound like an echo of Bacon’s, plus a rather muddled attempt to imagine the corresponding apparatus. Kepler, certainly competent and familiar with the principles of the telescope, found his description entirely unintelligible. Porta, however, was one of the earliest workers on the camera obscura and upon this some of his cryptic statements may have borne.

Somewhat similar is the situation respecting Digges. His son makes reference to a Ms. of Roger Bacon as the source of the marvels he describes. The whole account, however, strongly suggests experiments with the camera obscura rather than with the telescope.

The most that can be said with reference to any of the three is that, if he by any chance fell upon the combination of lenses that gave telescopic vision, he failed to set down the facts in any form that could be or was of use to others. There is no reason to believe that the Dutch discovery, important as it was, had gone beyond the empirical observation that a common convex spectacle lens and a concave one of relatively large curvature could be placed in a tube, convex ahead, at such a distance apart as to give a clear enlarged image of distant objects.

It remained for Galileo (1564-1647) to grasp the general principles involved and to apply them to a real instrument of research. It was in May 1609 that, on a visit to Venice, he heard reports that a Belgian had devised an instrument which made distant objects seem near, and this being quickly confirmed by a letter from Paris he awakened to the importance of the issue and, returning to Padua, is said to have solved the problem the very night of his arrival.

Next day he procured a plano-convex and a plano-concave lens, fitted them to a lead tube and found that the combination magnified three diameters, an observation which indicates about what it was possible to obtain from the stock of the contemporary spectacle maker.[2] The relation between the power and the foci of the lenses he evidently quickly fathomed for his next recorded trial reached about eight diameters.

With this instrument he proceeded to Venice and during a month’s stay, August, 1609, exhibited it to the senators of the republic and throngs of notables, finally disclosing the secret of its construction and presenting the tube itself to the Doge sitting in full council. This particular telescope was about twenty inches long and one and five eighths inches in aperture, showing plainly that Galileo had by this time found, or more likely made, an eye lens of short focus, about three inches, quite probably using a well polished convex lens of the ordinary sort as objective.

Lodge “Pioneers of Science.” Fig. 3.—Galileo.

Laden with honors he returned to Padua and settled down to the hard work of development, grinding many lenses with his own hands and finally producing the instrument magnifying some 32 times, with which he began the notable succession of discoveries that laid the foundation of observational astronomy. This with another of similar dimensions is still preserved at the Galileo Museum in Florence, and is shown in the Frontispiece. The larger instrument is forty-nine inches long and an inch and three quarters aperture, the smaller about thirty-seven inches long and of an inch and five-eighths aperture. The tubes are of paper, the glasses still remain, and these are in fact the first astronomical telescopes.

Galileo made in Padua, and after his return to Florence in the autumn of 1610, many telescopes which found their way over Europe, but quite certainly none of power equalling or exceeding these.

In this connection John Greaves, later Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, writing from Sienna in 1639, says: “Galileus never made but two good glasses, and those were of old Venice glass.” In these best telescopes, however, the great Florentine had clearly accomplished a most workmanlike feat. He had brought the focus of his eye lens down to that usual in modern opera glasses, and has pushed his power about to the limit for simple lenses thus combined.

The lack of clear and homogeneous glass, the great difficulty of forming true tools, want of suitable commercial abrasives, impossibility of buying sheet metals or tubing (except lead), and default of now familiar methods of centering and testing lenses, made the production of respectably good instruments a task the difficulty of which it is hard now to appreciate.

The services of Galileo to the art were of such profound importance, that his form of instrument may well bear his name, even though his eyes were not the first that had looked through it. Such, too, was the judgment of his contemporaries, and it was by the act of his colleagues in the renowned Acaddemia dei Lincei, through the learned Damiscianus, that the name “Telescope” was devised and has been handed down to us.

A serious fault of the Galilean telescope was its very small field of view when of any considerable power. Galileo’s largest instrument had a field of but 7′15″, less than one quarter the moon’s diameter. The general reason is plain if one follows the rays through the lenses as in Fig. 4 where AB is the distant object, o the objective, e the eye lens, ab the real image in the absence of e, and a′b′ the virtual magnified image due to e.

It will be at once seen that the axes of the pencils of rays from all parts of the object, as shown by the heavy lines, act as if they diverged from the optical center of the objective, but diverging still more by refraction through the concave eye lens e, fall mostly outside the pupil of the observer’s eye. In fact the field is approximately measured by the angle subtended by the pupil from the center of o.

To the credit of the Galilean form may be set down the convenient erect image, a sharp, if small, field somewhat bettered by a partial compensation of the aberrations of the objective by the concave eye lens, and good illumination. For a distant object the lenses were spaced at the difference of their focal lengths, and the magnifying power was the ratio of these, fo/fe.

Fig. 4.—Diagram of Galileo’s Telescope.

But the difficulty of obtaining high power with a fairly sizeable field was ultimately fatal and the type now survives only in the form of opera and field glasses, usually of 2 to 5 power, and in an occasional negative eye lens for erecting the image in observatory work. Practically all the modern instruments have achromatic objectives and commonly achromatic oculars.

Fig. 5.—Diagram of Kepler’s Telescope.

The necessary step forward was made by Johann Kepler (1571-1630), the immortal discoverer of the laws of planetary motion. In his Dioptrice (1611) he set forth the astronomical telescope, substantially, save for the changes brought by achromatism, as it has been used ever since. His arrangement was that of Fig. 5 in which the letters have the same significance as in Fig. 4.

There are here three striking differences from the Galilean form. There is a real image in the front focus of the eye lens e, the rays passing it are refracted inwards instead of outwards, to the great advantage of the field, and any object placed in the image plane will be magnified together with the image. The first two points Kepler fully realized, the third he probably did not, though it is the basis of the micrometer. The lenses o and e are obviously spaced at the sum of their focal lengths, and as before the magnifying power is the ratio of these lengths, the visible image being inverted.

Kepler, so far as known, did not actually use the new telescope, that honor falling about half a dozen years later, to Christopher Scheiner, a Jesuit professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt, best known as a very early and most persistent, not to say verbose, observer of sun spots. His Rosa Ursina (1630) indicates free use of Kepler’s telescope for some years previously, in just what size and power is uncertain.[3] Fontana of Naples also appears to have been early in the field.

But the new instrument despite its much larger field and far greater possibilities of power, brought with it some very serious problems. With increased power came greatly aggravated trouble from spherical aberration and chromatic aberration as well, and the additive aberrations of the eye lens made matters still worse. The earlier Keplerian instruments were probably rather bad if the drawings of Fontana from 1629 to 1636 fairly represent them.

If one may judge from the course of developments, the first great impulse to improvement came with the publication of Descartes’ (1596-1650) study of dioptrics in 1637. Therein was set forth much of the theory of spherical aberration and astronomers promptly followed the clues, practical and impractical, thus disclosed.

Without going into the theory of aberrations the fact of importance to the improvement of the early telescope is that the longitudinal spherical aberration of any simple lens is directly proportional to its thickness due to curvature. Hence, other things being equal, the longer the focus for the same aperture the less the spherical aberration both absolutely and relatively to the image. Further, although Descartes knew nothing of chromatic aberration, and the colored fringe about objects seen through the telescope must then have seemed altogether mysterious, it, also, was greatly relieved by lengthening the focus.

For the chromatic circle produced by a simple lens of given diameter has a radial width substantially irrespective of the focal length. But increasing the focal length increases in exact proportion the size of the image, correspondingly decreasing the relative effect of the chromatic error.

Descartes also suggested several designs of lenses which would be altogether free of spherical aberration, formed with elliptical or hyperbolic curvature, and for some time fruitless efforts were made to realize this in practice. It was in fact to be near a century before anyone successfully figured non-spherical surfaces. It was spherical quite as much as chromatic aberration that drove astronomers to long telescopes.

Meanwhile the astronomical telescope fell into better hands than those of Scheiner. The first fully to grasp its possibilities was William Gascoigne, a gallant young gentleman of Middleton, Yorkshire, born about 1620 (some say as early as 1612) and who died fighting on the King’s side at Marston Moor, July 2, 1644. To him came as early as 1638 the inspiration of utilizing the real focus of the objective for establishing a telescopic sight.

Fig. 6.—Diagram of Terrestrial Ocular.

This shortly took the form of a genuine micrometer consisting of a pair of parallel blades in the focus, moved in opposite directions by a screw of duplex pitch, with a scale for whole revolutions, and a head divided into 100 parts for partial revolutions. With this he observed much from 1638 to 1643, measured the diameters of sun, moon and planets with a good degree of precision, and laid the foundations of modern micrometry. He was equipped by 1639 with what was then called a large telescope.

His untimely death, leaving behind an unpublished treatise on optics, was a grave loss to science, the more since the manuscript could not be found, and, swept away by the storms of war, his brilliant work dropped out of sight for above a score of years.

Meanwhile De Rheita (1597-1660), a Capuchin monk, and an industrious and capable investigator, had been busy with the telescope, and in 1645 published at Antwerp a somewhat bizarre treatise, dedicated to Jesus Christ, and containing not a little practical information. De Rheita had early constructed binoculars, probably quite independently, had lately been diligently experimenting with Descartes’ hyperbolic lens, it is needless to say without much success, and was meditating work on a colossal scale—a glass to magnify 4,000 times.

But his real contribution to optics was the terrestrial ocular. This as he made it is shown in Fig. 6 where a b is the image formed by the objective in front of the eye lens r, s and t two equal lenses separated by their focal lengths and a′ b′ the resultant reinverted image. This form remained in common use until improved by Dolland more than a century later.

Fig. 7.—Johannes Hevelius.

A somewhat earlier form ascribed to Father Scheiner had merged the two lenses forming the inverting system of Fig. 6, into a single lens used at its conjugate foci.

Closely following De Rheita came Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) of Danzig, one of the really important observers of the seventeenth century. His great treatise Selenographia published in 1647 gives us the first systematic study of the moon, and a brief but illuminating account of the instruments of the time and their practical construction.

At this time the Galilean and Keplerian forms of telescope were in concurrent use and Hevelius gives directions for designing and making both of them. Apparently the current instruments were not generally above five or six feet long and from Hevelius’ data would give not above 30 diameters in the Galilean form. There is mention, however, of tubes up to 12 feet in length, and of the advantage in clearness and power of the longer focus plano-convex lens. Paper tubes, evidently common, are condemned, also those of sheet iron on account of their weight, and wood was to be preferred for the longer tubes.

Evidently Hevelius had at this time no notion of the effect of the plano-convex form of lens as such in lessening aberration, but he mentions a curious form of telescope, actually due to De Rheita, in which the objective is double, apparently of two plano-convex lenses, the weaker ahead, and used with a concave eye lens. If properly proportioned such a doublet would have less than a quarter the spherical aberration of the equivalent double convex lens.

Hevelius also mentions the earlier form of re-inverting telescope above referred to, and speaks rather highly of its performance. To judge from his numerous drawings of the moon made in 1643 and 1644, his telescopes were much better than those of Scheiner and Fontana, but still woefully lacking in sharp definition.

Nevertheless the copper plates of the Selenographia, representing every phase of the moon, placed the lunar details with remarkable accuracy and formed for more than a century the best lunar atlas available. One acquires an abiding respect for the patience and skill of these old astronomers in seeing how much they did with means utterly inadequate.

One may get a fair idea of the size, appearance, and mounting of telescopes in this early day from Fig. 8, which shows a somewhat advanced construction credited by Hevelius to a suggestion in Descartes’ Dioptrica. Appearances indicate that the tube was somewhere about six feet long, approximately two inches in aperture, and that it had a draw tube for focussing. The offset head of the mount to allow observing near the zenith is worth an extra glance.

Incidentally Hevelius, with perhaps pardonable pride, also explains the “Polemoscope,” a little invention of his own, made, he tells us, in 1637. It is nothing else than the first periscope, constructed as shown in Fig. 9, a tube c with two right angled branches, a fairly long one e for the objective f, a 45° mirror at g, another at a, and finally the concave ocular at b. It was of modest size, of tubes 1⅔ inch in diameter, the longer tube being 22 inches and the upper branch 8 inches, a size well suited for trench or parapet.

Fig. 8.—A Seventh Century Astronomer and his Telescope.

Even in these days of his youth Hevelius had learned much of practical optics as then known, had devised and was using very rational methods of observing sun-spots by projection in a darkened room, and gives perhaps the first useful hints at testing telescopes by such solar observations and on the planets. He was later to do much in the development and mounting of long telescopes and in observation, although, while progressive in other respects, he very curiously never seemed to grasp the importance of telescopic sights and consistently refused to use them.

Telescope construction was now to fall into more skillful hands. Shortly after 1650 Christian Huygens (1629-1695), and his accomplished brother Constantine awakened to a keen interest in astronomy and devised new and excellent methods of forming accurate tools and of grinding and polishing lenses.

Fig. 9.—The first Periscope.

By 1655 they had completed an instrument of 12 feet focus with which the study of Saturn was begun, Titan the chief satellite discovered, and the ring recognized. Pushing further, they constructed a telescope of 23 feet focal length and 2⅓ inches aperture, with which four years later Christian Huygens finally solved the mystery of Saturn’s ring.

Evidently this glass, which bore a power of 100, was of good defining quality, as attested by a sketch of Mars late in 1695 showing plainly Syrtis Major, from observation of which Huygens determined the rotation period to be about 24 hours.

The Huygens brothers were seemingly the first fully to grasp the advantage of very long focus in cutting down the aberrations, the aperture being kept moderate. Their usual proportions were about as indicated above, the aperture being kept somewhere nearly as the square root of the focus in case of the larger glasses.

In the next two decades the focal length of telescopes was pushed by all hands to desperate extremes. The Huygens brothers extended themselves to glasses up to 210 feet focus and built many shorter ones, a famous example of which, of 6 inches aperture and 123 feet focal length, presented to the Royal Society, is still in its possession. Auzout produced even longer telescopes, and Divini and Campani, in Rome, of whom the last named made Cassini’s telescopes for the Observatory of Paris, were not far behind. The English makers were similarly busy, and Hevelius in Danzig was keeping up the record.

Fig. 10.—Christian Huygens.

Clearly these enormously long telescopes could not well be mounted in tubes and the users were driven to aerial mountings, in which the objective was at the upper end of a spar or girder and the eye piece at the lower. Figure 11 shows an actual construction by Hevelius for an objective of 150 feet focal length.

In this case the main support was a T beam of wooden planks well braced together. Additional stiffness was given by light wooden diaphragms at short intervals with apertures of about 8 inches next to the objective, and gradually increasing downwards. The whole was lined up by equalizing tackle in the vertical plane, and spreaders with other tackle at the joints of the 40foot sections of the main beam. The mast which supported the whole was nearly 90 feet high.

So unwieldly and inconvenient were these long affairs that, quite apart from their usual optical imperfections, it is little wonder that they led to no results commensurate with their size. In fact nearly all the productive work was done with telescopes from 20 to 35 feet long, with apertures roughly between 2 and 3 inches.

Fig. 11.—Hevelius’ 150-foot Telescope.

Dominique Cassini to be sure, scrutinizing Saturn in 1684 with objectives by Campani, of 100 and 136 feet focus picked up the satellites Tethys and Dione, but he had previously found Iapetus with a 17-foot glass, and Rhea with one of 34 feet. The longer glasses above mentioned had aerial mounts but the smaller ones were in tubes supported on a sort of ladder tripod. A 20-foot objective, power 90, gave Cassini the division in Saturn’s ring.

A struggle was still being kept up for the non-spherical curves urged by Descartes. It is quite evident that Huygens had a go at them, and Hevelius thought at one time that he had mastered the hyperbolic figure, but his published drawings give no indication that he had reduced spherical aberration to any perceptible degree. At this time the main thing was to get good glass and give it true figure and polish, in which Huygens and Campani excelled, as the work on Saturn witnesses.

These were the days of the dawn of popular astronomy and many a gentleman was aroused to at least a casual interest in observing the Heavens. Notes Pepys in his immortal Diary: “I find Reeves there, it being a mighty fine bright night, and so upon my leads, though very sleepy, till one in the morning, looking on the moon and Jupiter, with this twelve foot glass, and another of six foot, that he hath brought with him to-night, and the sights mighty pleasant, and one of the glasses I will buy.”

Little poor Pepys probably saw, by reason of his severe astigmatism, but astronomy was in the air with the impulse that comes to every science after a period of brilliant discovery. Another such stimulus came near the end of the eighteenth century, with the labors of Sir William Herschel.

Fig. 12.—Gregory’s Diagram of his Telescope.

Just at this juncture comes one of the interesting episodes of telescopic history, the ineffectual and abandoned experiments on reflecting instruments.

In 1663 James Gregory (1638-1675) a famous Scottish mathematician, published his Optica Promota, in which he described the rather elegant construction which bears his name, a perforated parabolic mirror with an elliptical mirror forward of the focus returning an image to the ocular through the perforation. It was convenient in that it gave an erect image, and it was sound theoretically, and, as the future proved, practically, but the curves were quite too much for the contemporary opticians. Figure 12 shows the diagrammatic construction as published.

The next year Gregory started Reive, a London optician, doubtless the same mentioned by Pepys, on the construction of a 6 foot telescope. This rather ambitious effort failed of material success through the inability of Reive to give the needed figures to the mirrors,[4] and of it nothing further appears until the ingenious Robert Hooke (1635-1703) executed in 1674 a Gregorian, apparently without any notable results. There is a well defined tradition that Gregory himself was using one in 1675, at the time of his death, but the invention then dropped out of sight.

No greater influence on the art attended the next attempt at a reflector, by Isaac Newton (1643-1727). This was an early outcome of his notable discovery of the dispersion of light by prisms, which led him to despair of improving refracting telescopes and turned his mind to reflectors.

Unhappily in an experiment to determine whether refraction and dispersion were proportional he committed the singular blunder of raising the refractive index of a water-filled prism to equality with glass by dissolving sugar of lead in it. Without realizing the impropriety of thus varying two quite unknown quantities at once in his crucial experiment, he promptly jumped to the conclusion that refraction and dispersion varied in exact proportion in all substances, so that if two prisms or lenses dispersed light to the same extent they must also equally refract it. It would be interesting to know just how the fact of his bungling was passed along to posterity. As a naïve apologist once remarked, it was not to be found in his “Optics.” But Sir David Brewster and Sir John Herschel, both staunch admirers of the great philosopher, state the fact very positively. If one may hazard a guess it crept out at Cambridge and was passed along, perhaps to Sir William Herschel, via the unpublished history of research that is rich in picturesque details of the mare’s nests of science. At all events a mistake with a great name behind it carries far, and the result was to delay the production of the achromatic telescope by some three quarters of a century.

Turning from refractors he presented to the Royal Society just after his election as Fellow in 1672, the little six-inch model of his device which was received with acclamation and then lay on the shelf without making the slightest impression on the art, for full half a century.

Newton, by dropping the notion of direct view through the tube, hit upon by far the simplest way of getting the image outside it, by a plane mirror a little inside focus and inclined at 45°, but injudiciously abandoned the parabolic mirror of his original paper on dispersion. His invention therefore as actually made public was of the combination with a spherical concave mirror of a plane mirror of elliptical form at 45°, a construction which in later papers he defended as fully adequate.[5]

Fig. 13.—Newton’s Model of his Reflector.

His error in judgment doubtless came from lack of practical astronomical experience, for he assumed that the whole real trouble with existing telescopes was chromatic aberration, which in fact worried the observer little more than the faults due to other causes, since the very low luminosity toward the ends of the spectrum enormously lessens the indistinctness due to dispersion.

As a matter of fact the long focus objective of small aperture did very creditable work, and its errors would not compare unfavorably with those of a spherical concave mirror of the wide aperture planned by Newton. Had he actually made one of his telescopes of fair dimensions and power the definition would infallibly have been wrecked by the aberrations due to spherical figure.[6]

Fig. 14.—De Bercé’s sketch of Cassegrain’s Telescope.

It is quite likely that appreciation of this, and the grave doubts of both Newton and Huygens as to obtaining a proper parabolic curve checked further developments. About the beginning of the year 1672 M. Cassegrain communicated to M. de Bercé a design for a reflecting telescope, which eventually found its way into the Philosophical Transactions of May in that year, after previous publication in the Journal des Sçavans. Figure 14 shows de Bercé’s rough original sketch. It differed from Gregory’s construction in that the latter’s elliptical concave mirror placed outside the main focus, was replaced by a convex mirror placed inside focus. The image was therefore inverted.

The inventor is referred to in histories of science as “Cassegrain, a Frenchman.” He was in fact Sieur Guillaume Cassegrain, sculptor in the service of Louis Quatorze, modeller and founder of many statues. In 1666 he was paid 1200 livres for executing a bust of the King modelled by Bertin, and later made many replicas from the antique for the decoration of His Majesty’s gardens at Versailles. He disappeared from the royal records in 1684 and probably died within a year or two of that date.

At the period here concerned he apparently, like de Bercé, was of Chartres. Familiar with working bronzes and with the art of the founder, he was a very likely person to have executed specula. Although there is no certainty that he actually made a telescope, a contemporary reference in the Journal des Sçavans speaks of his invention as a “petite lunette d’approche,” and one does not usually suggest the dimensions of a thing non-existent. How long he had been working upon it prior to the period about the beginning of 1672 when he disclosed the device to de Bercé is unknown.

Probably Newton’s invention was the earlier, but the two were independent, and it was somewhat ungenerous of Newton to criticise Cassegrain, as he did, for using spherical mirrors, on the strength of de Bercé’s very superficial description, when he himself considered the parabolic needless.

However, nothing further was done, and the devices of Gregory, Newton and Cassegrain went together into the discard for some fifty years.

These early experiments gave singularly little information about material for mirrors and methods of working it, so little that those who followed, even up to Lord Rosse, had to work the problems out for themselves. We know from his original paper that Newton used bell-metal, whitened by the addition of arsenic, following the lore of the alchemists.

These speculative worthies used to alloy copper with arsenic, thinking that by giving it a whitish cast they had reached a sort of half way point on the road to silver. Very silly at first thought, but before the days of chemical analysis, when the essential properties of the metals were unknown, the way of the scientific experimenter was hard.

What the “steely matter, imployed in London” of which Newton speaks in an early paper was, we do not know—very likely one of the hard alloys much richer in tin than is ordinary bell-metal. Nor do we know to what variety of speculum metal Huygens refers in his correspondence with Newton.

As to methods of working it Newton only disclosed his scheme of pitch-polishing some thirty years after this period, while it is a matter of previous record, that Huygens had been in the habit of polishing his true tools on pitch from some date unknown. Probably neither of them originated the practice. Opticians are a peculiarly secretive folk and shop methods are likely to be kept for a long time before they leak out or are rediscovered.

Modern speculum metal is substantially a definite compound of four atoms copper and one tin (SnCu₄), practically 68 per cent copper and 32 per cent tin, and is now, as it was in all previous modifications, a peculiarly mean material to cast and work. Thus exit the reflector.