History of the Telescope - Binocular

Phoenicians cooking on sand discovered glass around 3500 BCE, but it took about 5,000 years more for glass to be shaped into a lens for the first telescope. A spectacle maker probably assembled the first telescope. Hans Lippershey (c1570-c1619) of Holland is often credited with the invention, but he almost certainly was not the first to make one. Lippershey was, however, the first to make the new device widely known.

The telescope was introduced to astronomy in 1609 by the great Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, who became the first man to see the craters of the moon, and who went on to discover sunspots, the four large moons of Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn. Galileo's telescope was similar to a pair of opera glasses in that it used an arrangement of glass lenses to magnify objects. This arrangement provided limited magnification--up to 30 times for Galileo--and a narrow field of view; Galileo could see no more than a quarter of the moon's face without repositioning his telescope.

In 1704, Sir Issac Newton announced a new concept in telescope design whereby instead of glass lenses, a curved mirror was used to gather in light and reflect it back to a point of focus. This reflecting mirror acts like a light-collecting bucket: the bigger the bucket, the more light it can collect. The reflector telescope that Newton designed opened the door to magnifying objects millions of times--far beyond what could ever be obtained with a lens.