The origins of the telescope - DWC - KNAW

unproblematic. In 1975 Van Helden summarized the remaining problems in
his paper ‘The Historical Problem of the Invention of the Telescope.’ Although
the archival and printed evidence relating to the invention of the telescope was
fairly extensive, it remained inadequate in several crucial areas. Moreover, Van
Helden wrote that ‘it varies from the unimpeachable to the patently false. The
problem has something for the positivist as well as for the weaver of plausible
theories.’ 5 He concluded – against De Waard – that the available evidence
‘does not necessarily commit us to believing that the telescope was invented
in Italy around 1590.’ 6 But we do not know who invented the telescope, and
when, because, ‘the instrument was there before the world knew it.’ 7
In 1977 Van Helden repeated De Waard’s efforts by collecting all the then
known sources about early telescopic devices, and he published a translation of
these documents, for the first time into English. The Invention of the Telescope
also contained Van Helden’s own account of the happenings of 1608. He concluded
that the Lipperhey letter of 25 September 1608 indeed was the earliest
traceable ‘undeniable mention of a telescope,’ but his analysis also demonstrated
the extreme complexity of the process that had led to the invention of the
instrument. Van Helden concluded that ‘to award the honor of the invention
to Lipperhey solely on that basis is an exercise in historical positivism.’ 8 Many
others had paved the path, or had developed the instrument further, and by
doing so these artisans and scholars eventually had made an optical toy into a
useful instrument for obtaining new knowledge. With Van Helden’s intervention
the question shifted from ‘who was the first and true inventor of the telescope’
to how the instrument was developed. The reconstruction of the long
and complex process of the invention of the telescope, and the identification
of the multiple technical, mathematical, and social origins of the telescope is
also the aim of this book.
The editors of this volume felt that such a collection was much needed,
because of the shifts in the historiography of science and technology in the
past decades since Van Helden’s seminal The Invention of the Telescope, and because
of new findings and revisionist accounts on the history of the telescope,
especially in the past two decades (after a long silence following the publication
of The Invention of the Telescope). Most authors responsible for the new
perspectives brought to the invention of the telescope have contributed to this
5 Van Helden, ‘The Historical Problem of the Invention of the Telescope’ (1975), 251.
6 Ibidem, 259.
7 Ibidem, 255.
8 Van Helden, ‘The Invention’ (1977), 25.
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introduction