The origins of the telescope - DWC - KNAW

optics prepared a blue-print of the instrument later called ‘the telescope.’
When Galileo first encountered the instrument, ‘the telescope’ was still in
the making. In his contribution to this volume Mario Biagioli shows that contrary
to his own later words Galileo probably saw a copy of a real instrument in
the hands of his friend Paolo Sarpi before he presented his own instrument to
the Doge of Venice. Albert Van Helden discusses how Galileo turned this device
useful for military purposes into an instrument for astronomical observing.
However, astronomy was not the only field in which the telescope caused
changes in the hands of its first users. First, the telescope had an enormous
impact on the craft of lens-making because of the quality demands which
telescope lenses imposed, which were much higher than for eyeglasses. Fokko
Jan Dijksterhuis taps the notebooks of Isaac Beeckman to show how Descartes’
friend struggled with new and not-so-new lens-making techniques. Giuseppe
Molesini studies surviving telescope lenses to reconstruct the lens-making techniques
of Torricelli and other 17 th -century Italian telescope makers. Second,
in the field of optics, Antoni Malet’s contribution to this volume discusses
the legacy of the first theory of the telescope by Kepler. Contrary to received
opinion, he argues, Kepler was a determining factor who shaped optical theory
until the 1660s, when a new concept of optical imagery emerged. Third, the
telescope was important to navigation. Henk Zoomers shows in this volume
how through the channels of the Dutch East India Company the telescope
travelled as far as Southeast Asia. Finally, Albert Clement, the representative of
the 2008-conference’s host (the Middelburg Roosevelt Academy), highlights
how the telescope was even influential in music. In all those disciplines, enterprises
and fields of endeavour the telescope acquired new functions and meanings,
and in this process of circulation and appropriation, the contributions to
this book bring out, ‘the telescope’ as a cultural artefact was continually made
and re-made.
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introduction